The Black Eyes Peas “I Gotta Feeling” has been downloaded 5,561,000, which, give or take, is a helluva lotta bucks.
It is also the most downloads of a song to date (and if the spotify’s of the world take off, maybe the most ever) and perhaps the oddest assimiliation of dance into popular music.
Rock is too egotistical for mp3s… rock has convinced itself it is an high art form which neccessitates a forty, sixty, one hundred and twenty minute platform to announce itself.
Classical doesn’t really have three minute movements -there is no way to break em into 99 cent bytes.
Jazz the same.
And both are too wonky.
Hip hop never recovered from the 80 minute CD.
So of all the things that work best in MP3 format, the utilitarian egoless world of BPMs is King. Black Eyed Peas was born for the MP3.at’s why the Rolling Stone interview with Will I Am was so destructive: it intellectualizes an aesthetic and useful music by trying to make it a thought process. Why shouldn’t BEPs b, essentially, dumb fun whose smarts are all in musical manipulation?
I would go further and say that’s exactly what dance is.
But it is the Jerry Lewis. Leave him to be funny and Jerry Lewis is hysterical and the French are right, a great artist, BUT just ASK HIM WHEN HE’S FUNNY and guess what happens. he becomes unfunny, a stodgy self-important bore. Will I Am may have great thoughts but he should keep them to himself.
Meanwhile “I Gotta Feeling” is about the pure pleasure of the pop moment, of the night, of the dance in the club of the good night.
FIVE MILLION PLUS TIMES!!!!