Excerpts from The Believer: Resurrector: “Like a G6”

“I like to imagine that ‘Like a G6’ is what they play in the seventh ascension of the Galaxy Brain, a tesseract where linear time ceases to exist and the past and future become one.”

- - -

A rotating guest column in which writers reexamine critically unacclaimed works of art

- - -

In my mid-twenties, most Fridays after work, I would frequent Asian-themed nights at clubs like White Rabbit in the Lower East Side, mostly because the drinks were cheap and the girl I had a crush on was going to be there. The dance floor was always a little sticky, and it wasn’t unusual to go home at 4 a.m. with someone’s rogue eyelash smushed into your shoe.

Those Friday nights more or less defined one of the weirder transition periods of my adult life—new to New York City; terminally broke; wearing cheap, wrinkle-free work shirts from H&M that probably osmosed microplastics into my bloodstream—yet I remember developing something of a personal ritual whenever the DJ played the song “Like a G6” by Far East Movement, which was everywhere at the time: I’d go outside and smoke a cigarette.

Lest there be any confusion, this was mostly because I was young and stupid and filled with gloomy malaise. Back then, the song occupied a place in my subconscious, lying in proximity to other party anthems like “Let’s Get It Started” by the Black Eyed Peas (sanitized from the original version, “Let’s Get Retarded”) and “Dynamite” by Taio Cruz. Spiritually, “G6” inspired a mild existential spiral in me every time those first few synths caused the floor to wobble, a stark reminder that I was spending eight hours a day sitting at a desk job I loathed, and the only antidote was two-for-one vodka sodas served with too much ice.

The song went to number one on the Billboard pop charts, which was unheard of for an Asian group at the time, especially pre–“Gangnam Style,” pre-BTS. But even at the top of the music world, Far East Movement went largely ignored by the elite players in music media. (Which, in a way, is kind of a fundamental part of the Asian American experience.) Pitchfork didn’t bother to review their album Free Wired, while Rolling Stone said that it was “music designed to make two-year-olds deliriously giddy.” Plenty of music bloggers abhorred it too. One of the meaner-spirited reviews noted that there are “bad songs out there, and then there’s ‘Like a G6.’ It’s as if someone found Ke$ha’s Asian-American extended family, got them trashed on absinthe laced with meth, guided them to a MacBook with GarageBand, told them to write a song that sounds dated already, and put the results on the radio.”

Time, though, has a haloing effect, which is why I’ve since come to appreciate, even love, “Like a G6” like no other guilty pleasure in my life: more than “Post to Be,” “Faithfully,” and anything by Skrillex. It’s just so damn good. Transcendent, in fact. I like to imagine that “Like a G6” is what they play in the seventh ascension of the Galaxy Brain, a tesseract where linear time ceases to exist and the past and future become one.

Read the rest over at The Believer.