The Singles Jukebox

Time to find out once and for all who hates fun!

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Crystal Leww: A fun weird thing that happened this year is that Kyle Gordon premiered “Planet of the Bass” at the party that I book called hulaHOOP, which is a trance, Eurodance, and euphoric dance music party that I started this year with two of my best friends. He was a last-minute add to our lineup, which was filled with friends and artists that we admire from around the world who are not white, not straight, and not dudes. I have nothing bad to say about Kyle Gordon, a guy who genuinely seems to love Aqua and Vengaboys, treated our team and the club staff with nothing but respect, and willingly took a ten minute slot that we gave him. But it was very weird to see “Planet of the Bass” become the center of conversation for a Eurodance and trance revival well underway that had been for a while spearheaded by mostly not white dudes. None of this stuff should be taken that seriously — I’m on Team Dance Music Should Be Fun — but it’s kinda sad that something as goofy as the Eurodance revival still gets dominated by bros who are not even that good at the music part of it. The day before our party, Boiler Room dropped sets from La Darude, the collective from Paris that is really spearheading a lot of this stuff. Suggest you listen to those instead to embrace the goofy, euphoric whimsy from people who are really, really in it. 
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Kat Stevens: I don’t mind people taking the piss if it’s banging, but this is just spiteful.
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Oliver Maier: If you are here reading this website you probably don’t need me to explain all the ways that this isn’t particularly spot-on as Eurodance pastiche. Maybe someone else will do it for me. Fortunately, “Planet of the Bass” gets the most important thing right, which is to have fun. It’s pretty funny (throwaway 30 Rock joke/10) and pretty catchy (memorable, but not an earworm/10). Try though I might, I simply have no strong feelings about “Planet of the Bass”! Takes, I’m wanting more.
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Jonathan Bradley: Taken beyond meme length, “Planet of the Bass” seems increasingly dubious: are silly accents and ESL phrases actually hilarious, or is this tired American condescension? Forgive me for imposing some level of scrutiny on that lowest from of entertainer — the internet comedian — but the DJ Crazy Times project fails for its sloppiness about the details. Purportedly a parody of ’90s Eurodance, it sounds more like it belongs to the 2000s than alongside “Rhythm is a Dancer,” “Another Night,” or “The Rhythm of the Night.” It also posits its performers as central European or Balkan, while the big hits from the time it seeks to parody came from nations that hadn’t just emerged from behind the Iron Curtain: Germany, Italy, the Netherlands. Maybe Slavs are supposed to be inherently more ridiculous than western Europeans? But the weakest quality of “Planet of the Bass” — what makes it fail as a song rather than a gag — is that it isn’t interested in what the Eurodance acts of the ’90s were doing with their big boshing beats and unusual syntax: adopting simple English phrases that could be understood in a club across the continent, regardless of which of the dozens of Europeans languages might be spoken there, yet still communicating a sense of dancefloor yearning that plays anywhere from Copenhagen to Cordoba.
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Will Adams: Like most viral memes today, “Planet of the Bass” was pummeled into oblivion in a matter of weeks. The life cycle of a joke landing to the jokester re-telling the joke (keep ’em laughing!) to the resentment of the joke to discourse about the joke to, finally, the chatter fizzling out… this isn’t new. That’s not the issue. The song is fine. The chorus is quite good, and I trust that Kyle Gordon knows his Eurodance references — I’m getting equal parts the goofy dude rap of Aqua and Toy-Box and the emotive female vocal of Matrix’s “Can You Feel It” and Vengaboys’ “Superfly Slick Dick.” The issue is that the core joke belongs to the genre of “ESL? LOL!” comedy (hi Brian Jordan Alvarez!) that generally has a short shelf life.
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David Moore: I only recognize one TikTok meme as a legitimate 2023 banger, and it is “Sitting” by T.J. Mack, the alter ego of comedian Brian Jordan Alvarez. (The Paul F. Tompkins big band version is great, too.)
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Rachel Saywitz: Sometimes what goes viral on TikTok should stay viral on TikTok.
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Katherine St Asaph: Kyle Gordon appears to be a bit of an asshole, but an asshole with some genuine appreciation for the genre and for Y2K visual aesthetics. But regardless of how much Eurodance he’s heard, he does not seem to realize that their English lyrics were almost never this bad — and that deliberately bad English is both rarely funny and never emotionally charged like the real songs were. Should have stayed a meme reel on Croatia Roosevelt Island.
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Hannah Jocelyn: This doesn’t understand what makes those songs great beyond the most obvious signifiers of broken English — even shit like “The Fox” had a euphoric EDM outro that made at least one person in my life say “wait, is this actually good?” (No.) “Planet of the Bass” aims for that transcendence, but the production does the bare minimum, and nothing in the song is as beautifully unhinged as “I’m as serious as cancer when I say rhythm is a dancer.” But “Planet of the Bass” brought me as much joy as anything else this year: a loved one and I constantly quote the spoken-word bridge, itself lifted from a deep cut that shows Kyle Gordon knows his shit. If that knowledge was translated to a stronger arrangement, we would have an all-timer parody song on our hands. But we’ll always have the immortal affirmation “women are my favorite guy.” 
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Tara Hillegeist: As Gordons getting their five minutes of fame out of the way off a techno-type beat and meme-ready lyrics go, I’d genuinely much rather be listening to “Gordon Kill the Thomas“. Peanuts-kun at least extends their socmed-ready pisstake with some wild, one might even say creative, decisions; “Planet of the Bass”, by contrast, can’t even get its feet motivated enough to reach the dancefloor.  I would be lying if I said the bonehead genius of pastiche lyrics like “women are my favorite guy” inspired utterly no joy in me, of course, but as a full song, this misses the Vengabus.
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John S. Quinn-Puerta: Disney Channel Original Trance Song
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Nortey Dowuona: Half of this is BASS. The other part is a barely-there repeat of circa-’05 pop dance I’d hear in Torino.
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Tim de Reuse: Reviewing musical comedy is hard because you have to ask whether it’s funny. And then when the answer is “the first time, I guess,” you have to ask whether the music is good. And then when the answer is “it’s unremarkable,” you’ve run out of things to talk about.
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Joshua Minsoo Kim: No one who is actually funny will take a joke and try to milk it for all he can. That’s just disrespectful to the craft. Even if this were initially amusing, the moment that Kyle Gordon dropped the full song is when he went from comedian to content creator.
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Will Rivitz: TSJ in 2014: collectively unable to parse that a Eurotrash genre sendup could be sublime. TSJ in 2016: collectively unable to parse that a Eurotrash genre sendup (except for at least one of us!) could be sublime. TSJ in 2023: admittedly, this song is no QT or Charli, but it rips regardless. I hope we’ve learned our lesson.
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Jacob Sujin Kuppermann: All jokes aside, that’s genuinely an all-time great dance-pop hook. It’s a shame about the other 2 minutes of the song, though!
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Aaron Bergstrom: This could have been a clever tweet (I’ll admit that I chuckled at “women are my favorite guy” the first time), but instead it’s a three and a half minute song that overstays its welcome by at least two. By the end he’s basically just doing Borat.
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Taylor Alatorre: Those European people to the east of the Rhine — they don’t speak the English too good, do they? And they sure do love their bass-thumping, fist-pumping club music, right? Well, at least in the ’90s they did. Now it’s a different decade, and they like some different kinds of electronic music than that. But still, we could make pretend like we’re back in the ’90s and excavate a harmless, beloved, frozen-in-amber genre for the purpose of mocking I mean “celebrating” it, and have our YouTube TikTok comedian guy say some sex-obsessed and politically naïve phrases that probably sounded funnier as a recurring bit on Twitter than they do when spoken aloud. That’s something, right? Ylvis still appears in Uber One ads, right?
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Brad Shoup: It rocks that he made a Eurodance track for locals and when the locals finally heard it, they had no idea what to do with it. The structure and timbre are dead on–I particularly enjoyed the electro freestyle ostinato–but the deep-fried Continental English stopped being funny real fast. There’s just something really beautiful about European dance-pop: the way that shamelessness and fun can carry idiosyncratics like Hit’n’Hide or Rednex over the border. “Planet of the Bass” gets at a little of both, but it mostly feels like a joke about Slavic hustle. I guess I’ll wait for the third-wave ska parody.
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Ian Mathers: Brevity is the soul of wit. Chorus is still pretty good, though!
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