The following blog is rated PG-13 for a comedic response to adult themes.

Are you ready for some pop culture irony? All I need you to do is actually click on the links and listen to the music, otherwise, reading this is a waste of time.

Listen to Usher’s “Love in this Club” (2008)

Actually, it’s probably not necessary that you click that link because the song is already playing as you these letters on my website. Statistically, you’ve already heard this song three times before lunch. Every radio station is playing the song every seven minutes without any hesitation. This is notable because the lyrics leave no room for misinterpretation: “I wanna make love in this club…on the couch, on the table, on the bar, or on the floor…I wanna make love in this club.”

How can radio stations play a song this explicit without making people mad? For listeners, even the most vigilant parents are hypnotized by the prettiness. Even cautious radio program directors who live in fear of the FCC put the song in heavy rotation because it subconsciously reminds them of going to prom in the 1980s when life was simple and innocent, when they were forever young.

Listen to Alphaville’s “Forever Young” (1984)

- or for some more fun, watch their video on YouTube -

Watch Alphaville’s “Forever Young” (1984)

If you weren’t around in 1984, “Forever Young” is the song that first played at the school dance in the movie Napoleon Dynamite. The dreamy layers of synthesizers added the atmosphere that made that scene so memorable.


“I like your sleeves.”

I’m not arguing that Usher is doing a cover of Alphaville. There are notable differences in the two songs, the most obvious being that Usher’s song is better. Less subjective differences are as follows:

  1. Usher is cool and Alphaville is not
  2. Usher lays on a heavy hip hop beat where there was none
  3. Alphaville used odd trumpets in the bridge, Usher selected the wheezy Young Jeezy to articulate what Usher really means to “make love in this club” (Probably to keep the song from sounding too pretty.)

In the end, the greatest similarity between the two songs is that these song will continue to play at school dances for the next few decades.

Here’s some more fun with decades:

Listen to Lil Wayne’s “I’m Me” (2008)

Listen to Moby’s “God Moving Over the Face of Waters” (1995) (The similarities start 45 seconds into the song.)

Like Usher, Lil Wayne grabbed the vibe of his song from someone else. Unlike Usher, Lil Wayne thought it’d be cool to make bird sounds in the first 10 seconds of his song.

Historically, these similarities won’t be worth recording in the story of hip hop. But it’s clear that the authentic hip hop formula of MC + DJ = Hip Hop is long gone. This is a music business, and the natural selection of the biz defines that biggest hip hop hits are made from notorious MCs that narrate a hip hop beat driving over a diverse collage of pop music, whether its 1980s New Wave or 1990s techno.

Yes. Hip hop is pop music.