Robin at It's Her Factory with more close analysis of EDM-modeled apocalypse-now pop, in this case a new monstrosity triply parented by Guetta, Usher, and Ludacris, with focus on the lyrics

·      “Why tiptoe through life to arrive safely at death”

·      “I was born for the fast life”

·      “I go for broke, a lesson I can’t afford/but FWIW I’m ready to pay”

·      “If I got one life to live, I’m gonna party till I’m dead/What the hell is a life worth living, if it’s not on the edge”

·      “Tryin to keep my balance, I’m twisted, so just in case I fall/written on my tombstone should be ‘women, weed, and alcohol’”

  “I’m stuck in this moment, freeze the hands of time/cause I feel inner peace, when I’m outta my mind”

 at a certain point, Luda says something like, so hold tight cuz me and Usher gonna break some rules

and i'm thinking, what could be more normative and allowed than "women, weed and alcohol" (okay weed is technically illegal, still, in most states, but for how much longer, and it's still absolutely conformist in social-youth terms... )

but i'm also thinking what could be more regulated and regular than this regulation-issue slice trance-electro-house whatever

whereas the records Ludacris made in the very early 2000s seemed genuinely strange and alarming

particularly this one 

but also this

and  this

this decline in mainstream black pop.... the disappearance of the "blackness", in many ways ... is one of the most intriguing stories of the last 6 years

(like, what is the "meaning" of the Rihanna voice...   this black-not-black achey-yearn-y hollow-inside vocality that is ubiquitous)

now this tune approaches the numbness/excess/burnout theme from a much more ambivalent and critical / doubting angle -- in the club or on the radio, it can work superficially as a "Rest of My Life" type banger, but the stealth bomb lyrics interrogate the idea that "i am free because i'm overdoing it -- and it is SO much more interesting and potent in terms of music and mood... genuinely voluptuous in its melancholy decadence, like a crunk Associates.

  
indeed it could be retitled "Party Fears, Too"