I’m going to try something weird: Dum Dum Dem Dem Dem Demp DumDum DemDemDem Dum (2x).
If I didn’t get too far ahead of myself, at least one person reading this said, “Let’s Dance” to themselves after reading that. Now another hundred of you have “Intoxicated” by Martin Solveig stuck in your head. Sorry.
Here’s the full song if you’ve somehow managed to avoid this song since it first came out in 2015. It is a true earworm and that beat will keep playing in your head for five days straight. So listen if you dare.
If I had to guess, I’d say that anyone who has spent at least three weeks in the United States in the last nine years and anyone who has been inside a sports stadium since this song came out has heard it. Probably multiple times. Whoever hears this song, unless they literally have a heart and soul made of pure metamorphic rock – the least grooving type of inorganic material – at the bare minimum starts moving their shoulders to the music. It’s a great party tune, an excellent sing-along jam, and a perfect baseball walk-up song. A true stroke of genius from Solveig.
The biggest problem with the written word is that it is insufficient to express the totality of the human experience. There is always something lost in translation. Want a more complicated way to say that? Just look to Derrida, “if supplementarity is a necessarily indefinite process, writing is the supplement par excellence since it proposes itself as the supplement of the supplement, a sign of a sign, taking the place of a speech already significant.”[1] Not sure why anyone would prefer that to what I wrote, but there are some real freaks out there.
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Not to get too far up my own ass, but the limits of language are not theoretical problems. Even people who don’t do that much writing in their day-to-day lives run into this issue all the time. It’s the real reason why emojis have taken off in the way that they have. Think about the last time you said “I love you” to someone. Did those three words really capture the depth of emotion, the personal history, the feeling of love between you and whoever you said it to? No, it was a paltry simulacrum for all that. Total precision and accuracy are impossible in writing. People misread tone and intent in simple work emails all the time. Here’s an example. I once had a client complain to my boss because they thought I was being rude in my emails to them. Their evidence was that I was not using enough exclamation points. Hell, there’s an early episode of Suits that revolves around Mike – the slightly less handsome white male lead – getting his ass handed to him in a mock trial because he reads intent into an email. In case you were wondering, Harvey, the slightly more handsome white male lead, is not happy with Mike for doing that. It’s a problem that everyone and their mother has experienced. The pain of trying to bring what is intensely personal and interior out into the broader world. Derrida made a career out of making it sound more complicated than it is. I mean if a Suits writer can understand it, so can you.
Back to “Intoxicated.” Here are the lyrics to Martin Solveig’s hit, provided by some SEO-pumping site called “Musicxmatch”
Let's dance
No time for romance
Let's dance
No time for romance
You got me intoxicated
You got me intoxicated
You got me intoxicated
You got me intoxicated
Let's dance
No time for romance
Let's dance
No time for romance
Let's dance (You got me intoxicated)
No time for romance (You got me intoxicated)
Let's dance (You got me intoxicated)
No time for romance (You got me intoxicated)
Let's dance
No time for romance
Let's dance
No time for romance
You got me intoxicated
You got me intoxicated
You got me intoxicated
You got me intoxicated
On the page, this is the work of an eighteen-year-old whose parents didn’t tell them “No” enough. A ChatGPT-produced monstrosity of a song. Something only a hormone-addled teenager could appreciate. Even Eiffel 65’s “I’m Blue (Da Ba Dee)” is a richer text than this. However, these lyrics are the perfect example of the limits of language.
Art is a surefire way around the limitations of the written word. Music, painting, video, theater, whatever the hell it is that Marina Abramovic does, all allow us to reach the fullness of the human experience, to go beyond the written word. “Intoxicated” is no different. Solveig’s tone, rhythm, length, production values, and everything that makes up the song, all add layers of meaning to the written lyrics. In doing so, they transform the lyrics, utter dreck if looked at as just words, into a beautiful expression of the human experience. Or an ass-shaking jam if you prefer a less poetic explication.
You’ll notice that I’m not saying what I think the deeper levels of meaning the music adds to the words are. That’s because I don’t want to sound like an early 2000s Pitchfork writer and analyze a pop song to death. So, I’ll make this short because I’ve written myself into a corner where I have to explain that extra level at least a little. When taken as a whole piece of music, “Intoxicated” is not just about how being in love can make you feel a little drunk, it also touches on the feeling of being lost in the world unable to quite have a real connection with the person you love, because you’re drunk, and honestly, you maybe don’t quite want to have that deep a connection with them. Or something like that, my words aren’t enough.
To be honest, I am being a little facetious here. I do love “Intoxicated,” I’m listening to it as I write this, but I don’t think it’s like a world-shattering work of genius. I’ll save such lofty titles for “Mr. Brightside” and “Yeah!” My point still stands though. Words are never enough, sometimes you need a wicked melody line to make your point.
[1] Derrida, Of Grammatology, Writing and Difference, and Speech and Phenomena, 281.
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