The music mashup created by DJ Earworm combines pieces of the most renown American pop songs of 2016. While watching the music video, a flood of flashbacks hit me as I began to connect various songs to some of the memories that I had throughout my junior year of high school. The lighting and party visuals of the video further attributed to solidifying what I experienced in the past, which included going to the beach, participating in school dances, and spending time with friends.
Amongst the myriad of songs in the video, Justin Timberlake’s Can’t Stop the Feeling was one of the few songs that was oddly congruous with the overall club-like imagery. In the original music video of Can’t Stop the Feeling, the ambiance of the song depicted lots of radiant and untroubled individuals of diverse backgrounds in the cultural, ethnic, and occupational aspects. Despite all of the aforementioned differences between the townspeople, the video conveys that such variances can be negligible in the light of the happiness that surfaces when we cease making superficial judgements. Throughout the video, Justin Timberlake reiterates “everybody sing… I wanna see you move your body…room on lock the way we rock in, so don’t stop…” in order to emphasize the happiness that emerges as we learn to look past another’s physical appearance (Justin Timberlake 2016).
Can’t Stop the Feeling plays an essential role in the culmination of the 2016 pop songs, as it carries the same message of creating goodness out of diversity in the mashup video. I noticed that the variation of songs in DJ Earworm’s video substantially resemble the diverse townspeople in Justin Timberlake’s video. Through their musical recordings, both Justin Timberlake and DJ Earworm manifest the idea of how the harmonization of diverging backgrounds sparks a flourishing, euphoric sensation.
