This is, in a way, Elon Musk’s fault: Spending the last several years with our society stewing in the fevered flopsweat of the world’s least funny, most disastrous social media tech bro has made some of Musk’s competitors take on a certain glow, if only be comparison. Say what you like about Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg, for instance, but at least he doesn’t pose for the world’s most embarrassing photographs, or attempt to genuinely hijack American governmental policy, or recruit T-Pain to help him record an acoustic cover of Lil Jon’s “Get Low,” in which he sings, with some sincerity, lines like “‘Til the sweat drops down my balls” or “stop, then wiggle with it.”
Hm? What’s that?
So, yeah: Zuckerberg has now done exactly that, explaining that he committed this Owl City-fication of a Lil Jon classic as a tribute to his wife Priscilla, because the song was playing when the two first met. And, like any insider-y romantic gesture between couples, Zuckerberg (posting on Instagram) felt the most appropriate thing to do with said song—on which he is credited, with T-Pain, as “Z-Pain,” in an effort to make us feel a pity that can never each our hearts—is post it to YouTube and Spotify, because, hey, nothing says “I love you, babe” like streaming royalties, right?
Motherfucker, do you understand you were on probation? We put the Social Network memes away and stopped roasting your asinine VR playpen for grampas because the shifting nature of online culture had somehow left you sitting at the “benign” end of the “tech bros we wouldn’t personally want to share an elevator with” list. We were busy, not writing you a cultural blank check. When Lil Jon invited us to think about the sweat droppin’ down his balls, it was a riotous expression of sexual imagery that helped define the soundscape; when you do it, crooning through the Auto-Tune like a college freshman who just found out he can get girls by strumming out a slow, “soulful” cover of “Hey Ya!”, all it does is make us imagine Mark Zuckerberg’s sweaty balls.
T-Pain, we can’t even talk to you. You know what you did.
English (US) ·