In case you've been living under a rock, you've probably already heard the slammer of a bop that is "Break Up Every Night" by EDM duo The Chainsmokers. If you haven't, please take a listen below. It's like somebody took the experience of shopping at a Forever21 while frantically checking your iPhone every three seconds to see if your crush texted you back (he hasn't) and congealed it into three minutes and 28 seconds of pure auditory bliss.
Let me be clear: This song saved my life. It is the platonic ideal of a summer bop: objectively catchy with just the right amount of anthemic pop repetition necessary to make you forget you've been listening to it on a loop. It's a tour de force of raw feeling and confusion. They want to break up every night. He hates her but loves their messed-up dynamic. The duality of man!
Much ink has already been spilled about The Chainsmokers. Esquire notably called them the "Nickelback of EDM," which: OK. People mocked their Billboard cover story, where the two bragged about their dick lengths (17.34 inches combined, base to tip, in case you were wondering). But as with many great artists, the haters are often probably just jealous.
In "Break Up Every Night", the clear breakout track off their debut album, Memories ... Do Not Open, Drew Taggart's Natty Ice-laced vocals harmoniously melt into each beat, like a frat guy in a tank top reaching over to give you a big bear hug. Who will free our Chainsmokers from this möbius strip of frustration and pain?
She wants to break up every night
She wants to break up every night
Don't wanna wait until she finally decides to feel it
While most of the lyrics were easy enough to wrap my head around, one question remained.
She wants to break up every night
Then tries to fuck me back to life
How can I help it if I like the way she makes me feel it
What does it mean to "fuck" somebody "back to life"? How exactly does one do this? I'd like to believe I'm somewhat of a sexpert (I go to many boy-girl parties and have had exactly 1.3 serious boyfriends), but this question confounded even me. Are you supposed to assume The Chainsmokers are dead in this narrative? Pulling you closer in the backseat of an afterlife Rover? Doing just fine before they met you (at the pearly gates?).
Are they having such good sex that it reanimates their rotting corpse? Sorry if it's weird that it's going in that direction — I don't feel good about it either! But how else would you fuck something that's already alive ... back to life?
Curious, I reached out to Harvard's very own Josh Bell, a poet whose work has been published in The New Yorker, received his MFA from the Iowa Writer's Workshop (aka where Hannah went in the fourth season of Girls), and current Briggs-Copeland Lecturer on English, to help me decipher the poetry that had earwormed their way into my heart and soul.
Why this metaphor? Why did Taggart, arguably one of the most layered lyricists of our time with his penchant for fully voicing Millennial melodrama so beautifully ("So, baby, pull me closer / In the backseat of your Rover / That I know you can't afford / Bite that tattoo on your shoulder / Pull the sheets right off the corner / Of the mattress that you stole / From your roommate back in Boulder / We ain't ever getting older"), choose to suggest that sexual intercourse could reanimate someone?
For that, Bell suggested we look to the Bible's "Song of Solomon," which praises love, but also notes that "love is as strong as death" but not stronger.
I’d like to argue that The Chainsmokers, like Solomon, seem wise to this fact. If you check with the lyrics to “Break Up Every Night,” you’ll note that nowhere in the song does the singer claim that the un-named she-figure actually succeeds in bringing him back to life by way of sexual intercourse. We are told merely that she “tries” to bring him back to life. We are told that she tries repeatedly, that she tries and tries only, and the suggestion is that The Chainsmoker simply will not reanimate, like a stubborn EDM Snow White.
It's also worth noting that on the official Chainsmokers Genius page, they say the song allowed them to "vent about that girl who we’re stuck on but is driving us crazy." Why is this small detail so important?
Bell explained: "The un-named she, they say, is a 'girl who we’re stuck on,' which is a problem. Because by extension, then, she’s not only trying to bring one Chainsmoker back to life, but possibly two Chainsmokers."
Let that sink in.
If this unnamed woman possesses the power to reanimate not one, but two separate Chainsmokers, and is well-traveled ("Been to France one time and you're Parisian"), then at least you have a clearer understanding of the emotional and mental prowess this woman has.
But of course, that interpretation assumes that Taggart was talking about the power of love and not, like, the physical act of banging. What if he had meant it literally?
For that, I turned to a medical doctor, who on the condition of anonymity because this is an extremely ridiculous story, agreed to answer my questions as to if it would be possible to literally "fuck" a person back to life.
He explained that while very little research has been done on this area (possibly due to difficulties conducting trials, "primarily around the issues of consent and staying hard,"), he did suggest that there was some "theoretical basis to consider that the procedure (i.e., the fucking) might be better than doing nothing depending on the technique used."
For a male in cardiac arrest (the scenario in the song), an enthusiastic cowboy position, with both hands placed mid-sternum, a fairly standard sex position, could reasonably be expected to produce significant changes in intrathoracic pressure which might be similar to but less effective than traditional chest compressions. Mouth-to-mouth artificial ventilation would require only a basic modification to the kind of incompetent breathy kissing which is widely practiced among the general public ... I would discourage face-sitting and fisting unless the patient is in extremis. Golden showers have no role in resuscitation.
From there, there was only one thing left to do.
Drew, if you're reading this, call me. I just want to talk.
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