My Baby Don't Mess Around...

It's entirely possible that "Hey Ya!" by Outkast is one of the best dance songs ever (evah!), if not one of the best songs ever written by humans. Granted, it's likely that this may be doing some sort of disservice to other worthy contenders, but... right now... at this moment... well, "Hey Ya!" just made one of it's rare appearances on shuffle, and it's impossible for me not to jump up in my empty apartment and scream "Brilliant!"

Which I am doing right now, on the internets.

There was a time when I feared that I would grow tired of "Hey Ya!". It was 2003, I had gotten my first iPod a year before, and was more than happy to have the genius (again, brilliant!) double opus of Speakerboxx/The Love Below as a constant player in the car, on the bus, walking through the city... But then, well, it was everywhere. Over Christmas we listened to it ("Hey Ya!") repeatedly while myself and my friend Angela snorted No-Doz with a Nordy's gift card (christ, don't ask!) and danced in her apartment, then later at a bar that I shouldn't have been at, making out with people that I shouldn't have been, then again at a New Year's party, where we listened to it twice, at full volume while a friend of a friend drunkenly tried to sing karaoke all by herself (sad!). (Later too, or perhaps earlier, I made out with two girls that New Year's that no one knew, so you see, this is a song for making out, as well as dancing!)

"Hey Ya!" was everywhere, yet somehow it never grew old, I never tired of the hooks and the lyrical twists and turns ("I don't to meet your daddy/ Just want you in my caddy/don't want to meet your momma/just want to make you comma"). The subject matter of "Hey Ya!" is, ironically, not so much the stuff of great dance songs (aside from the invitation to "shake it like a polaroid picture"), as it's the tale of love gone wrong; a love that has staled, and neither party is ready to let go, unwilling to let the relationship take it's course. We've all been there, and "Hey Ya!" has it's poignant moments when Andre 3000 implores "why, oh why are we so in denial/when we know we're not happy here." But then, we don't want to hear him, we just want to dance.

"Hey Ya!" is the party that you never want to end. Song ends, hit repeat, and dance to this shit all night. With friends, with strangers, alone in front of floor to ceiling windows writing what very well may be a lame blog entry. Just listen, dance, enjoy, repeat.

ice cold, bitches.

Oh, and the official word from Polaroid is that you really shouldn't shake their photos for a faster development time; just FYI.