Review
Genre and Mood
DNCE introduced themselves in 2015 with Cake By The Ocean, a song that wants nothing more than to make a room move. Wikipedia describes it as pop, dance and disco-pop inspired by the 1970s, with funk in its make-up. The mood is playful, upbeat and energetic, with a wink in the title itself.
Song Summary
The title was an accident. The Swedish producers Mattman & Robin, Mattias Larsson and Robin Fredriksson, kept confusing the phrase “sex on the beach” with “cake by the ocean”, and the band turned the mistake into the hook. The lyric is about desire, often read as a nod to the cocktail of the original phrase, and the original version is explicit enough that clean versions with altered wording were made. Joe Jonas wrote it with Justin Tranter and the two producers; Serban Ghenea mixed it.
Musical Breakdown
Billboard summed up the song as a pop-funk beat with scream-along hooks, and that is the frame to listen in: a groove at a tempo Wikipedia gives as 119 beats per minute, comfortable for dancing, and a chorus built around the title phrase. The song is written in E minor and Jonas’s part spans almost two octaves, from E3 to D5, which gives the hooks room to rise. The single runs three minutes and thirty-nine seconds; the official video runs longer, at a little over four minutes.
Concepts in Focus
Cake By The Ocean is built around a hook that is three ordinary words in an odd order. Because the phrase sounds almost like something you already know, it sticks; the producers’ mishearing became the most memorable thing in the song.
It is also a useful counterexample for the minor key. Minor keys are often linked with sadness, yet this party song is in E minor; tempo, groove and delivery decide the mood as much as the key does. Compare how Daft Punk – Get Lucky (Radio Edit) carried its own disco revival two years earlier.
Finally, the music video, directed by Black Coffee and Gigi Hadid and released in October 2015, takes the title literally: the band plays in front of a giant cake on a beach while a cake fight breaks out around them, with Josh Ostrovsky, known as The Fat Jewish, among the combatants.
Artistic Context
DNCE formed in Los Angeles in 2015 around Joe Jonas, with drummer Jack Lawless, guitarist JinJoo Lee and bassist and keyboardist Cole Whittle. Cake By The Ocean, released by Republic Records on 18 September 2015, was their debut single and the lead single of the EP Swaay, and it later appeared on their 2016 album DNCE.
Impact and Reception
The single climbed slowly: it entered the Billboard Hot 100 at number 79 and reached number 9 in its nineteenth week, spending 46 weeks on the chart. It reached number 4 in the UK, number 6 in Australia and Germany and number 7 in Canada, and it was certified five times platinum in the US. It won a Teen Choice Award, and Billboard put it among the best pop songs of 2016. The Guardian called it a frothy pop dream, which is exactly what it means to be.
