“Right Round”

Album Review

If you’re of a certain age, you likely remember a catchy, mildly suggestive one-hit wonder by the band Dead or Alive called “You Spin Me Round (Like a Record).” (OK, OK, technically, the band did have one other hit, the much less memorable “Brand New Lover.” But can you sing that one, too?) “You Spin Me” peaked at a respectable but hardly earthshaking No. 11 in September 1985.

Fast-forward 24 years (which makes me feel way older than I care to think about), and the song—or part of its chorus, anyway—has helped Flo Rida nab his second No. 1.

If there’s one thing you need to know about Flo Rida, it could be boiled down to this: He likes women’s backsides, preferably close to the ground and on a stripper’s pole. Want proof? That’s pretty much all he sang about in 2008’s No. 1 hit “Low,” which staked out the top spot on the charts for 10 weeks.

“Right Round” offers more of the same. Which is to say a crude, objectifying ode to how a particular stripper’s skills prompted Flo Rida to part with a stack of cash at the club: “I’m spendin’ my money, I’m out of control/Somebody help me, she takin’ my bank roll.” As he sips Patron, Mr. Rida says of the woman’s performance, “You spin my head right round, right round/When you go down, when you go down, down”—a lyric that likely does double duty as a winking reference to oral sex as well.

The song’s repeated bridge brags that the rapper can’t think of anything more wondrous than what he’s looking at: “From the top of the pole I watch her go down/She got me throwin’ my money around/Ain’t nothin’ more beautiful to be found.” Elsewhere, the rapper is so infatuated with the view that he actually imagines the woman’s backside talking to him. Really.

It’s a measure of our culture’s moral and aesthetic decay that a middling hit from 1985 now tops the charts for a month and a half as it peddles the message that a stripper’s gyrations are the most beautiful thing in the world.