“Sexy and I Know It”

Album Review

Sometimes when I sit down to review a track, I’m nearly overwhelmed with lyrical opacity. I set about carefully deciphering contextual clues like some sort of deconstructive pop-music investigator, delicately trying to suss out what a song’s intended meaning might be.

This hit from LMFAO is not that kind of song.

There’s no opacity, no ambiguity, no nuance, no subtlety, no shades of gray here. When it comes to “Sexy and I Know It,” there’s nothing but … well, ah, um, there’s just no polite way to even paraphrase what this alternative hip-hop duo has to say about the pride they take in their sexual anatomy. I’m somewhat loathe to do so, but I’m therefore forced to let them speak for themselves:

“When I walk in the spot, this is what I see/Everybody stops and they staring at me/I got passion in my pants and I ain’t afraid to show it/I’m sexy and I know it.”

Lest we miss the point, we then encounter an unwanted exercise in visualization that goes, “Wiggle, wiggle, wiggle, wiggle, wiggle, yeah”—three times in a row, no less.

Those lyrics offer an appropriate segue into a conversation about the video. While it’s not technically pornographic, that’s nevertheless the word that comes to mind when watching it. Looking like a refugee from a Weird Al convention gone horribly wrong, DJ Redfoo wiggles and wiggles, as does a whole parade of men (and a few women). Indeed, pretty much in its entirety, this visual affair consists of men in Speedos undulating and thrusting and rotating their hips in such a way that what’s going on underneath isn’t much of mystery—as onlookers gawk and lust and laugh.

Think Napoleon Dynamite in his underwear.

Or, better yet, don’t.