Mixtapes for Hookers

2003. Lend Song #9 Some Sugar. It Is Your Neighbor!!

[At this rate, I'll only finish my recap before the end of the year if I do one of these a day.  Ha!]

9. Outkast, Hey Ya!

The best thing about Andre 3000′s bouncy Hey Ya is, I think, the fact that it has so many different parts.  Like pop classics going back to Reach Out In The Darkness and Rock Lobster, Hey Ya throws out something new every twenty seconds or so, and every new part is crazier than the crazy thing that came before it.  To laziily quote myself, “It goes from the Beatly opening to the two-word chorus (which sounds, for some reason I can’t figure out, like the Moody Blues’ Your Wildest Dreams), to the sad break-up part, to the not-wanting-to-meet-your-Daddy part, to the call-and-response part. And then there’s the shaking it like a Poloroid picture part, which might actually get kind of annoying except that it’s so random.* And then the chorus again. All that’s missing are the narwhal noises.”

As the sixties-inspired video demonstrates, Hey Ya is a song that kids of all ages can get down to; despite the fact that Outkast were well-established on hip-hop radio, the most recent hit this song bore any resemblance to was the stupid theme song from 1996 om Hanks vehicle That Thing You Do.  Only, unlike that song’s calculated Matthew Sweet-goes-to-Disneyland kind of order, Hey Ya is all about chaos. It sounds, really, like Andre’s making it up as he goes along.

In my 2003 year-end recap, I made a prediction, one which happily turned out to be incorrect.  I said then that within two years, all the hipsters who spent the later part of 2K3 dancing around to Hey Ya would deny ever liking it, and that the song would fade away very rapidly, only to resurface as some sort of jokey curio that maybe you’d hear sometimes at Whole Foods.  Sure, it topped the Village Voice Pazz & Jop critics’ poll of the year’s best singles, but that poll frequently rewards songs last heard at the wedding receptions of your less hip cousins.

Because as much as this song was universally beloved–even modern rock radio picked up on it for a while, despite the fact that it’s by a black person–I thought Outkast-mania would be a short-lived phenomenon.  But I was wrong.  I mean, lately I’ve only heard it on adult contemporary radio**, but I still don’t think anyone’s denying this song’s greatness.

(*A note on my use of the word ‘random.’  2000, I think, was when everyone I went to college with started saying ‘random’ to describe more or less everything that happened to them; I hated it, to the point where I got really self-conscious about the word and started saying arbitrary a lot, just so people wouldn’t think I was one of those people that said ‘random’ all day for no reason.  But by 2003, I guess I was pretty much ready to reclaim the word.)

(**Side tangent: I just went to said radio station’s website and saw they have a Hunk of the Day feature.  And holy crap, the hunks for today, October 22, 2009.)

2 Comments so far
Leave a comment