RAMBLE ON: "United State of Pop 2011 (World Go Boom)" by DJ Earworm

A clarification: This is April's Ramble On. I got so overwhelmed with finishing the last video that I forgot to post it, but I swear I had it done on time. That's two deadlines missed now but oh well.  Enjoy!

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2011 is not, in my memory, an especially apocalyptic year. That’s easy to say during an unprecedented global pandemic, granted; not many years would seem like the end of the world in comparison to this current moment in time. Also, my memories of Obama’s first term are idyllic, probably to an unrealistic level, so maybe I’m not the best judge of the 2011 zeitgeist. But even at the time I remember thinking that doom and destruction didn’t feel appropriate. I look back at the major events of 2011, I guess there’s the Arab Spring and Occupy Wall Street, both of which revealed deep cracks in the world and probably had some effect on the national mood, but I wouldn’t really say they raised an air of fear or dread. So “World Go Boom,” the 2011 edition of DJ Earworm’s United State of Pop mashups, hit a very weird note for me; I just didn’t see how this exhausting song fit the year. That wasn’t just the case for overthinky pop theorists like myself but also just the average listener, who expressed their displeasure profusely in the YouTube comments. The response was unanimous: What the hell was this?

DJ Earworm had been making mashups for years, but he first came to prominence at the end of 2007 with his first United State of Pop mashup, which put the 25 biggest hits of the year into one song. It was an immediate viral hit, and his year-ends quickly became Major Events in the world of Internet music fandom. Just the fact of it was impressive on paper (especially at the time, before the YouTube mega-mashup became an oversaturated genre), but it was also an impressive document on its own. Every December, every news and culture site on the Web tries to compress a year’s worth of events into a digestible retrospective, usually with limited success at best; a year is a long time to sum up. But nothing captures a moment in time like a popular song; by combining 25 of them into one he didn’t just make a time capsule of The Year That Was, he also made it seem more exciting and high-energy and powerful than any single song could. (This is also what makes Weird Al’s polka medleys so great.)   

In hindsight the first two United State of Pops, though still impressive, feel a little primitive and formless. “Blame It on the Pop” from 2009 was his first truly great year-end -- not just a mashup but an honest-to-god pop song in its own right, with a structure and a hook and everything. To this day it’s his most popular. His 2010 mashup, “Don’t Stop the Pop,” was even more ambitious. His previous year-ends had used one song as the instrumental base for the track. The utter dominance of Dr. Luke party anthems that year allowed him to mash several tracks together into something that felt undeniably like 2010 without being anything specific. But 2011 took him even further.  

“World Go Boom” is overwhelming from its opening measures. Unlike the other mashups, it has no intro, launching into the verse immediately, with six or seven songs slammed together in a few short seconds. His 2009 mashup also started with a rapid-fire montage, but that one quickly resolved into something slower and more digestible; “World Go Boom” only got more intense. One of the joys of United State of Pop is trying to spot and recognize the component pieces from other songs. But every year it got harder, as the clips got shorter and shorter, from full lines to short phrases to individual words. One long passage from Katy Perry sounds like it should be more familiar, but it’s a trick; it’s two songs seamlessly melded together, and your mind tells you it must be a single track and stumbles over itself trying to figure out which one. Not content to merely cut his mashup together word-by-word, Earworm now assembled it through individual phonemes; Katy Perry’s “boom” becomes “b-oooooooooooooo-m” with Adam Levine’s absurd falsetto inserted into the middle. He even does it without words; the whistle from “Pumped Up Kicks” becomes the whistle from “Moves Like Jagger” before you even notice. It’s a sonic collage in the truest sense; recognizing the individual songs in it feels like trying to identify the magazine clippings in a ransom note.  

The song’s sensory overload is not limited to the overstuffed collection of clips; even taken as a whole rather than of a sum of its parts, it’s still… a lot. Lord only knows how Earworm wound up with “world go boom” as a theme, but he throws himself at it. Britney Spears’ “Till the World Ends” provides the foundation of the song, and the lyrics are built around it. “Eeeverything” sings Ne-Yo; “…is on fire” finishes Bruno Mars. Innocuous lines, like “the city is on fire tonight” from OneRepublic’s innocent “Good Life,” become literal. The vibe is backed up instrumentally too; the beat is anchored by “We Found Love,” “Till the World Ends” and “Born This Way,” i.e. the densest, most aggressive pop songs of the year. It’s all just too much; if the world did go boom, it would indeed sound like this, it sounds like the music of the year ground into dust and rubble.  

Was there an undercurrent of apocalypticism in the air that I missed, reflected in the pop songs of the day? “Till the World Ends” seems like an indicator that it was, but I don’t remember it that way. The conceit of the Britney video is that it takes place on the Mayan calendar’s supposed doomday; if the prediction was to be believed, we had less than a year. But I don’t remember anyone taking that very seriously; at most we had Roland Emmerich’s dumb-as-hell “2012” movie from the year previous, and nothing Emmerich has ever done has resonated with reality. What I remember from music that year is that the non-stop party of ’09 and ’10, though on the wane, was still predominant – LMFAO, Pitbull, the Black Eyed Peas. “Raise Your Glass,” “On the Floor,” “Last Friday Night”: all right there in the mix. But Earworm makes a case for it – after all, as Ne-Yo said, we might not get tomorrow. The video (among other things, Earworm is also a great video editor) catches glimpses of destruction everywhere; a model city catches fire in “Rolling in the Deep,” a building collapses in “We Found Love,” LMFAO wakes up in the zombie dance-pocalypse. If this was the end of the world, it wasn’t the cornball disaster of Emmerich, but the sensory overload of Michael Bay (incidentally, the second-highest grossing director of 2011 with “Transformers 3”).   

This still feels like thin justification for an end-of-the-world anthem, but if there is an overarching theme to the pop songs in that year, it’s in their intensity. Adele launched into superstardom that year; Bruno Mars caught a grenade for you, Rihanna found love in a hopeless place, baby you were a firework. Good year for belting, in other words. Just as notable as what’s prominent in the mix is what got buried; 2011’s obnoxious novelty goofs “Sexy and I Know It” and “The Lazy Song” are barely present, and the Black Eyed Peas’ most forgettable hit “Just Can’t Get Enough” is reduced to a half-second cameo. (Where, if anywhere, Jeremih’s “Down on Me” appears in the song is still a mystery to me years later.) To Earworm, this was a year of big emotions, and perhaps only the explosion of the entire goddamn world could capture it.  

 The thing is that “World Go Boom” is, in its conclusion, a happy song. 2011 was still a good year, and Earworm doesn’t dampen that; these mashups are meant to be a celebration of the music and “World Go Boom” didn’t change that. The world going boom could have been a buzzkill but the dancing is undercutting the darkness, not vice versa. Michael Bay’s incoherent action scenes and slam cuts are controversial, but there are many who would tell you that he’s a genius and a visionary. Similarly, I completely understand why “World Go Boom” got a negative reception, including from myself, but I now consider it his masterpiece.    

After 2012, he retreated to familiar ground – one song, not several, as the foundation. 2011 was his last great year-end mashup, 2012 his last good one; after that the mashups became lazier, worse-sounding, less rewarding upon relisten. I tuned out and started listening to other year-ends, only a few of which ever captured what those early Earworm songs did. Earworm continues to rack up millions of hits every year but I don’t think it was ever the same; I don’t know if anyone but me cares. It feels silly to spend this many words reviewing what is an essence a viral video, but I feel like his work deserves it.  

Earworm has tons of respect in the remix community and the mashups made him an on-demand DJ, but I’ve never seen his work covered by serious publications, not the same way that Girl Talk or Danger Mouse were. I feel like there’s a bias against artists who operate on YouTube; a truly respectable musician can be found on at least one other, more respectable outlet like Spotify (where, because of copyright issues, Earworm will never be). But Earworm’s shadow looms large over music regardless; he’s still the gold standard, and perhaps no one will ever reach those heights again.