The Singles Jukebox

If you want a picture of the future, imagine Redfoo party rocking on a human face — forever.

[Video][Website]
[2.75]

Anthony Easton: Irony no longer means anything. LMFAO, the band who should be least likely to believe their own hype, released this damp squib of premature ejaculation and treat themselves like Iceberg Slim. You can tell me it’s a joke, but I damn well know it doesn’t matter, because they don’t think it’s a joke. 
[0]

Alfred Soto: The wobbly 808 intro augurs a rhythmic excitement that never comes, and I would like alert readers to note that I mean every denotation of that verb. The sound of pathology, not to mention a criminal record, in just over three minutes.
[1]

Jonathan Bradley: They’ve released two albums, but I still can’t see LMFAO as a real pop group. Surely they’re some overgrown and unfunny SNL skit about clueless assholes who think they have a real musical career? At least contemporaries like David Guetta or Pitbull seem like they actually entered a studio of their own volition; I’d buy Redfoo’s stock advice before I would his viability as a pop star. And yet pop stars LMFAO are, and their basis for remaining so becomes ever flimsier. “Sexy and I Know It” is a joke without a punchline. I’m not meant to be laughing at them, but I can’t thrill to the absurdity and identify with the protagonists, either. When I do anything as incompetently as these guys are at rapping, I don’t feel sexy in the slightest. Is this dada? Would it be better if it were?
[3]

Brad Shoup: One joke and a shit production team. Truly, they are The Loneliest Island.
[2]

Katherine St Asaph: You know this is getting LMFAO laid, which deserves points if only for audacity.
[3]

Jake Cleland: My first reaction to the video was disappointment that they’d abandoned the post-apocalyptic theme from their two previous singles, but then I’m not so certain a world in which the Speedo is an acceptable garment isn’t just as evocative of a world dealing with infrastructural collapse and total moral chaos. I can see myself having a good time to this on a dance floor sticky with so much fluorescent-flavored vodka, the vague promise of a sexual encounter whispered after each “I’m sexy and I know it” through a half-smile at the tight dress to the left.
[10]

Jonathan Bogart: When I saw Ke$ha in concert two weeks ago and LMFAO opened, this was the highlight of their punishingly mean-spirited, date-rapey set because it showed some hint of self-awareness and gleefully (if mockingly) celebrated all kinds of body types as “sexy.” They even had the overweight roadies come out, whip their shirts off and dance like fools. But of course, that courtesy was only extended to guys; there was only one woman on stage, and she was a size zero.
[3]

Jer Fairall: Say what you will about the exhibition of female sexuality in popular culture, but every now and then it will elicit serious discussion and even valuable, provocative work. Male sexuality, however, remains stranded between the twin horrors of the preening lothario and the desire, born out of some toxic mixture of squeamishness and immaturity, to humiliate the sexual aggressor. The ground in between is left unexplored, lest anyone admit that there might be any way men can experience or provide sexual pleasure without it turning into a Michael Bay joint. No wonder we get infantile pieces of shit like “Sexy and I Know It,” with its sub-“I’m Too Sexy” buffoonery and entendres a 13-year-old would roll his eyes at, not to mention an appalling promo clip that plays out the only way in which a music video that features men, rather than women, getting naked ever possibly could: mugging, clowning and Ron Jeremy cameos. Does it even need to be pointed out that the song is utterly atrocious as music, combining the smarmiest elements of the Bloodhound Gang’s frat-rock with the unfunniest ones of The Lonely Island’s tired genre parodies and the chintziest ones of Black Eyed Peas’ ongoing degradation of pop? It is, and it does.
[0]