Are there two Americas, too many Americas, not enough? The plaint changes with the day. Identity is a serpentine target on the dance floor—a place where, in its most romantic evocation, how you catch a groove and to what says something about who you like to fuck and how. And if you haven’t danced lately (and, no, weddings don’t count) then oof.
Or maybe you’re straight—the kind of straight person who saw the club and its music as a means to the end we call marriage, coupledom. Some weeks ago, three married people and the pop singer Halsey, engaged since 2024, filmed themselves, for a podcast, having a depressing conversation about partying, during which the two men in the room—producer Benny Blanco and rapper Lil Dicky—confessed that their bygone participation in the activity was never in the interest of fun but in that of finding someone who would end their search for a partner to settle down with.
Last year, Blanco—credited with college-bar bangers such as 3OH!3’s “Want,” Katy Perry’s “Teenage Dream,” Kesha’s “Animal”-era catalogue, those Gym Class Heroes singles, “No Sleep” by Wiz Khalifa—married the artist and actress Selena Gomez. Blanco said that she asked him if he missed “the party life.” As relayed to the pod, Blanco answered in the negative. “The point of the party is to find you,” he said he told her. “The party’s over. I won the party.”
Not all straights agree, but I know my people. I live in the Midwest, a region that spawns homebodies aplenty. It’s that age-old aging-out adage: going out is for the immature and single, twinned conditions that can be escaped, if things go according to plan, before one’s twenties are out. Bemused pity is directed at those whose path deviates.
Seasonally, the internet bats around derision for party people of a certain age. “This is not your brat summer, you are 32, start a stretching routine,” the journalist Matthew Zeitlin posted on X a few years ago. It seems almost beyond remark that the author of said summer, Charli XCX, a self-described “365 party girl,” was turning thirty-two that August. On the same internet, a contingent crows about going “granny mode.” One America breaks off here. The comedian Jaboukie Young-White put it thusly in a recent interview he gave to the performer Ziwe: “I see straight discourse of people being, like, ‘Imagine being thirty-two in the club.’ And I’m, like, ‘Baby, we’re at the after afters.’ ”
Which explains those hits whose seeming ubiquity is only seeming—the solid, danceable pop music that barely penetrates the eardrums of those self-professed thirtysomething old folks. “Padam Padam,” from 2023, is one such hit, performed by Kylie Minogue, an Australian artist with lots of them. I feel a pang when discussion of an artist is led by their being slept on, but it must be said that Minogue, one of the most fabulous showgirls alive, beloved by the world at record-breaking levels, has never entirely caught on among Americans. (“Is it the relentlessly upbeat disco aesthetic that throws us off?” Sasha Frere-Jones asked New Yorker readers in 2009. “Is it the costume changes?”)
But not all Americans. There are grand pockets of this nation where merely knowing of Minogue is not enough, where the 2001 album “Fever,” whose nu-disco perfections did stick in the States, is just the shallow end. Minogue’s music “has become a hallmark of the gay club, even in its mass dilution in the 21st century as these spaces (justifiably) opened up to others,” the journalist Joan Summers wrote in Jezebel, in 2020. “Minogue understands that she rules over these club floors, and takes care in her position as dance commander to a legion of sweaty homosexuals.” Three summers ago, in 2023, the anthem on offer was “Padam Padam.”
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