Baz Luhrmann is the guy who directed Moulin Rouge and that Romeo and Juliet movie set in a Miami-ish gangster universe where the bad guys all wore Hawaiian shirts and called their guns “swords” (I actually kind of liked that one), so it should come as no surprise that his version of The Great Gatsby looks approximately like a disco ball f*cked a rainstick. And from shininess and sacrilege and pointless affluence it’s not a big leap to get to Fergie, who, along with Q-Tip and Goonrock (note: I have no idea what these words mean), recorded a song called “A Little Party Never Killed Nobody” for the soundtrack. Apt, no? And do you sense a note of Fitzgeraldian foreshadowing in that double negative, or was it accidental? If Zelda Fitzgerald was alive today, she’d probably be peeing her pants at Black Eyed Peas concerts.
The Great Gatsby liked partyin’, Fergie writes songs about partyin’ – it makes total sense. And my, what a perfect mash-up of club music, dub-steppy wub-wubbing, and trashy pop it is. Because Nick Carraway was into that whole Yale thing. He was probably a closet homosexual who did a lot of cocaine, that whole Yale thing. Actually, I think the AV Club put it best:
“Anyway, hey, here’s Fergie’s swing-flavored hip-hop song about partying, from the soundtrack of a 3-D movie about American opulence. It has scatting.”
This movie is going to be the non-tongue-in-cheek Spring Breakers.
