Worst Songs ever: The Black Eyed Peas’ “I Gotta Feeling”

Like a good single, a terrible one reveals itself with airplay and forbearance. I don’t want to hate songs; to do so would shake ever-sensitive follicles, and styling gel is expensive. I promise my readers that my list will when possible eschew obvious selections. Songs beloved by colleagues and songs to which I’m supposed to genuflect will get my full hurricane-force winds, but it doesn’t mean that I won’t take shots at a jukebox hero overplayed when I was at a college bar drinking a cranberry vodka in a plastic thimble-sized cup.

The Black Eyed Peas’ “I Gotta Feeling”
PEAK CHART POSITION: #1 in July 2009.

Look, I don’t care for “Celebration” or “Summer Nights” or other wedding and bar mitzvah perennials; caring about them is like caring about ice cubes. Giving people pleasure at social occasions is the Black Eyed Peas’ M.O. I don’t begrudge them this. Better the giving of pleasure than ordering a drone strike or signing a tax bill that dooms anyone who makes less than a million a year to penury.

Beginning with a processed guitar or guitar synth augmented in the next sequence by synth block chords, “I Gotta Feeling” gets down to business with those strummed chords that call to mind the Strokes and the rest of those bands it pains us to remember but certain biographers won’t let us forget. But it’s not bad. “I gotta feeling that tonight’s gonna be a good good night,” will.i.am promises, repeating it enough to worry about those assurances that it’s gonna be a good good night. A respectable sentiment — so many dance classics use ambivalence for tension.

But the anonymous David Guetta production, as pandemic in 2009 as the flu in 1918, has other ideas. Every electronic cliché of the late 2000s gets an airing. If a friend jumps off my sofa, I’d get mad, not encourage him. Rhyming “mazel tov” with “just take it off” is the kind of tastelessness I can support if the track didn’t feel so buttoned-down. That’s the oddness of “I Gotta Feeling” too: there’s a sense in which everybody’s forcing him and herself into a hysteria they don’t feel and can’t convey. Considering how beloved Guetta remains in Europe and Miami (oh god Miami) in 2007 through 2011, I’m not surprised that I’m in the minority. Kinetics of any kind fascinate Ultra Music Festival attendees (Guetta as potentate, by the way). With each “Let’s do it” and stuttered rap the track gets sillier. If “I Gotta Feeling” weren’t so hopped up, it would join “Happy” and “Can’t Stop the Feeling!” as inspirational music at business conferences — it’s at that level of institutionalized euphoria. It’s the aural equivalent of rice pilaf and baked chicken breasts.

Y’all remember how huge “I Gotta Feeling” was? In 2009, it and its predecessor “Boom Boom Pow” ruled the year. Unfortunately, “Boom Boom Pow” has disappeared while “I Gotta Feeling” gets played on A/C radio next to the Pointer Sisters’ “He’s So Shy,” Celine Dion’s “If You Ask Me To,” and any Ed Sheeran jam . Because “Boom Boom Pow” is more representative of the Miami sound, of radio stations that made “Me So Horny” and L’Trimm’s “Drop That Bottom” massive club hits — we love booty music. From its noxious misspelled title to its anonymity, “I Gotta Feeling” sounds like body/booty music made in a McDonald’s lab.