15 January 2009
As the launchpad for a sensational new chart superstar, ‘Just Dance’ really didn’t do much for Colby O’Donis. He’ll have another ‘featuring’ credit later in 2009 on a top 20 single by another Irish number one act and serial featurer himself – Akon, the unlikely co-writer of ‘Just Dance’. After that we won’t see him in the Irish charts again.
(Digression. It may seem to us in Ireland like the makey-uppy Irish name a Hollywood screenwriter would give to a renegade IRA bomber terrorising Harrison Ford’s all-American family in some ’90s action flick, but Colby O’Donis Colón is indeed his birth name and he has no Irish family connection. When he was gaining attention in 1999 as a boy singer, his father told a local newspaper that he named his son after a New York firefighter called Colby O’Donis who died while saving the father’s life. This in turn raises another question: how did the late New York firefighter Colby O’Donis get his name? A quick online search suggests the O’Donis name is actually Germanic and only looks Irish, but you shouldn’t believe everything you read on the Internet: if anyone asks you, there’s loads of O’Donises in Ireland. Now read on.)
Where this record succeeded spectacularly, of course, was in making a superstar of Lady Gaga. It wasn’t an overnight success, though. I remember first hearing of ‘Just Dance’ online in mid-2008 as something of a cool-kids cult favourite: a classic New York street-smart electro-pop soundclash that eventually crossed over into a mainstream chart smash. In that regard, the early Gaga career arc is a lot like that of the Scissor Sisters, whose similarly unapologetic progression from left of field to middle of dancefloor also quickly burnt off the early-adopter hipsters. This is a positive: ‘Just Dance’ is far too good to be wasted on hipsters anyway.
The ’80s Madonna influence on the dancefloor energy and female agency of ‘Just Dance’ is clear enough, as is the glam Bowie reference with her Aladdin Sane lightning bolt in the video (below). Maybe not in sound but certainly in spirit, Prince also comes to mind here: the same maverick spirit and touch of genius; the same commitment to fun, randiness and absolutely cramming a track with catchy hooks. “Wish I could shut my Playboy mouth” is a brilliant line worthy of ‘Little Red Corvette’, and “Control your poison, babe!” is something I like to work into as many conversations as possible during my day. The track’s grinding electro groove ramps up dramatically from verse to pre-chorus to chorus. As if to spoil us, Gaga throws in a whirling synth-pop mid-section with weird overlapping lyrics (“Half psychotic, sick, hypnotic / Got my blueprint, it’s symphonic”) for seemingly no other reason than it sounds so bloody cool. The same goes for Colby O’Donis’s part: he does his job fine, and the sumptuous gear change from his rap to his singing is more of this track’s embarrassment of riches.
And yet ‘Just Dance’ also teeters into embarrassment full stop. Right at the end you find the seeds of Gaga’s future commitment to clunky try-hard naffness: the awful final mid-section rhyme of “spend the lasto / in your pocko”. This should be the last part of ‘Just Dance’ you’d want to spin out into a signature sound, but from here it’s a diet of “puh-puh-puh-poker face” and “rah-rah-ah-ah-ah!” Maybe my upcoming re-listen to her six more Irish number ones will make me change my mind, but from the vantage point of ‘Just Dance’ it’ll be another 11 years—during Covid lockdown!—before I like a Lady Gaga single again. That’s a pity.
As an item of its time, ‘Just Dance’ is probably more the last hurrah of the ’00s chart pop renaissance—a 2008 New York peer of Santigold’s equally inventive and thrilling ‘L.E.S. Artistes’—than a bellwether of ’10s music to come. Nonetheless, you’ll be aware that Lady Gaga goes on to become the biggest pop-culture superstar of the ’10s, and the decade would have been less entertaining without her. Don’t worry about Colby O’Donis either: he’s gone on to make a successful music career for himself in brand idents. And I like to think of an O’Donis family in New York or here in their ahem-ahem ancestral homeland, pleased as punch to see their name immortalised in such a fabulous record for the ages.
