{"id":828,"date":"2026-07-05T10:09:01","date_gmt":"2026-07-05T10:09:01","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/cityrelocationnews.com\/?p=828"},"modified":"2026-07-05T10:09:01","modified_gmt":"2026-07-05T10:09:01","slug":"the-summer-when-everyone-wanted-a-good-good-night","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/cityrelocationnews.com\/?p=828","title":{"rendered":"The Summer When Everyone Wanted a Good, Good Night"},"content":{"rendered":"
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You\u2019re reading Songs of Summer<\/strong>, a series on music and memory.<\/em><\/span><\/div>\n<\/div>\n

I find it hard to even write the words \u201cDJ Earworm.\u201d I\u2019ve tried to say the word \u201cmashup\u201d out loud alone while I\u2019m typing, and it feels as though I\u2019m saying, \u201cCome see Lady Gaga perform at the Doritos Locos Tacos #Boldstage at SXSW, an activation powered by tweets.\u201d But the fact remains: there is a man named DJ Earworm, and he created a mega-mashup called \u201cUnited State of Pop 2009 (Blame It on the Pop)\u201d that currently has fifty-five million views on YouTube and more than forty-six thousand comments. The track is not on Spotify, and, if you ever had it in your iTunes library, you had probably converted it from an MP4. But there are hidden masses among us who need only catch a glimpse of its college-Photoshop cover art\u2014a Statue of Liberty with her dress hiked up, dancing like the recession had just been declared over\u2014to feel an instant shiver of pathos and pain.<\/p>\n

Read more Taylor Swift and Travis Kelce\u2019s Marriage Plot<\/a><\/p>\n

\u201cBlame It on the Pop\u201d came late in the era of mainstream mashups, which was enabled by user-friendly music-editing software and properly began with the 2001 track \u201cA Stroke of Genius,\u201d by the Freelance Hellraiser, which laid the vocals from Christina Aguilera\u2019s \u201cGenie in a Bottle\u201d over the instrumental of \u201cHard to Explain,\u201d by the Strokes. (The result, which sounds a bit like Avril Lavigne, went viral.) Five years later, a former biomedical engineer going by the name Girl Talk put out an album titled \u201cNight Ripper,\u201d a feat of hyperactive brilliance that feels vaguely illegal to revisit, rolling Missy Elliott into Neutral Milk Hotel into Jefferson Airplane into Juelz Santana before you can take a second sip of Sparks. DJ Earworm\u2019s project was more targeted: \u201cBlame It on the Pop\u201d combines the Top Twenty-five Billboard<\/em> singles of 2009 into one coherent dance track, with lyrics that hold together and that you can sing along with, from start to finish. It\u2019s built upon the backing arrangement of the Black Eyed Peas\u2019 \u201cI Gotta Feeling,\u201d a song of summer that d\u00e9buted, in June, 2009, at No. 2, right behind the Black Eyed Peas\u2019 \u201cBoom Boom Pow.\u201d<\/p>\n

Melodically and otherwise, \u201cI Gotta Feeling\u201d is all buildup. It\u2019s in G major, which, as the late musicologist Wilfrid Mellers put it, is the key of \u201cblessing and benediction.\u201d \u201cI Gotta Feeling\u201d avoids its dominant chord\u2014there are no spikes of tension and release, only a simmering state of anticipation. The fun hasn\u2019t started yet. The Black Eyed Peas only have a feeling<\/em>, an intention; they\u2019ll paint the town, they\u2019ll shut it down, they\u2019ll burn the roof, and then they\u2019ll do it again. This was recession pop: an iris shot quickly blacking out the periphery of societal failure and joblessness, and narrowing our vision to a circle around a sparkler inside a bottle, inside a club. Will.i.am knew his hit was fundamentally sad. \u201cWhat you hear in \u2018I Gotta Feeling\u2019? To me, that\u2019s joy,\u201d he told Rolling Stone<\/em>. \u201cYou\u2019re in pain, but tonight\u2019s going to be a good night.\u201d<\/p>\n

Above this scaffolding, DJ Earworm constructs a Frankensteined vocal line from the rest of the year\u2019s big singles, which are basically versions of \u201cI Gotta Feeling\u201d: Lady Gaga telling us to just dance, Rihanna telling us to live our life, Jamie Foxx and Flo Rida and Jay Sean telling us to binge drink at the club. Keri Hilson and Beyonc\u00e9 join in on the first verse to console the listener: \u201cDon\u2019t worry, even if the sky is falling down.\u00a0.\u00a0.\u00a0. No need to worry, just get back up when you\u2019re tumbling down, down, down.\u201d Leading into the chorus, will.i.am and the Fray split a line that makes the subtext explicit: \u201cI got a feeling \/ I found God.\u201d Salvation seemed possible in 2009: Barack Obama had just been elected, Chesley Sullenberger had performed a miracle on the Hudson, the C.E.O. of City National Bank of Florida had distributed sixty million dollars in profits to his employees. The songs in \u201cBlame It on the Pop\u201d are full of trust and need and longing, straddling wish and fulfillment. \u201cIt\u2019s like I\u2019ve been awakened,\u201d Beyonc\u00e9 sings, in a line from \u201cHalo.\u201d \u201cDon\u2019t be afraid, we\u2019ll make it out of this mess,\u201d Taylor Swift adds, in a sample from her hit \u201cLove Story.\u201d Miley Cyrus, in \u201cThe Climb,\u201d heartbreakingly sings about every step she\u2019s taking.<\/p>\n

Read more Testimonials from Your Dog\u2019s Fourth of July Support Group<\/a><\/p>\n

<\/div>\n

More than a decade and a half later, this sounds like one of the last gasps of the monoculture. It\u2019s as if our country, on the cusp of micro-fracturing into algorithmically determined foxholes of individual obsession, had simply agreed, after the foreclosures and the bankruptcies and the bailouts, to put on a suit of shiny hundred-and-twenty-seven-b.p.m. optimism and go out for a good, good night. Mega-mashups went moderately viral for a while longer (see Daniel Kim\u2019s \u201cPop Danthology 2012\u201d), and DJ Earworm still does his thing each year. But there\u2019s no sonic or thematic through line that unites Morgan Wallen, sombr, Tate McRae, Leon Thomas, Benson Boone, Olivia Dean, Ros\u00e9, and Bruno Mars\u2014the artists in his 2025 year-end mix. There is no national mood, just a m\u00e9lange of anomie, distaste, and derangement.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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\u201cBlame It on the Pop,\u201d meanwhile, continues to attract frequent comments on YouTube, mostly from people who identify themselves as former children and who miss a time when life felt simpler and happier. Or perhaps it\u2019s just that there were, identifiably, a couple of years when the biggest musical artists in the world were all making music that treated the general public like a coherent audience\u2014a childish one, seeking temporary pleasure, finding blessing and benediction in the Black Eyed Peas. DJ Earworm\u2019s big hit remains an object of peculiar power, strobing perpetually in the empty night club where the end of the aughts is stored. He released it in winter, at the close of the year, but it\u2019s a secret song of summer for me: all promise and unpunctured optimism, a feeling of artificial forever that wasn\u2019t meant to last.\u00a0\u2666<\/p>\n

Read more My Review of the Big Parade After Being Locked in the Trunk of My Car<\/a><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Jia Tolentino on \u201cI Gotta Feeling,\u201d by the Black Eyed Peas, and the summer of 2009, when every big hit sounded like a version of the song.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":827,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[89],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-828","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-songs-of-summer"],"yoast_head":"\nThe Summer When Everyone Wanted a Good, Good Night - City Relocation News<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/cityrelocationnews.com\/?p=828\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"The Summer When Everyone Wanted a Good, Good Night - City Relocation News\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"Jia Tolentino on \u201cI Gotta Feeling,\u201d by the Black Eyed Peas, and the summer of 2009, when every big hit sounded like a version of the song.\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:url\" content=\"https:\/\/cityrelocationnews.com\/?p=828\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:site_name\" content=\"City Relocation News\" \/>\n<meta property=\"article:published_time\" content=\"2026-07-05T10:09:01+00:00\" \/>\n<meta name=\"author\" content=\"admin\" \/>\n<meta name=\"twitter:card\" content=\"summary_large_image\" \/>\n<meta name=\"twitter:label1\" content=\"Written by\" \/>\n\t<meta name=\"twitter:data1\" content=\"admin\" \/>\n\t<meta name=\"twitter:label2\" content=\"Est. reading time\" \/>\n\t<meta name=\"twitter:data2\" content=\"5 minutes\" \/>\n<script type=\"application\/ld+json\" class=\"yoast-schema-graph\">{\"@context\":\"https:\\\/\\\/schema.org\",\"@graph\":[{\"@type\":\"Article\",\"@id\":\"https:\\\/\\\/cityrelocationnews.com\\\/?p=828#article\",\"isPartOf\":{\"@id\":\"https:\\\/\\\/cityrelocationnews.com\\\/?p=828\"},\"author\":{\"name\":\"admin\",\"@id\":\"https:\\\/\\\/cityrelocationnews.com\\\/#\\\/schema\\\/person\\\/3e7ce0c0c60d21e12a5ac61fb2b786d4\"},\"headline\":\"The Summer When Everyone Wanted a Good, Good Night\",\"datePublished\":\"2026-07-05T10:09:01+00:00\",\"mainEntityOfPage\":{\"@id\":\"https:\\\/\\\/cityrelocationnews.com\\\/?p=828\"},\"wordCount\":1088,\"commentCount\":0,\"image\":{\"@id\":\"https:\\\/\\\/cityrelocationnews.com\\\/?p=828#primaryimage\"},\"thumbnailUrl\":\"https:\\\/\\\/cityrelocationnews.com\\\/wp-content\\\/uploads\\\/2026\\\/07\\\/1db281f040d609000de1551697e25fb0.webp\",\"articleSection\":[\"Songs of Summer\"],\"inLanguage\":\"en-US\",\"potentialAction\":[{\"@type\":\"CommentAction\",\"name\":\"Comment\",\"target\":[\"https:\\\/\\\/cityrelocationnews.com\\\/?p=828#respond\"]}]},{\"@type\":\"WebPage\",\"@id\":\"https:\\\/\\\/cityrelocationnews.com\\\/?p=828\",\"url\":\"https:\\\/\\\/cityrelocationnews.com\\\/?p=828\",\"name\":\"The Summer When Everyone Wanted a Good, Good Night - 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