party 4 us
One of my favourite songs went viral on TikTok. It’s irrevocably changed how I perceive it.
At the core of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby – a novel encompassing big themes like technology, class disparity and expectations of women – there is a story about longing. Hosting elegant soirées and raucous nights in the hopes of getting her attention, Jay Gatsby holds Daisy Buchanan as the object of both his infatuation and his fascination. Buchanan is married to Gatsby’s college friend Tom, but that does nothing to stop Gatsby from throwing these wild parties, craving her return. Early in the novel, its narrator Nick Carraway notes that Gatsby watches a green light coming from the Buchanans’ dock from across the bay. In spite of his success, his possessions, his wealth, Gatsby wants something money can’t buy.
It’s tempting to imagine Charli xcx’s 2020 song ‘party 4 u’ as a retelling of the Gatsby-Buchanan saga from Gatsby’s perspective. Indeed, the novel being narrated entirely by Carraway means we never get a firsthand account from Gatsby; the extent of his obsession with Daisy is left to the reader’s imagination. Though xcx wrote the song from her own perspective (the track mentions June 19, the birthday of her then-boyfriend Mike Kerr, and is ostensibly about him), one can draw several parallels between xcx and Gatsby. There’s the obvious: she throws a party ‘just for you’, just as Gatsby throws his parties purely to vie for Daisy’s attention, and xcx’s party seems to rival the excess (if not the elegance) of Gatsby’s parties, with a DJ, cake, champagne and no less than ‘1000 pink balloons’.
But, as with Gatsby’s wealth, the flashy trappings of xcx’s party conceal an underlying yearning. xcx anxiously awaits the arrival of this person at her party, even while seeming to realise they’ll never show. Atop a thunderous 808 thump, skittery clicks and sticky synth stabs – which create a bouncy hyperpop beat that serves to accentuate the artifice outlined in the lyrics – xcx begs the object of her affection to show up, to kiss her, to touch her, to call her back. She even proffers benefits to be reaped by this person, comparing her love to ‘holy water’. By the song’s outro, however, her pleas fade into the void; whether she’s saying ‘party on you’, ‘part of you knew’ or ‘you party on’, it’s clear her desperation falls on deaf ears. Her crush has moved on.
As with many of xcx’s songs, ‘party 4 u’ has had a curious life. According to its producer, A.G. Cook, it was first recorded for xcx’s 2017 mixtape Pop 2 but was left off the tracklist. In the subsequent months, it got played at events and tour afterparties; as a result, it became a fan-favourite despite not being released. When xcx, during sessions for her lockdown album how i’m feeling now in 2020, expressed interest in reworking an old song, ‘party 4 u’ was reborn with new lyrics, new vocals and a new outro. What once was a tale of unrequited love was moulded into a love letter to the people she loves – both her friends and her fans. Within the context of the album, it scans as a eulogy for life in the ‘before times’, before the pandemic forbade xcx from going clubbing and putting on concerts.
Today, the ‘before times’ might also apply to xcx’s career pre-BRAT. If you’ve read this far, I likely don’t need to tell you about the slime-green summer many of us had last year. By any metric, BRAT was xcx’s most successful album thus far, propelling her into the mainstream and inviting swathes of new fans. No longer an artist operating at the borders of pop’s A-list, she was now a main pop girl all her own. (With this lens, we might also retrospectively consider ‘party 4 u’ a longing to return to a time when she wasn’t as relentlessly scrutinised online.)
A byproduct of such mainstream exposure has been many people rediscovering gems of xcx’s discography. Aided by its performance on the BRAT tour, ‘party 4 u’ began going viral on TikTok towards the beginning of this year, then had a second resurgence in the past week or so, with users racing to describe their interpretation of the outro. At the time of writing, it’s xcx’s second most popular song on Spotify, behind only the Billie Eilish remix of BRAT deluxe track ‘Guess’.
As both a queer person and a fan of experimental pop, I’m used to my interests lying outside the mainstream. (I’m aware this sounds very ‘not like other girls’ but I implore you, read on; it’ll all make sense.) As such, I’d be lying if I said the embrace (and borderline appropriation) of xcx by every influencer under the sun didn’t sting a little. Of course, I’m thrilled for her and the success she’s had, but at the same time it hurt to have xcx – who, for a while, was for the gays and the popheads only – be not only discovered but celebrated by the straight masses. When so many queer people have been beaten down by social hierarchy, it’s natural that we feel protective over cool, niche things that the mainstream hasn’t fully caught onto yet. It’s like if you were to buy a nice T-shirt from an online shop; if someone asked you about it, would you tell them where it was from if it compromised its uniqueness?
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There’s something about ‘party 4 u’ going viral that particularly strikes a nerve for me. I first discovered the song when how i’m feeling now was released in May 2020, with the album’s magic only growing on me with repeated listens. There was something indelibly sacred about the record: the anxiety of its lyrical content was matched by xcx’s anguished vocals and the hyperpop instrumentals, which seemed to bounce across my headphones excitedly before burning out (almost mirroring the cabin-fever circumstances that influenced its recording). In the subsequent years it became one of two ‘20s pop albums I consider to be perfect – the other being Beyoncé’s RENAISSANCE.
I prefer other songs on the album to ‘party 4 u’: the hard-as-nails, club-ready ‘pink diamond’; the out-and-out love song ‘claws’; the obliviously optimistic ‘visions’. Yet ‘party 4 u’ is the track I’ve found myself returning to the most over the years, coming back to it like an old friend in times I need comfort. I’ve related its lyrics to boys who’ve never given me the time of day, to friends who’ve given me the cold shoulder, to actual parties where the certain someone I wanted to show up did not. I love ‘party 4 u’ for the same reason I love how i’m feeling now: the partygirl showed her vulnerability, and in turn helped me embrace my vulnerable side.
All this is to say that I initially resisted this song’s popularity on TikTok. This was my song, I thought. Surely not!
My internalised gatekeeping, though, eventually turned to appreciation. With more people listening to and processing ‘party 4 u’, so too have we witnessed a wider range of voices offering new perspectives on what the song means to them. Going from my for-you page in the last few days, people have observed that the song might feel like: seeing the person you like kiss someone else; feeling surrounded by straight people at the gay club; sending the last message before someone ghosts you; realising you can’t just be friends with someone anymore; seeing the screenshot that changes your view of someone forever; seeing a person years after everything happened but you’re not seventeen anymore; throwing Meep City parties in the hope of seeing your Roblox boyfriend after your mum told you to unfriend him. (As niche as that last one might be, it still – in its own perverse way – links back to the Gatsby theory! Ms. xcx, your pen game continues to be unmatched.)
While some of the takes are a bit more questionable (‘this song feels like the tension before the first kiss’? Girl, did you listen to any of the lyrics?), they mostly remind me that unrequited longing – which is really what ‘party 4 u’ is all about – is a universally human experience. With the song becoming more and more popular even as I write this piece, I’ve learned to let go of the gatekeeping and bask in renewed appreciation for the song I’ve loved for so long. Now I have even more to associate the lyrics with – which, if anything, speaks to the power of the songwriting. Now, the party is even bigger.
Daisy and Gatsby (spoilers!) would go on to have an ill-fated affair, while the real-life xcx and Kerr eventually broke up. Still, the yearning remains, and what is yearning if not akin to watching a green light from across the bay? What is a crush if not a party we keep throwing, hoping that that one person might just show up?
Need a song from True Romance to go viral next and really educate the newbies
I felt the same way about miss Charli & this song!