And so we arrive, with some inevitability, back in The Club.
We are also back in the company of the inescapable David Guetta, who oddly enough seems to basically own pop music 2009-2010: 'When Love Takes Over', 'I Gotta Feeling', 'Sexy Bitch', 'Acapella', 'Gettin' Over You', and plenty of others. When a producer is getting credited as a featured artist on the song, you know he is officially a Big Name, more important than Flo Rida, for sure, both in pop music in general and on 'Club Can't Handle Me' in particular. The spirit of 'I Gotta Feeling' seems to animate 'Club Can't Handle Me' more than anything else. It's the same feeling of soft-focus, druggy bonhomie, the same build-and-release dynamics. 'I Gotta Feeling' seems more brilliant the further removed I get from its overexposure, and more than any other record of 2009 - more than Gaga, for better or worse - it looks like it may just have invented early-2010s pop. 'Club Can't Handle Me' is less good, but a cynical imitation of a brilliant pop song is often still sort of brilliant (cf 'From Me To You'), and 'Club Can't Handle Me' does exactly what it's supposed to do admirably well - a big, warm, energetic pop noise designed to sound transcendently brilliant - of course! - in the club.
'Club Can't Handle Me' also brings to a head a tension in 'club' music that I was talking about last time David Guetta was at number one, with 'Gettin' Over You'. That tension was, as I put it there, the tension between "inclusivity and exclusivity, equality and elitism, between the ecstasy-fueled group hug of acid house at one extreme and the restrictive door policies of Studio 54 on the other". I think that a lot of the 'club'-centric pop music of the moment navigates this tension with some ambiguity, and 'Club Can't Handle Me' is the most galling example yet. The most interesting thing about the record is the extent to which the music tells a different story from the lyrics. The music is all inclusivity - Flo Rida is de-centred, his voice is far from being the sonic centre of the song; it is processed and autotuned to the point of sounding one with the synthetic flow of Guetta's music, and most of the vocals sound layered anyway, female backing singers joining him through the chorus. The song sounds anything but individualistic: it sounds en masse, an undifferentiated sea of ravers, boundaries between identities melted away by pills and house music.
Most of the lyrics, then, are not particularly audible, but the general impression is obvious and inescapable - this is (sigh) a song about how rich, impressive and heterosexual Flo Rida is. I'm not a Flo Rida connoisseur, but I imagine this is probably what all of his songs are about. He comes across as if constituted out of sheer ego; there is no sign of a crack in his vacuous, grinning persona. He rhymes "bottles" with "models", talks about money a lot, brags about his "ice" and his "new Lear" (should that be 'new leer'?), approves of "groupies taking off their clothes", actually literally says, as if we didn't get it already, "arrogant, like yeah!", and - in case we really didn't get it - feels the need to inform us, in one of the most clearly audible and enunciated lines on the whole track: "I am a ladies' man". What a likeable and lyrically inventive fellow. I hope you're all duly impressed.
These knuckleheaded sentiments literally could not be further away from the message of the actual music. Ironically, given that Flo Rida spends so much time bragging about being the centre of attention (they "stop and stare", paparazzi are clamouring) he is emphatically not the centre of attention on this very record; you barely notice him, he is utterly inessential to it. In this context, there is, perhaps, something desperately sad about his ridiculously over the top declarations of his own visibility and importance. The song almost seems to say: sorry, The Club can handle you, The Club will be fine without you.
In keeping with the blinkered, in-the-moment, no-horizons-outside-the-club logic of these records, the chorus in fact goes "the club can't even handle me right now". And right now is all that matters; Flo Rida's glory may be fleeting, he may be forgotten tomorrow, but we aren't meant to think about that - there is no acknowledgement of any time beyond that "right now". As such, the most telling, and perhaps saddest, lyric of all is his "celebrate 'cause that's all I know". Is that a good reason to celebrate? Are we dancing in the club because we've forgotten how to do anything any more emotionally complex - or because, as 'Telephone' implies, we can't face the outside world? Is that the meaning of Roll Deep and Dizzee Rascal's "no negatives", "if you can't something nice then keep quiet" protestations? Don't ruin my fun, don't ring my phone. "The club can't even handle me right now"; what happens when we can't handle the club any more?
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