"Party In Your Bedroom," by Cash Cash

It's difficult for me to face the fact that I'm an old man. The pop-punk and emo scene of my youth - all guitar pick slides and double-time drums and sweaty shows at the youth center (we don't have basements on the West Coast) -  has been replaced by a scene of time-intensive haircuts, Garageband drum loops, and a color scheme last seen on your older sister's bicycle shorts in 1993. So while I lament the fall of Fenix TX and reminisce over Taking Back Sunday's old lineup, toolbags like these guys are touring the country and having sex with middle schoolers. 

It's enough to drive a man to hip-hop, or at least to convince him to take out the earrings and start wearing collared shirts. Maybe it's because I'm desperate, then, that I seem to latch on obsessively to anything posted on Absolutepunk these days that seems halfway decent. Maybe this is why, despite my preference for all-black Atticus over hilighter vomit Glamour Kills, Cash Cash's "Party in Your Bedroom" has become one of my favorite songs of the year.

If autotuned, dance-beat emotronic (seriously, Myspace?) were a medical disorder, Cash Cash would be the textbook cases that all med students studied so they could save patients someday. The band's Myspace page features two band members in yellow pants and a logo written in rainbow animal print. They've got matching throwback Reebok Pumps and about fifty different pieces of merch, each garish enough to burn the eyes of unaccustomed adults. They're shameless, but where 30h!3 try to be clever and Forever the Sickest Kids are just pandering douchebags, Cash Cash have given themselves in completely to the neon scene aesthetic. There's something refreshing in a band that has the balls not just to wear ugly yellow shirts, but to wear ugly yellow pants. You can't make fun of shit like that. It's too awesome.

And how's the music? Here's where this blog post starts making sense. Most of their stuff is tootache-inducing mall pop, with tinny dance beats and massive harmonies and nonsensical lyrics about raising your hands to the air like you're flying, with like electric hearts, whatever that means. Again, so entirely devoid of substance and so enthusiastic that it's baller again.

"Party in Your Bedroom" is a whole other story. The song was a minor New York club hit (so I'm told) before Cash Cash was even a full band, and for good reason. From the autotuned, chopped up opening chorus to the vintage synth squiggles that accent the verses, the song is a nonstop dance juggernaut.

Exhibit A: that fucking chorus. It will never leave your head, and in a totally good way. I have this theory that all of us are secretly twelve year-old girls inside, insecure about our bodies and our social standing, and all of us need to dance around in bedrooms sometimes. Cash Cash understands this (that's a little creepy, but I'll get to that), so they've given us a big, sweet chorus about dancing around in our bedrooms to help us do that. Soooo perfect.

Exhibit B: the white-boy funk guitar in the second half of each verse. Actually, it's barely even white-boy funk. It's more funk distilled into white-boy funk distilled into Disney Channel barely funk-inspired pop. Which is awesome.

Exhibit C: How is every part of this song catchy? What happened to the whining verses that lead into the chorus you remember? Here, the verse is catchy, then the second part of the verse is catchy, and by the time he sings "the roof is on fire, you're losing control," you're about to break into the Running Man. Then the chorus comes in, and then that part at the end of the chorus about "lips sealed tight, don't say goodnight" gets you all excited, and then...

Exhibit D: The bridge! Yeah, it totally sounds like he says, "It's no TV," but that's okay. More minimally funky guitar! Chunky-ass harmonies! There's no way they wrote this. I refuse to believe that they put this entire song together without the help of some 40 year-old Swedish pop genius.

Exhibit E: The last chorus. Disco strings???!?!?!?!? The high harmony on "a lot of talk about youuuuu?!?!?!?!?!?" Ending on that last "don't say goodnight?!?!??!?!" Yeah, this.

So those lyrics: this song is either about a twelve year-old girl who's shy at school and then displays a serious lack of caution as she posts pictures of herself on popular social networking sites, or it's about a webcam porn site. I'm not sure which one is creepier to hear the dude singing about, but the first one strikes me as far more likely. So here's my thought: even though a lot of these neon emo-men are seriously creepsters, none of them would be transparently pedophilic enough to sing about it directly, right? This just leads me to believe that, once again, Cash Cash has transcended any traditional notions of seriousness or personal expression in their lyrics and have created a song that is truly meant to exist outside of them, for the sole benefit of the twelve year-old girls (and non-twelve year-old girls) who need it. 

Once again, that makes them awesome.