Isn't there something magical about that? The time of your life. What better song could there be to sell people on the idea of a magical vacation? And, skipping ahead to the mid-to-late 1990s, Sandals, the Caribbean based resort company started making commercials like this (here's the reggae version):
And here's the original version.
Meanwhile, in those mid-to-late 1990s, a little underground hip hop group in Los Angeles called The Black Eyed Peas was producing positive, fun rap songs like this:
Somewhere along the line in the early 2000s, the Black Eyed Peas picked up a new member. An attractive, statuesque white girl named Fergie:
No, not that Fergie, the other one:
The Peas had always been about having a good time, but with the addition of Fergie, they took on a more Pop/Commercial Hip-Hop/Electro sound. And started making songs about Fergie's "Humps". I'm not sure what she's referring to, but my take on it is that the song is told from the perspective of a sassy female camel. Listen:
And if you listen closely to "My Humps", you can catch a little piece of musical inspiration from an unexpected source, namely composer Antonín Dvořák's "New World Symphony":
"SHEEE'S... GOT-ME-SPENN... DING-IT." Do you hear it?
Now, am I going to spend the rest of this blog article talking about how The Black Eyed Peas sold out and betrayed hip hop? Hell no. I'm not ashamed to say I like the later Black Eyed Peas and much of their silly dance music. And if you like their silly dance music, you shouldn't be ashamed to say it either. And if you don't like their silly dance music, well, don't listen to it. Though, in all fairness, not listening to the Black Eyed Peas wasn't really possible in 2009, as I shall explain.
In the spring of 2009, the Peas unleashed the single "I Gotta Feeling", and for what seemed like the whole year, the song was unavoidable. It was a piece of electronica influenced rap and R&B, with that classic pounding house/techno kick drum pattern of "thump, thump, thump...". The auto-tuned vocals sang devotional odes to partying. The inane lyrics, "I gotta feeling... that tonight's gonna be a good night", made it the perfect song for preparing to go out and drink too much. The song was so unavoidable, that on any given Saturday in the summer of 2009, you would probably hear the song before, during, and after your "good night" out, and the next day, and the next night. Apparently every night was a good night in 2009. Anyway, here it is. Click it at your own peril if you're worried about this song being stuck in your head again:
I use this song to mark the beginning of pop's current "Electronic Dance Music craze." After this song came out, the tempos of popular rap and R&B songs increased, electro influence was everywhere, and even country musicians were using dance beats. It was a major change, and I think the Black Eyed Peas were the prime musical mover to make this happen. For good or bad, you can credit the Peas for this.
The message of "I Gotta Feeling" (and 90% of rap and r&b songs nowadays) is "carpe diem". Go out and have a good night, every night, they say. Go have the time of your life.
In 2010 The Black Eyed Peas took the carpe diem message a step further, and released their single "The Time (Dirty Bit)", a full-on 80s inspired retro-futuristic electro rap cover of, you guessed it, "(I've Had) The Time of my Life" from Dirty Dancing:
But what exactly is a "Dirty Bit"? An homage to Dirty Dancing? A play on words with the pejorative term "Dirty B*tch"? A computer science term? Wait... maybe it's all of these things. See this from M. Morris Mano and Charles Kime's "Logic and Computer Design Fundamentals, Fourth Edition":
Yes, a dirty bit is actually something inside a microchip. I don't know what the Peas were getting at with this weird computer science reference, though it probably has something to do with the different number of bits (binary digits in computer memory) used to produce digital sounds. A lower number of bits, like 8 or 16 bits, as was the only technological possibility in earlier digital music, will get you a dirtier, more unpolished Nintendo-esque sound, and I guess that's what they were going for, and what a lot of electronic musicians have been going for in recent years. See the album cover for "The Beginning" with 8-bit caricatures of the Peas:
Anyway, this song was a success. Not quite as big a success as "I Gotta Feeling", but enough of a success to get the attention of the people at Sandals Resorts. Pretty soon after the release of "The Time (Dirty Bit)", Sandals released yet another "Time of My Life" themed TV advertisement, this time suited to the "EDM Craze". The Black Eyed Peas influence is um, prominent, to say the least. Check it out:
Basically it's a Black Eyed Peas "sound-alike" composition. But, interestingly, it's not a rip off of the "The Time." Rather, it's a rip-off of the Peas even bigger hit "I Gotta Feeling." It's got those same guitar chords, and the refrain "Do it all again!" is almost verbatim lifted from the Peas' song. I guess those electro synths found in "The Time" were a bit too dirty for a commercial selling a relaxing vacation. The whole thing, that started with Patrick Swayze and Jennifer Grey, came "full circle". Well, not really full circle, but some kind of circular or elliptical motion.
So what was the point of me telling you this story? I don't really know. Maybe there wasn't a point. But it's fascinating to see, in the age of the internet, how people and pieces of culture; from songs to films to commercials to music to music videos and back to commercials, from computer science to Nintendo to Hip Hop, from Bill Medley and Jennifer Warnes, Patrick Swayze and Dvořák to Will.I.Am, these people and things all bounce around each other, making new bizarre combinations. For good or bad, the time of our lives is a time of bizarre, technologically facilitated musical combinations.
