A recurring feature where we analyse the latest Number One Australian single so you don't have to.
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Jennifer Lopez feat. Pitbull
‘On The Floor’
(Def Jam/Universal)
‘On The Floor’ by Jennifer Lopez (featuring Pitbull) is the new Australian #1 single; it ends the dominance of ‘S&M’ by Rihanna (
review), which was at #1 for five weeks, interrupted by a single week when Lady Gaga’s ‘Born This Way’ reigned (
review). Produced by RedOne, who also produced many of Lady Gaga’s biggest hits, ‘On The Floor’ is J-Lo’s first top 10 single in Australia since 2005’s ‘Get Right’. It’s also only her second #1 single, after 1999’s ‘If You Had My Love’. On the other hand, Latino rapper Pitbull has been very successful recently, and his presence is probably more of a major selling point than is usual for the ‘featuring’ credit; last year, he featured on two songs in the top 20 selling singles of 2010 (
review), ‘I Like It’ by Enrique Iglesias (incidentally also produced by RedOne) and ‘DJ Got Us Falling In Love’ by Usher. Phew.
Jennifer Lopez 'On The Floor'
There’s not really a lot you can say about ‘On The Floor’. The song is not trying to provoke discussion, after all. It’s trying to provoke dancing. It features a pretty massive dance beat, with the requisite thunderous four-to-the-floor kick drum, and the currently omnipresent David Guetta-esque synth lines. I doubt you need me to explain the lyrics, but they mostly consist of universal encouragements to dance. Thus the lines about
"let’s take the whole world on a ride" and
"I want the whole world to get on the floor" in Pitbull’s intro rap. Thus the fact that, in the song’s introduction alone, he demands that the listener
“get on the floor” a total of 11 times. Thus the chorus lyric:
"tonight we gon’ be it on the floor". Thus the video with scenes from an upmarket, exclusive looking club (and oddly prominent product placement) full of very well dressed and beautiful people dancing...on the floor. One suspects there's something about a "floor" going on here. If all of this is too subtle for you, the song is called ‘On The Floor’.
One oddity about ‘On The Floor’ is the way that it takes forever to get to the hook - J-Lo’s vocal melodies. The delay may be why Pitbull believes that
“I’m like Inception / I play with your brain” – he knows you’re waiting for the hook, but he’s teasing it out until you get there. Or perhaps Pitbull has read a book like Daniel Levitin’s
This Is Your Brain On Music, and is aware that music literally does play with the brain, that certain sounds really do make us want to dance. You're at the mythical Club of chart pop fantasy; you hear the beat thumping through the speakers, you’re a little tipsy, the lights are dim and you’re in a good mood/drunk. If you are not dancing after J-Lo’s and Pitbull’s repeated demands that you must get on the floor, you may be an over-analytical music snob. Hi, welcome to the club! If you're not into dancing at clubs, you may ask: why do people want to dance? What’s the attraction?
One thing to understand about music is that, if you live in a Western society post-1950 or so (as you almost certainly do if you’re reading this), the way you approach music is really, really weird. At least, it’s really weird as far as human history is concerned. You’re not only listening to music that has been recorded and sold, but music which has been manipulated in a thousand ways, from Auto-Tune to overdubs, to guitar effects to modern equalisation, to stereo effects and techniques in mixing and mastering. This is totally awesome in a way – music has never sounded so larger-than-life – but it’s very different to the experience of music for most people in history.
Music for most of the world’s history has been a communal event – it wasn’t until the advent of headphones in the mid-20th century that you could really even hear music on your very own. In a typical African village’s ceremonies (at least before they got mobile phones and AK-47s), there will be skilled musicians leading the music, but everyone in the village at the ceremony participates, even if by singing in a chorus and clapping their hands and dancing. Until the 20th century, this was the default mode of music for most humans. Even in the West, it took until recordings changed how we could hear music (the technology was available for around 70 years before people saw them as anything other than a document making device), before people started to accept recordings as artifacts with their own properties and advantages. And recording technology was available for 80-90 years before people began dancing to records spun by DJs rather than live music.
Music is also a communal thing that makes you move your limbs. In many African languages, they don’t have separate words for music and dance; the two concepts are so tightly bound. If you’re referring to one, you’re referring to the other. And this is not because African music is primal, primitive, getting at the basic roots of music – a lot of it is extraordinarily complicated and advanced; it's because dance and music have more or less been the same thing for much of the history of the world. It’s almost impossible to find a culture that doesn’t dance to music. Music makes us
want to dance, to
participate.
Evolutionary psychologists wonder whether all this dancing to music has something to do with the evolution of music itself. Music and rhythm seem deeply rooted in the human brain – we don’t need to learn how to listen to music – it just seems to automatically happen. Infants seem to respond to and understand music long before they understand speech, which is why mothers sing to their infants – according to
research by Sandra Trehub, two month olds can tell the difference between pleasant sounding music and dissonant, unpleasant music. In fact, there are centres in the brain specifically devoted to music, and these centres have strong connections to the deep, old parts of the brain like the
nucleus accumbens, according to
research by Menon & Levitin - the same parts of the brain that opiates like heroin or morphine target, a part of the brain that has a role in making you feel orgasmic or to crave something. And one of the unusual things about humans, compared to other animals, is that we have what seems to be a very strong sense of the beat – we are really quite good at clapping in time. This is not entirely unique to us humans - some researchers wrote a
scholarly paper on Snowball, a cockatoo that can dance to the beat (see below) - but it does seem to be comparatively unusual. All of which makes music appear embedded in our genes.
Snowball - 'Another One Bites The Dust'
But music is not obviously useful in helping us survive – being able to play the guitar solo in ‘Stairway To Heaven’ won't scare away the mountain lion. So why might it be so? Some have argued that dancing to the beat brings a community together, and that closer-knit communities work together better and thus have
survived throughout evolution. Others have argued that we evolved to have music because, being a good musician or dancer probably means your brain and body work fairly well,
and so the opposite sex will find you attractive as a result - that ancient tribal ceremonies were basically today's dance clubs. We don't know for sure, but however it occured, our brains naturally find beats and rhythms almost irresistible.
Of course, we learn to inoculate ourselves, to resist this because of the sheer amounts of music we’re exposed to every day – we’re no longer the kids at the front of the stage who’ll dance to anything; the hunter returned from the hunt. Because music is omnipresent in modern life, it's natural power has become dulled. In modern society, music now often works as an emotional (and social) regulator, as something we listen to as a work of art, instead of being the base result of a primal urge, meant to inspire similar. And so we’ll happily fall asleep to music that, 60 years ago, would have gotten you thrown out of dance halls for being too loud and suggestive.
Critics and discerning musical listeners now attempt hear music as art – we’re interested in what the music says about the world; about the artist and about us. For this kind of listener, social context and artistry
enriches the music, as well as meaning to perpetuate it's basic function. There is often art and social commentary in popular dance music; there was a ton of it in Lady Gaga’s ‘Born This Way’, for example. But if you listen to ‘On The Floor’ from this
artistic point of view, it’s not going to do much for you. Snobs will think ‘On The Floor’ is as banal as can be. But if all dance music really has to do is be good for dancing (and perhaps remind you of that other good time you had dancing, hopefully to
this song perhaps - woah there's your
Inception link!), then you can’t really blame RedOne, Pitbull, and J-Lo for scientifically targeting that nucleus accumbens deep inside our brains - the small, spongy bit that responds in primal approval whenever we throw ourselves around a dancefloor, to loud music and amongst like-minded humans.
Tim Byron