15 Years Ago, 3OH!3’s “Don’t Trust Me” Captured a Scene That Soon Left Them Behind
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The post 15 Years Ago, 3OH!3’s “Don’t Trust Me” Captured a Scene That Soon Left Them Behind appeared first on Consequence.
You’ve arrived at Warped Tour 2008. The heat is searing, relieved only by a mirage oasis of energy drinks and human sweat. The once-punk-forward touring festival has now become the go-to summer camp for every MySpace buzz band: Cobra Starship, The Devil Wears Prada, Mayday Parade, Bring Me the Horizon. You wander to the Hurley.com stage, past a field of the skinniest jeans imaginable, hair volumized to glam metal heights, and young fans stacked with candy rave bracelets. A fast-rising duo takes the stage and fills their 25 minute set with obnoxious electropop-emo-rap songs. A lot of the music is repellant, but their final song catches everyone’s attention: “Black dress/ With the tights underneath…” goes the first line, reinforced by a screaming audience of mostly young girls.
The song is “Don’t Trust Me” by 3OH!3 — pronounced “three-OH!-three” — a brash-but-silly pop-rock track that became the Colorado duo’s breakout hit. Nearly a year after its release, “Don’t Trust Me” would complete its slow journey towards the top, garnering significant pop radio play and serving as a crucial crossover moment between MySpace notoriety and mainstream attention.
But 15 years later, the song reeks of a very particular time in the late 2000s, where a maximalist turbo-pop attitude had once carried 3OH!3 to brief stardom. Shortly after they made their grand entrance into the zeitgeist with grossly misogynistic lyrics, a burgeoning Katy Perry and Kesha would eventually eclipse 3OH!3 in both musical style and overall success, and terrible jokes about women and Helen Keller would never fly so blatantly again. 3OH!3’s moment in pop culture was cemented, but after 15 years, is any of the music worth revisiting? What was this moment like, and was it really as bad as we remember it?
“Don’t Trust Me” was the lead single to the duo’s label debut, Want, which came out in the midst of their Warped Tour journey on July 8th, 2008 via Photo Finish Records (a division of Atlantic Records). When I first heard the track as a 12 year-old, I loved it, but was rightfully embarrassed enough to tell no one, listening to it exclusively on MySpace from time to time. But eventually, the song peaked at No. 7 on the Billboard Hot 100 and has since been certified 3x platinum — accolades that, barring a miracle or its opposite, 3OH!3 will never achieve again.
Want, on the other hand, only peaked at 44 on the Billboard 200, and absolutely does not stand the test of time. Of course, in the iTunes age, I never bothered to listen to the album — but for the album’s 15th anniversary this month, I decided to give Want a close listen for the first time ever. I expected brazen pop hooks amidst squelching synths, terrifyingly bad lyrics about getting fucked up and disrespecting women, all around bafoonery. I wondered whether the music would be actually good, “so bad that it’s good,” or just plain bad.
The answer is mostly “it’s bad,” but not without a few surprises. Want features hip-hop in droves. Heavily associated with the “crunkcore” genre — a combination of southern hip-hop by way of Lil Jon with the emo-tinged aggression of post-hardcore — most of the album’s 12 tracks are souped-up shout-along crunk anthems that reek of Monster Energy Drink and embarrassing cultural cosplay. At the time, southern hip-hop in particular was still wildly popular, especially among young people. Whether for love or love of money, 3OH!3 — Sean Foreman and Nathaniel Motte — chose this hybrid presentation as their go-to style.
But their aggro frat-rap experiments are really only a conduit to the more interesting aspects of 3OH!3’s sound, which take disparate elements of electronic music, emo, and pop into a candy-coated tornado of late 2000s excess. The atrocious “Punkbitch,” which is essentially the opening track on Want, is 2-and-a-half minutes of brash crunk raps about strippers and booze — a lyrical trend that is truly all over the album — until a barrage of electro beats rip through the song’s outro and bring you straight to the emo rave.
They were certainly right that these horrific rap songs needed something else going for them; each emotionally fraught bridge, like the pop-punk croon that breaks up “I’m Not Your Boyfriend Baby,” adds a kind of warped sensitivity to these overtly harsh tunes. Examining this kind of oscillation in retrospect, it makes sense that they were initially pigeoned into “scene” iconography — there were doses of colorful, alternative sensibilities, a very subtle kind of feminization that pop-punk and emo had begun to champion (see: Panic! At the Disco’s A Fever You Can’t Sweat Out), sandwiched between hypermasculine presentations of white boy rap.
This was certainly an aspect that helped propel “Don’t Trust Me” to mainstream success. It may be the most straightforward pop track on Want, but it’s just as brazen and ridiculous as the rest of the album — let us not forget the tortured bridge, where Motte commands, “Shush girl/ Shut your lips/ Do the Helen Keller and talk with your hips,” which was bad then and worse now (when asked by PAPER about whether or not that line would fly in 2019, Motte said “I don’t know, probably not!”). Foreman’s verses are similarly cocksure; we all remember “Tell your boyfriend/ If he says he’s got beef/ That I’m a vegetarian and I ain’t fucking scared of him,” but the rest of his narration about this imagined woman (the “hoe” named in the chorus) is dripping with contempt.
For whatever it’s worth, “Don’t Trust Me” is decidedly unserious. It’s clear in its shiny, falsetto-laden chorus hook, with each “woo-oo” a playful assertion that yes, these guys are pop stars. It’s clear in the aforementioned “jokes” about “beef” and “doing the Helen Keller,” a prime example of the edgy late 2000s Family Guy-style humor that, at the time, was still being celebrated. And it’s certainly clear in the raucous music video for “Don’t Trust Me,” which features a scantily-clad Foreman and Motte acting incoherently ridiculous on themed sets and models treated like set-dressing.
“Don’t Trust Me,” as well as its follow-up single “Starstrukk,” arrived at a very particular moment in pop music, with very particular personnel at the fore. The co-writer and co-producer of “Don’t Trust Me” was a budding Benny Blanco, a then-protégé of Dr. Luke. Luke brought Blanco along to work on Katy Perry’s debut album, One of the Boys, in 2008 — right around the same time that 3OH!3 were crafting Want with pop-punk super-producer Matt Squire.
The connection between Perry and 3OH!3 was then cemented as they both took their respective breakout albums on the aforementioned 2008 Warped Tour (yes, Katy Perry played Warped Tour), with Perry becoming the more instantly successful of the two. When 3OH!3’s status began to rise in 2009, Perry hopped on a remix of “Starstrukk,” doubling down on her slightly edgy, sexualized persona with the two similarly edgy, sexualizing dudes. “Starstrukk,” even with its catcalling whistles and ecstasy-pop chorus, is definitely one of the better songs on Want — there are some terrible lines all over the album, but “L-O-V-E’s just another word I’ll never learn to pronounce” is actually a good one.
Meanwhile, Luke and Blanco were hard at work developing a similarly audacious artist: Kesha. There’s a clear lineage between the turbo-pop absurdity of “Don’t Trust Me” and Kesha’s still-incredible breakout hit, “Tik Tok.” Kesha’s rapid ascent was characterized by her party-til-the-world-ends candor, almost leaning into the idea that she’s the type of girl 3OH!3 were singing their songs about. They then embraced this association with two singles: 3OH!3 appeared on Kesha’s “Blah Blah Blah” (not a good song), and Kesha in turned guested on 3OH!3’s post-Want follow-up, “My First Kiss” (also not a good song).
Luke and Blanco would continue to define the sound of Obama-era pop, with Katy Perry and Kesha as two of their star players. 3OH!3, on the other hand, would never quite land in the same mainstream arena again. They continued their Warped Tour-adjacent streak as MySpace and the “scene” with it began to wane, until — like hundreds of musicians in their lane and generation — they each turned to writing songs for pop stars. Foreman reunited with Want producer Matt Squire to co-write Ariana Grande’s “Tattooed Heart” (a great song) in 2013, and five years later, co-wrote the Steve Aoki and BTS track “Waste It on Me” (not too bad). Motte was arguably the more successful hired gun, co-writing Maroon 5’s top 10 single “Love Somebody” in 2012 — an overly-sanitized track that is lightyears away from 3OH!3’s outrageous romps.
But their influence, such as it is, isn’t entirely commercial. It’s easy to track the connection between 3OH!3 and 100 gecs, the current leaders of hyperpop in its most brazen form who’ve adopted a similarly playful spirit. The gecs even hopped on one of 3OH!3’s recent tracks, “Lonely Machines,” the lead single off their 2021 album Need (fashioned as a spiritual sequel to Want). But 100 gecs are reinterpreting the more obnoxious elements in 3OH!3’s catalog with a more developed ear, leaning harder into the absurdity of MySpace-era emo pop, shamelessly adopting what sounds the most fun and discarding the rest.
Perhaps, as our postmodern culture strays further into the genreless, as we attempt to reappropriate art that carries an aura of shame, and as we lean harder into irony, humor, and silliness as an antidote for the apocalypse, 3OH!3’s work will feel less like a bad omen for the future of pop and more like an intriguing promise. But if you do the unthinkable and listen to Want, you might come to the conclusion that society moved on for a reason.
15 Years Ago, 3OH!3’s “Don’t Trust Me” Captured a Scene That Soon Left Them Behind
Paolo Ragusa
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