Diligently refining the art of partying by creating an album of club-banger booty-shakin’ music, LMFAO’s unique style of electro-hip hop they describe as Party Rock, the name of their new album, has embodied their lifestyle of flashy clothing, sexy women and giving the middle finger to sobriety.
LMFAO’s Party Rock, with its freak-worthy beats and sexually infused lyrics, is the product of love forged by hyphy duo Sky Blu and Redfoo who describe it as “like a gateway drug” compelling even the most modest to the dance floor to engage in the pelvic whoo.
Not shy of the spotlight in the slightest bit, the duo unleashed an internet onslaught of daily YouTube updates, a steady flow of comedic skits and bits as well as self-produced music videos for a hungry and devoted fan base that can’t get enough of their antics and bold style.
I celebrated with LMFAO at their record release party back where it all started at the Roxy in Hollywood, days before filming the new music video for “Shots” with Lil Jon. Speaking with LMFAO about the new album we learned of their humble beginnings, what it is to Party Rock and the underlying themes in tracks that will get you laid.
Q & A with Sky Blu and Red Foo of LMFAO: 
Delirious Tremors: How was it playing at the Roxy?
LMFAO: It was great. It was like the completion of a dream because we started one of our first shows at a place called On The Rox which is next door and owned by The Roxy. So to have our album coming out and performing at The Roxy again about two and half years later was pretty symbolic. We had gotten to the top by selling out at The Roxy compared to when we first got there we had about 14 people in the audience. We sold it out our album is out and so that’s a big deal and a big accomplishment.
Delirious: I was speaking to some of the people that work there and they said that you were pretty regular back in the day.
LMFAO: Yeah we’ve probably done about 10 shows there. We started by doing shows where if we brought people then we would get paid and if we didn’t bring anyone we wouldn’t be paid.
Delirious: You don’t have to worry about that anymore.
LMFAO: Ha yeah, no we don’t.
Delirious: So what was it like creating your first record?
LMFAO: Writing songs came over time. We first started doing remixes and things like that. The album is kind of like a time capsule because it represents two and half years of our life. It kind of shows the evolution of LMFAO if you listen to the album front to back.
Delirious: Where do you guys get influences for your music and where do you get samples for your songs?
LMFAO: Well we don’t sample that much. All of that stuff is played by us except for “Lil Hipster Girl” that’s from Run DMC and in “Rock the Beat” we sampled the beginning from “Eye of the Tiger”. We’re trying to spread a feeling around the planet. We’re trying to make people feel good, kind of like how a stand-up comedian would: tell stories and at the end of the whole thing get laughter and help people escape reality and come into our reality and just have a blast and a merry ol’ time.
Like the song “Yes”, we had a ‘yes moment’ like when we were really hungry and then finally bit into that Fatburger we were thinking about all day with you know like a turkey burger with bacon, egg and cheese and you kind of just think to yourself, “Yes!” That feeling we felt was a universal feeling and we wanted to highlight that feeling in a song so that people hear that song and remember times when they go “Yes!”
Delirious: Damn you’re making me hungry.
LMFAO: Yeah! So that’s how we create a lot of our songs. “La la la” was the same way; it’s kind of that on-top-of-the-world feeling like when you’re with a girl, a new found love. It could be raining outside but for you it’s summer time in the Hamptons and everything is going good.
Delirious: Speaking of being on-top-of-the-world, I’m sure you’re familiar with what that’s like with the success of your new album and being the second highest download on the day of its release on iTunes.
LMFAO: I don’t think much has changed because we still haven’t reached our goal by any means. We still consider ourselves 10% up the mountain. We have some lofty goals one of them being true to our sound and dressing the way we want to dress. A lot of people are giving us tactics and strategies to become number one, saying stuff like, “do a song with this person, do this and that” but we’re just going to keep doing it our way. It gets complicated because with more success more people want to come to us and strike deals to get us more fans and more girls. It’s just more, more, more.
Delirious: That tends to be a difficult line to cross when it comes down to selling out or staying true to your style.
LMFAO: Yeah, and that’s easy for us – to stay true to our sound – because we do everything ourselves. We make our own music, we make our own clothes and we even write our own video treatments. For us the hardest thing to do is sell out … But we do want to sell our album. We feel that it is a classic album, it’s a time piece, it represents a new shift in music and there are strategies on selling that record. Why do people have to have it? We feel that it will change lives for the better. Girls are attracted to our music so if you’re a dude and you want to get more girls, just take our album and drive around the city at night blasting it you will have girls swarming your car.
Delirious: Good to know. I am curious to see what would happen to a person playing your music and wearing Axe body spray at the same time. Girls would probably go nuts. Kind of like their reaction at your shows when you let them up on stage to dance and sing with you.
LMFAO: It does get out of control sometimes, but it’s a party. And the rule of a party is: anything goes. It wouldn’t be following our party rules by having security take people off the stage. There are songs where we do want to be up there by ourselves though, especially with the remixes because we don’t sing ourselves in those songs like the one by Kanye. So it gives the crowd a chance to feel more like they are in a club. An interesting factor is when we do let people on stage and then we take them back down it’s hard to have the same kind of show because some of them get disappointed. So we try to time it so we let people on stage but you can’t really stop a crowd-surfing party animal from finding their way on stage.
Delirious: Yeah I learned the hard way to be careful of kicks to the face by rogue crowd surfers.
LMFAO: Yeah it gets crazy. We did a show at the Galaxy in Santa Ana and it got so crazy on stage that we left everybody on stage and then we performed in the crowd on the balcony because so many people were on the stage that no one could see us. So they were all on stage watching us in the crowd.
Delirious: Along those lines, what would you say is the most outrageous party/adventure LMFAO has encountered?
LMFAO: That Santa Ana show was pretty crazy in terms of crowds. But a couple nights ago at a show a girl came up and took off her shirt – well actually that happens a lot – but this time Foo poured beer on her breasts and we licked it off. That was a lot of fun. I think that was in New York. But you know that kind of stuff happens often and really every show is crazy like that.
Delirious: Must be hard to concentrate under those kinds of conditions.
LMFAO: Yeah, the Roxy show was all ages so people don’t tend to be as crazy. I don’t even think we were drinking on stage … that much.
Delirious: I remember a bottle of champagne and a couple Coronas being sprayed over the crowd.
LMFAO: Oh yeah that was fun! We’re starting to do that more because of the song we are doing with Lil Jon. It actually all started when we were in Tampa, Florida and they brought us the biggest bottle of champagne we had ever seen in our life. It looked like a midget. They kept telling Foo to shake it up, but he wasn’t putting his thumb over the top of it so it was pouring out with a weak stream. So then I take it and I’m spraying Foo for like five minutes until he was soaked in champagne. Hilarious. When I try to remember the craziest show I draw a blank because we probably don’t remember the craziest show because we were too drunk.
Delirious: And that’s party rock status.
LMFAO: Tonight [July 15th] we’re actually doing the “Shots” video in Vegas at Tao Beach and tomorrow night we have another record release show at Tao and we’re going to be celebrating the video so that could possibly be the craziest show in the world. It probably will be because we will be taking shots all day, like we usually do, it’s a regular LMFAO thing, but it’s going to be something extra magical. Damn I’m feeling drunk just thinking about it.
Delirious: So for people who don’t already know, how did you get the name LMFAO?
LMFAO: We picked a name that our peers did not like. They didn’t like it because it was so obvious and they felt like “duh”. Our first name was Sexe Dudes.
Delirious: Yeah that’s totally obvious.
LMFAO: Yeah I know right? It was totally blatant and not really the funnest name. So we kind of felt like people were hatin’ a little bit and Sky was online chatting with grandma, grandmagoodfoot22 – because there are 21 other grandmagoodfoots – and he was like, “hey we’ve been talking to a lot of people about our name, what do you think of our name: Sexe Dudes?” and she simply replied, “LMFAO are you serious?” and then we decided to have that as our name. The whole thing: LMFAO are you serious. But when we tried to register it, it kept coming back as an error because there were too many characters so it was too long, like my schlong, so we just cut it down to LMFAO.
Delirious: You have some really good remixes how do you choose which songs to use?
LMFAO: Sometimes a song will just jump out at us and slap us in the face and say, “remix me you bitch!” Like “Love Lockdown” we just heard on the radio and we just thought this is Kanye West’s new song, new sound and people will want to play it in the club but they can’t, let’s help them be able to play it in the club.
Delirious: How would you describe Party Rock?
LMFAO: The album is energetic, intoxicating, fun and extremely sexy. You put it on when you want to have a good time. The Party Rock lifestyle is simply like if you like to hook up with chicks at a party then you play “Shots” and everybody’s going to start drinking. You get your flip cup stuff you get your beer pong set up and then play “Shots” and it will all just get started. Whereas, if you’re on a date and your girl is hitting on you, on the first date, you’re driving in the car and she puts her hand on your leg that’s when you skip to the track, “I Am Not A Whore” and instead of telling her straight up, you let the song say it. I am not a whore, you cannot touch my leg, you cannot try to give me felatio on the first date … just yet. If she’s like “well you’re boring” then you let her listen more and it says, “but I like to do it.”
Delirious: And this works? Brilliant!
LMFAO: And then, maybe you’re dating a prune girl and she’s being like “Oh I have to be home soon, I have work in the morning.” So in this case you play the song “Say My Name” and it says “I’m gonna make you scream my name” and it talks about that in the song, so subliminally she knows that she’s going to be screaming your name at some point soon. You know what though that song was actually around way before we were ever even born.
Delirious: Oh really?
LMFAO: Yes, I think the first person to write that song was Jesus. If you think about it, how many times do you hear girls yelling “Oh Jesus!” in the bedroom? So I have to give credit for that song to Jesus, he was singing that in all the lounges, you know with the three Wisemen as backup. They just couldn’t record back then so not that many people know that.
Delirious: [lmfao]
LMFAO: Then “I’m in Miami, Bitch” you can role-play. You’re walking down the street with your headphones on and you say to a random girl, “Hey! You look kinda cute,” and she goes “What?” and you just say “Oh, I’m just listening to LMFAO,” and then she’ll say “Oh I love that song! Let’s have a date, let’s go back to your house, let’s get naked in the bed!”
Delirious: Maybe play some naked twister too?
LMFAO: Yeah, that’s the Party Rock lifestyle.
Delirious: Do you ever play naked twister as like a pre-show ritual or anything like that?
LMFAO: You know what? We should. It’s really better suited for the after party. Yeah, if you hit ‘em with that kind of stuff early on they might get tired out, but we do play “Get Crazy, (get wild and flash your titties)” as the second song in our set to let them know that we are serious – serious about partying.
Delirious: How have you been so successful at getting yourself out there, especially on the internet, through so many different digital avenues?
LMFAO: We think that our lives are pretty entertaining and so we want to share our life with everybody else. So we thought of making daily videos on YouTube every day and then we started blogging, putting up pictures, tweeting it up and most recently we created our own social network which is the hub and so pretty much everything goes through there and then programmers blast it out to the blog, myspace and twitter at the click of a button. We want to entertain the world so we need to know the psychology of the people that we’re playing our music for. So the more communication and the more comments they leave the more feedback they leave us regarding our songs and videos. This way we can gauge to see what you like. Like if we were chefs and we know you like chicken then we’re going to make you an incredible chicken tartar, chicken nuggets, chicken crème brulee or chicken potpie. We like to know people’s preferences, so to connect with the fans is the only way to do it. You can also really get to know them by studying the vagina, but that’s another conversation.
