Drunken girls generally enjoy stupid songs, and Far East Movement (FM) — an electro-hop quartet composed of four young Asian American men from Los Angeles — has hit on the ultimate drunken-girl song: "Like a G6." FM's ode to feeling like an airplane, in all of its trashy, terrible, earworm-y glory, currently sits at number two on the Billboard charts.
The song has like three lines: "Poppin' bottles in the ice, like a blizzard/When we drink we do it right, gettin' slizzard/Sippin' sizzurp in my ride, in my ride like Three 6/Now I'm feelin so fly like a G6/Like a G6, Like a G6."
It's short, it's catchy, and, although meaning can be coaxed out of it, it doesn't have to be understood to be danced to. Most club-goers probably don't know that the titular G6 refers to a Gulfstream G650, a $58 million private jet that won't be available until 2012.
"Like a G6" might be the catchiest song not sung by Katy Perry released this year. And there's no reason this should be the case. Aside from the above refrain, the song features a few verses of horrible, Auto-Tuned quasi-rap and an embarrassingly simple drum machine beat that we've been hearing since before the Roland TR-808 was even invented.
There is nothing inherently great about FM's little ditty. When Rihanna took over the airwaves with "Umbrella" (2008), it was clear that the song was well-written and the performer had some serious talent. When Lady Gaga skyrocketed to fame, it was easily attributed to her penchant for the dramatic and, again, her serious talent. This song isn't well-written nor unique, and FM has no discernable talent. They're not even a can't-look-away train wreck of a hot mess like Ke$ha. What is it then?
The root of "G6's" brilliance is unknowable. It certainly is out there, but we cannot comprehend nor experience it. We simply have to accept it. In math terms, it's like infinity, a well-known concept but not necessarily a wholly comprehensible one — numbers forever with no end. Forever.
Another way of looking at it is like the Lacanian "real," the truth or reality that we as subjective individuals will never be able to experience. Jacques Lacan, the French psychoanalyst, proposed the concept of the real. At its simplest, the real is what cannot be known or imagined or understood. It isn't reality, necessarily, but it is an absolute truth opposed to perception, symbolism and imagination. The real is the space where the signifier is the signified, where words are their meanings.
This, I believe, is where the brilliance of "Like a G6" lies.
There's no explanation for it that we could imagine. We will never know it, like the lost prelapsarian world where Adam gave things in Eden their "true" names. Try as you might, you won't hit on valid explanation: It's a mystery, like a … like a G6.
And there it goes, creeping into everything we do like a virus, like a G6.
Eluding us like a phantom, like a G6.
Thinking about the real — in this case, why "Like a G6" has a spot on the Billboard charts, let alone the number two spot — is impossible. It boggles the brain. The closest analogy for the process of attempting to explain it would be, in the words of FM, "gettin' slizzard."
The real is an anxiogenic concept. Lacan proposed that experiences with the real — although technically unattainable, he liked to theorize about them — would be highly traumatic. If we understood why we can't stop listening to, and repeating, "Like a G6," we might discover something that we cannot un-know: We might discover, for example, that we are all, in essence, drunken girls.
