You can listen to “Cake By The Ocean” by DNCE here.

I once had a conversation with my brother about a college course he was doing on the history of sport. He told me about the reasons for success and popularity of certain sports and games. I guess strict rules require particular skills and creative solutions.

The idea of strict rules or constraints is something that always appeals to me in challenges. In my days of FIFA manager career modes, I liked to have self imposed constraints to make things more realistic, a French football team would be more likely to buy French speaking players, English players don’t often move abroad, etc. These little constraints are challenges to make things more realistic and more interesting.

That idea has lead me to a fascination with pop bands. I can, and always will, appreciate any good song made by a person on a computer, but the constraints of using the standard pop bands instruments of the last 70 or so years make things more interesting to me. “Cake By The Ocean” is very close to achieving that. It’s got a great funky bass line leading the whole song. There’s handclaps and a drum kit involved. There’s vocals. There’s a guitar and some backing vocals. Then there’s some extra sounds that are added on top that throw things off, but it’s very close to following the rules.

Aside from my nerdy musical snobbery, I also appreciate the lyric, “I’ll be Diddy, you be Naomi. I thoroughly enjoy that somebody felt it was necessary to write that the song is about sexual intercourse on the wikipedia entry for the song. And of course, I like that the title is based on confusing the phrases “cake by the ocean” and “sex on the beach”