If you’d asked me, as a teenager, what I wanted to be, I would have probably said a “party girl” and I’d have only been half joking. This was the early 2010s, back when it was considered cool and normal to get completely wasted on a night out and then brag about falling asleep in a skip or being sick on the bus. The music of the era was very much that energy, too. Ke$ha was brushing her teeth with a bottle of jack. Rihanna was cheersing to the freakin’ weekend. And every university bar selling alien green shots for £1.50 was blasting the worst song in the world: “Shots” by LMFAO ft. Lil Jon (the chorus goes: “Shots, shots, shots, shots, shots, shots / Shots, shots, shots, shots, shots.”)
The drunk anthem has existed for decades – a quick glance at any country song from the 1950s will tell you that. But in the 2000s and early 2010s, the “lets get wasted” party anthem truly reached fever pitch. According to a study released in 2013, among 720 songs in Billboard’s most popular songs lists in 2009, 2010 and 2011, 23.2 percent mentioned alcohol, with nearly half of those songs mentioning specific brands. To add, the context in which booze was mentioned was nearly always positive (has any one song sounded more furiously 2010 than Flo Rider’s “Club Can’t Handle Me” featuring David Guetta?)
Fast forward 10 years, though, and the fun drunk anthem has all but dried up. There isn’t any data tracking alcohol mentions – there are a couple in the charts, including Taylor Swift’s “Cruel Summer” and “Dial Drunk” by Noah Kahan with Post Malone, but these certainly aren’t exactly vibey adverts for getting on it. In “Dial Drunk”, Kahan sings “For the shame of being young, drunk, and alone” meanwhile Swift is “drunk in the back of the car” and crying “like a baby coming home from the bar.” When it comes to big party anthems, none of them mention alcohol positively. Dua Lipa’s “Dance the Night” doesn’t mention drinking, and, in “Paint the Town Red” Doja Cat even raps: “I am so much fun without Hennessey / They just want my love and my energy.”
It's not hard to figure out why artists aren’t banging out tracks about everybody in the club gettin’ tipsy anymore – or, at least, not at the same rate, or with the same energy. Alcohol just isn’t that cool among young people. According to a 2022 survey, 26 percent of 16 to 24-year-olds in the UK are now “fully teetotal.” Meanwhile, between 2011 and 2021, the UK lost more than a quarter of its clubs. With that in mind, it makes sense that we’re not hearing songs like “I Got a Feelin” (2009) by Black Eyed Peas, because nobody wants to “Fill up my cup / Mazel tov”. The kids are too busy watching their health. Also they can’t afford it. Oh, and there aren't even clubs to go to.
The songs of the 2020s aren’t all fully straight edge. They’ve just evolved, turned into something else more reflective of current substance trends. The pandemic saw a rise in psychedelic use, with a particular widespread penchant for mushrooms. But even before then, we were seeing the tide turn, with artists like Jon Hopkins, Kacy Musgraves and Beach House releasing albums with a psychedelic tinge. More recently, psychedelic influenced albums have multiplied. In the past year alone, Lil Yachty released a trippy, psych-rock album. King Krule returned with 15 neo-psychedelic tracks about “the space between”, and numerous song that are popular on TikTok, from Harry Styles to Tame Impala and Mac Demarco, feel like an acid-dipped, woozy trip.
It’s hard to know what came first. Did the drunk anthem dry up because everyone got sober-curious? Or did we stop drinking because alcohol was no longer cool, or else being constantly reflected back at us in popular culture, like the giant “drink me” label in Alice and Wonderland? For me, it’s neither: I drink less now because having more than three drinks makes my tongue feel like it’s going to fall off the following day. But this decision has definitely been made easier by the current attitude surrounding drinking; being sober in the club – the ones we have left – is becoming increasingly normal. Nobody’s going to berate you for not being fun anymore if you don’t want to neck a round of shots (shots, shots, shots, shots, shots, shots).
