--- title: I Like to Party type: song cssclasses: ["type-song"] status: published confidence: mixed source_basis: ["released music", "public interviews", "public posts", "official videos"] --- # I Like to Party > **One-line reading.** An exuberant party anthem about people who never leave the house — they "stay in and pretend that we're in the club" — staged as an attention-force operating a crowd, and interrupted at the very end by a competing broadcast, *the kingdom is within you*, which the program cuts off mid-word. > [!info] Album & credits > **Album:** *33* (2022, Big Loud Rock) — **track 4 of 10** · 2:57 · the album's most-streamed song > **First release:** standalone single, July 23 2021 (Strange Theory) > **Written by** Roy English & Matt Pauling · **Produced by** Matt Pauling (sole — Roy is *not* a listed producer here, one of only two such *33* tracks, with [[Down to You]]) > **Music video:** dir. Kyle Vorbach, released August 6 2021 > **Full lyrics:** [Genius](https://genius.com) · streaming > **▶ Listen:** [Official video (YouTube)](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8pTaZLA1QVA) ## At a glance - **Era / release** — *33* single era; out as a standalone single in **2021**, then track 4 on the **2022** album. (Some early pages mis-dated the video to 2022 — it's 2021.) - **In one line** — a clap-along banger whose actual subject is that nobody leaves the house, and whose one moment of real awakening gets interrupted by a fake news bulletin. - **Who speaks** — a herding narrator best read as [[Roy]] fronting the attention-force introduced one track earlier; the crowd answers in ad-libs; in the bridge a **Devil** and a **People** wake up at the same time. - **Key symbols** — the [[Concepts/Consumption|cake]] · the [[The Mask|mask]] · the [[Concepts/The Circus|circus]] and "in circles" · [[Concepts/Machine vs Human|Tell-A-Vision]] · the broadcast interrupt. The joke lands before anything else does. This is a hype track — *"let's see you clap them hands!"* — and its confession is that the party is people staying home pretending: *"we don't go outside / we stay in and pretend that we're in the club."* The party **is** the not-partying. Play it straight and it's the great ironic lockdown banger of the *33* record; listen once more and the host turns out to own the room. ## The song, mapped *I Like to Party* is a call-and-response dance-pop track built to loop. It opens on an MC hailing a crowd, runs a contradiction-hook four times, threads two clusters of media-and-isolation imagery, pivots into a doctrinal bridge — and then that bridge gets cut off mid-word by a broadcast interrupt that hard-returns to the chorus. The form doesn't decorate the argument; it *performs* it. Following the track's own shape: | Section | In the song | What the beat does | |---|---|---| | **MC hail** | *"Let's see you clap them hands!"* | The officiant addresses a crowd before the song "starts." Live-MC framing on everything that follows. | | **Hook** (×4) | *"I like to party with all of my friends / But we don't go outside / We stay in and pretend that we're in the club"* | The contradiction that anchors the whole thing: celebration staged as withdrawal. Connection *felt without connecting.* | | **Verse A — the pitch** | *"A new direction / Affecting the state of your mind"* → *"Give me attention, attention / The people are mine"* | The host names his offer (alter your mind) and his claim (I own the crowd). The "in circles… like chickens with no head" image lands here, with the chickens/Dickens pun (see the note below). | | **Count-off** (×2) | *"So one, two, three, four, follow me / To the beat of my drum / Sing along with me… Lock up your door / Get on the floor"* | The Pied-Piper module. The counting and call-and-response don't *describe* herding — they **enact** it. | | **Verse B — isolation + manufacture** | *"All I wanna do is zoomy-zoomy, zoom-zoom / So I zoom everyday"* → *"Television on the news / Devil's Food is a cake… We don't want 'em awake / Bake a truth with a lie / Then we sell 'em the cake"* | Lockdown malaise rendered as baby-talk, then the spectacle named as a **manufactured product**: pure lies won't sell, so you bake truth in. | | **Bridge** — the turn | *"Devil waking up to claim the kingdom / People waking up to claim what's in them / Heaven is within your heart / The kingdom, you're the kingdom… (Hallelujah)"* | The argument's pivot: **two opposite awakenings at once**, resolving toward inner sovereignty and escalating toward *"You're the King—"* | | **The interrupt** — the key event | *"You're the King—" / "We interrupt our program to bring you this important message"* | The inner awakening is severed **mid-word** and the broadcast slams back to the chorus. The distraction-system reasserts and gets the last word. | | **Outro** | *"(I like to party)" / "(we stay in)" / "(Let's see it! Let's see it!)"* → *"Let's see you clap them hands!"* | Dissolves back into the crowd-hail it opened on. The loop closes; the capture repeats. | **The argument in five moves:** (1) an invitation to a party that is actually isolation → (2) the host revealed as an attention-owner running the crowd → (3) the distraction shown to be a manufactured product, truth folded into the lie so it sells → (4) the counter-truth briefly surfaces — *the kingdom is within you* → (5) the broadcast cuts that truth off mid-word and loops back to the hook. The form is a machine for capture: **the awakening is never allowed to finish.** ## What it means A few claims that cut across the whole track: - **The hook is a contradiction, and the contradiction is the thesis.** Enthusiasm for partying, welded to *"we don't go outside."* The gathering is simulated and indoors; the clap-along *form* is itself the deception, selling the togetherness the words say isn't real. Everything else in the song is that gap widened. - **The narrator commands and owns.** *"Follow me," "sing along with me," "lock up your door," "get on the floor,"* counted *"one, two, three, four,"* and the tell: *"give me attention, attention / the people are mine."* He offers *"a new direction / affecting the state of your mind"* — the pitch of someone selling you an altered state, not a night out. Read against the previous track, this is the same acquisitive first-person **operating a crowd** (see [[#The attention-force, operating]] below). - **The distraction is a product, and the target is the system.** *"Bake a truth with a lie / then we sell 'em the cake"* is a recipe: pure falsehood gets rejected, so truth is baked in to make it go down. The critique isn't aimed at gullible individuals — it's aimed at the information **machine** that manufactures the sweet lie. *"We don't want 'em awake"* says the quiet part. - **The bridge stages two awakenings — and the wrong one wins the airtime.** *"Devil waking up to claim the kingdom"* vs *"People waking up to claim what's in them"*: one wakes to **seize** the kingdom as external possession, the other to **reclaim** it as interior inheritance. The song briefly hands the mic to inner sovereignty (*"Heaven is within your heart / you're the kingdom"*) — and then the broadcast interrupt severs it mid-word and returns to the chorus. It is **interrupted, not resolved.** That's the whole move. - **It also just works as a stay-home banger.** None of the metaphysics is *declared* by the lyric. It reads perfectly well as a straight, ironic Zoom-era party song, and the bridge can be heard as a tonal gear-shift rather than a doctrine. The attention-force and kingdom-within layer is the deeper interpretation, not something the song asserts — and the band cheerfully tours it as a banger (*"Dubai likes to party"*). Both readings are true at once; that doubleness is the point, not a problem to solve. ### The attention-force, operating *I Like to Party* sits directly after [[Pay Attention (feat. little luna)]], where a first-person power demands your awareness and Roy plays that force. Here, one track later, shared co-writer and all, that same acquisitive "I" is shown **running a crowd** — *"the people are mine"* is the casting note. It's a strong reading rather than a stated fact (Roy hasn't named them one character), but the anchors stack: adjacency, shared authorship, the lexical echo, and the matching first-person owner. This is the cleanest place in the catalogue to watch the attention-economy villain not just announced but *at work.* The mechanics are the **Pied Piper's**: *"one, two, three, four, follow me / to the beat of my drum / sing along with me."* A following led away by an irresistible beat, synchronized into motion instead of invited to think. And it reads as **secular ritual** — clapping, chanting, counting, call-and-response, the whole texture of a ceremony — right up until the officiant names himself. Entertainment as liturgy, with a congregation that repeats and follows. ### Lucius-coded, not Lucius-voiced The song dramatizes the exact mechanism [[Sir Lucius]] later personifies — spectacle as containment, false sweetness, media seduction, awakening-language converted to content — years **before** Lucius is named or credited. This is the catalogue's cleanest example of *Lucius-inspired-but-not-voiced*: Roy is the **object** here (the one being fed the cake in the video), not the speaker, which is precisely what separates it from the songs Lucius actually sings. The 2021 title card even names him by function — *"Devil waking up to claim the kingdom"* — a full two years before the 2023 dream-origin and four before Lucius's first co-credit (*Not Your Homie*, 2025). He was on the song before he had a name. ## Characters - **[[Roy]]** — voices the herding narrator, the attention-force shown running the crowd. In the **video** he's also the one being force-fed cake and ringed by masks: both the operator of the spectacle and its victim/object. The party is happening *to* him as much as *through* him. - **[[Sir Lucius]]** — not present by name or voice, but his operating signature is everywhere (see above). The clearest pre-name rendering of the figure in the whole catalogue. - **[[The Crowd]]** — the faceless followers, *"the people are mine."* In the video they're a ring of blank grey masks, which Roy's own pinned comment names *"a beautiful group of mind/body/spirit complexes"* (a Law-of-One term). See also the [[Concepts/The Audience|Audience]] as spectacle-participant. - **The Devil** — named in the bridge as one of two waking parties (*"Devil waking up to claim the kingdom"*): the external usurper competing with the inner-sovereignty awakening. - **The jeweled hand** *(video only, off-screen)* — the ringed hand that force-feeds the cake, read as the industry. Whose hand it is stays an open question — self-inflicted, industry-inflicted, or Lucius-inflicted — but its coming from *off-screen* makes the force external. ## Artifacts **CAUTION, ALL KINGS END** · `CAKE` — The unlock code CAKE lands directly on the song's confirmed lyric cluster "Devil's Food is a cake / Cake, cake, cake, cake!... Bake a truth with a lie / Then we sell 'em the cake," and the same song ends its… → [[Artifacts - Concept Images and Emblems|analysis]] · [gallery ↗](https://mirrors.jagwartwin.com/gallery) <a href="https://storage.googleapis.com/jagwar-twin-33.appspot.com/artifacts/0x29c72dbd4ba375457faa384e87e584f5362540b5b955121f4c43e2513739729d..jpg"><img src="https://storage.googleapis.com/jagwar-twin-33.appspot.com/artifacts/0x29c72dbd4ba375457faa384e87e584f5362540b5b955121f4c43e2513739729d..jpg" width="200"></a> ## Symbols - **[[Concepts/Consumption|The cake / Devil's Food]]** — the manufactured sweet-lie sold to a sleeping crowd (*"bake a truth with a lie / then we sell 'em the cake"*); rendered literal as force-feeding in the video and as the Saturn-cake cover art. The anchor of the "cake before the circus" consumption reading (and the real-world 2022 "cake party" NFT campaign — see Source notes). - **[[The Mask]]** — the grey-masked congregation in the video; an early instance of the Mask/Circus iconography later billed as Lucius. - **[[Concepts/The Circus]] / "in circles"** — spectacle as a participatory control system; the circle run *outward* as dissipation rather than [[The Circle|inward return]]. *"Clap them hands"* is the audience cued on command. - **[[Concepts/Machine vs Human|Television / Tell-A-Vision]]** — the broadcast that *tells you a vision*. Grounded as intentional band language by the official **Tell-A-Vision Tee** (a vintage TV with a woman's face reading TELL-A-VISION). The sedation-engine turned into an icon. - **The door** — *"lock up your door"*: isolation and withdrawal, the container/threshold sealed rather than opened. - **The drum** — *"to the beat of my drum"*: the Piper's rhythm as allegiance (see the Advanced reading on whose drum you move to). - **The crown / kingdom** — *"you're the kingdom / you're the King"*: inner sovereignty, the thing the interrupt cuts off. Echoes *33*'s "reclaim your crown" campaign language. - **The broadcast interrupt** — *"we interrupt our program"* as the spectacle-machine's signature move: overriding the awakening and looping back to content. ## Connected songs - **[[Pay Attention (feat. little luna)]]** — track 3, directly before; the strongest grounded connection. The attention-force is introduced there (Roy = Attention) and shown *operating a crowd* here; shared authorship, and *"the people are mine"* echoes its acquisitive "I." - **[[Online]]** — the closest satire kin: mediated identity and digital existence, the album's named-surveillance track. - **[[Happy Face]]** — performance replacing authenticity; the mask paired with this track, both dark/moody with "creepy" videos. (Lucius later claims *Happy Face* by name.) - **[[The Circle]]** — the inward **return** the crowd's outward "circles" parody; communion vs mob, the album closer. - **[[Welcome to the Circus]]** — names in lyric (*"I'll chew you up, spit you out"*) the consumption mechanism this video staged years earlier; *"take your seat, scream and shout"* is the commanded-echo kin to the Pied-Piper *"sing along."* - **[[Bad Feeling (Oompa Loompa)]]** — the cross-album twin. This song is *almost a recipe* for it: *"we don't want 'em awake / bake a truth with a lie / then we sell 'em the cake"* — same operation, sweet-lie sold to a sleeping crowd (Devil's-Food cake here, candy there). - **[[Down to You]]** — the inward correction (track 7): names and *refuses* the exact fame/money false gods this cluster peddles. This song sells the cake; *Down to You* answers *"one cannot live on bread alone."* (Also Pauling-alone production, like this track.) - **[[Superhuman (Interlude)]]** — the 2018 source of the Chaplin *"kingdom of God is within man"* sample this song re-voices as Roy's own lyric. - **[[Bananas]]** — the sedated, regressed crowd, cross-album (the id running the body while consciousness lags). - **[[The Watchers]]** — *"the whole place is dancing"* is the same faceless congregation, cross-album. - **[[Good Day]]** — proto-version (STF, 2018): consumption-as-anesthetic, hedonic compensation. - **[[Not Your Homie]]** — sibling in the "commanded/harvested echo" device family; a circle-chant weaponized. ## The comedy (and why it's load-bearing) The band leans into the bit, and the bit *is* the insight. *"All I wanna do is zoomy-zoomy, zoom-zoom / so I zoom everyday"* is lockdown malaise as a nursery rhyme. *"Cake, cake, cake, cake!"* collapses the entire bread-and-circuses critique into a gleeful sugar-rush ad-lib. The real merch promo code was *"Beanie4menie"* (a beanie for me, knee). In 2022 Roy tweeted, deadpan, *"What is a party?"* and *"It's not a party without cake"* while literally throwing a cake party to auction off an AI upload of his own consciousness. Later captions ran the song as a straight tour anthem — *"Dubai likes to party," "Do you like to party?"* — cheerfully oblivious, on the surface, to its own satire. That dual register — pop-friendly affect (clapping, *"yah, we're in the club"*) laid over genuinely dark content (loss of identity, force-fed cake, *"we don't want 'em awake"*) — is the same ironic mechanism that later produces *"great time to be human"* and *"welcome to the circus."* The sweetness is the delivery system for the horror. That's not a tonal accident; it's the thesis wearing a party hat. > [!note]- The chickens/Dickens joke, and the tale that was told > *"Running around like chickens with no head… / Looking like Charles Dickens / I mean dead, the tale was told."* It's a groaner pun first — **chickens/Dickens**, and "the dickens" as slang for the devil/for nothing — played for the wince and then abandoned. There's a faint after-image: *"the tale was told"* brushes *Macbeth*'s "a tale told by an idiot… signifying nothing" (empty spectacle), and Dickens's own most famous opening (*"it was the best of times, it was the worst of times"*) is the great duality sentence. But the honest verdict is that this is a **curio, not a keystone** — the rhyme came first, the resonance is decorative, and it shouldn't be built into anything load-bearing. ## Advanced reading > [!note]- The broadcast war — three signals fighting for the listener > The bridge and interrupt stage a three-way fight over **who authors reality**: > 1. **Tell-A-Vision sedation** — the system, *"we don't want 'em awake," "bake a truth with a lie."* > 2. **The kingdom-within awakening** — *"People waking up to claim what's in them,"* inner sovereignty. > 3. **The "we interrupt our program" counter-broadcast** — carrying Chaplin's borrowed humanist words into the feed. > > The catch: the interrupt **cuts the awakening off mid-word** and returns to the chorus. The counter-broadcast breaks in, but the program still wins the airtime. The song is honest about which signal is loudest. > [!note]- The Chaplin relay, re-voiced (not sampled) > The bridge's *"kingdom within"* isn't only Luke 17:21 — it borrows the **words of Chaplin's *Great Dictator* speech** (*"the kingdom of God is within man"*), the transmission Jagwar Twin sampled verbatim back on [[Superhuman (Interlude)]] (2018). Here it's **re-voiced as Roy's own lyric, not a clip** — a humanist transmission inherited and carried forward into the *33* media-machine (the [[Concepts/Machine vs Human]] arc, an [[Concepts/Inherited Substrate|inherited-substrate]] relay at the level of the line itself). So *"we interrupt our program"* is, in spirit, the **Chaplin counter-broadcast** breaking into the Tell-A-Vision feed — even as the feed silences it. > [!note]- The esoteric frame — Cave, Gnostic awakening, the kingdom within > Several traditions rhyme with the song, held as correspondence rather than claimed method: > - **Plato's Cave** — watching representations indoors while believing yourself fully present. > - **[[Concepts/The Circus#Where it comes from (bread and circuses)|Bread and circuses]] / "let them eat cake"** — spectacle plus confection as population-pacifier, the classical critique made literal in dessert. Marie-Antoinette sits underneath the Devil's-Food. > - **[[Concepts/The Sacred Truths/Gnosticism - The World as Trap|Gnostic awakening]]** — *"we don't want 'em awake"* vs *"claim what's in them"* = waking from illusion into remembrance, sharpened by the **Devil's** competing awakening. (Guard: the grounded floor is only Roy's public "society is fake, be yourself" posture; the specifically-Gnostic apparatus is a learned overlay on a plainer sentiment.) > - **The kingdom within / [[Kabbalah - The Tree of Life|Malkhut]]** — *"Heaven is within your heart / you're the kingdom"* locates authority in the person, not the institution or broadcast (Luke 17:21; the Kabbalistic Malkhut). The song's axis is external programming vs internal sovereignty. > [!note]- "In circles" — the Circle run outward > The distracted crowd moves *"in circles"* like headless chickens. Against the catalogue's central [[The Circle|Circle]] — the inward *return* — this is the circle run as **spectacle and dissipation**, recursion pointed outward rather than back home: the [[Concepts/The Circus|Circus]] as the Circle inverted. (Leap flagged: "in circles" is idiomatic for futility on its own; the Circle-architecture tie is the reader's frame, not the lyric's.) > [!note]- Whose drum you move to = whose creature you are > The Piper's *"to the beat of my drum… follow me"* (2021) sits between two other drums in the catalogue: a **true drum** — *"I can hear your heart, it beats"* (*Move To You*, 2018) — and an inherited **dread-drum** — *"coming like a drum from 1981"* (*All My Friends*, 2023). The point isn't that the word "drum" recurs (the cheap version); it's that **rhythm is allegiance**: the heart's beat, the Piper's beat, the dread-beat are three masters, and which one you move to is which one owns you. A framework reading of an allegiance motif, not a claimed authorial through-line. > [!note]- The video as the "cake before the Circus" > The 2021 video (dir. Kyle Vorbach) is the clearest **pre-naming** visual of the consumption mechanism: Roy is force-fed cake by an off-screen jeweled hand, escalating to cake smeared over his face and torso, while a ring of blank grey masks looks on. Four years before *Welcome to the Circus* names *"I'll chew you up, spit you out,"* the visual catalogue already shows Roy as the thing **being eaten**. The reading: cake = algorithm-friendly content; jeweled hand = the industry; Roy = what gets stuffed in and pulled out. And the **cover art** doubles it — a cake-slice plated as **Saturn/Cronus the devourer**, ringed by skulls and cherubs (Consumption plus memento mori: *"the party that eats you"*), under the tagline *"A new direction affecting the state of your mind."* ## Lyrics ``` Let's see you clap them hands! Let's see you I like to party with all of my friends But we don't go outside We stay in and pretend that we're in the club (Let's see you clap them hands!) Yah, we're in the club (Let's see you) A new direction Affecting the state of your mind Give me attention, attention The people are mine Running around like chickens with no head In circles, they go Looking like Charles Dickens I mean dead, the tale was told So one, two, three, four, follow me To the beat of my drum Sing along with me Yah, one, two, three, four, follow me Lock up your door Get on the floor I like to party with all of my friends But we don't go outside We stay in and pretend that we're in the club (Let's see you clap them hands!) Yah, we're in the club (Let's see you) I like to party with all of my friends But we don't go outside We stay in and pretend that we're in the club (Let's see you clap them hands!) Yah, we're in the club (Let's see you) All I wanna do is zoomy-zoomy, zoom-zoom So I zoom everyday Everyday, everyday Television on the news Devil's Food is a cake Cake, cake, cake, cake! We don't want 'em awake Bake a truth with a lie Then we sell 'em the cake So one, two, three, four, follow me To the beat of my drum Sing along with me Yah, one, two, three, four, follow me Lock up your door! Get on the floor! I like to party with all of my friends But we don't go outside We stay in and pretend that we're in the club (Let's see you clap them hands!) Yah, we're in the club (Let's see you) I like to party with all of my friends But we don't go outside We stay in and pretend that we're in the club (Let's see you clap them hands!) Yah, we're in the club (Let's see you) All I wanna do is zoomy-zoomy, zoom-zoom Devil waking up to claim the kingdom People waking up to claim what's in them Heaven is within your heart The kingdom, you're the kingdom You're the kingdom (Hallelujah) Heaven is within your heart The kingdom, you're the kingdom You're the King We interrupt our program to bring you this important message I like to party with all of my friends But we don't go outside We stay in, and pretend that we're in the club (Let's see you clap them hands!) Yah, we're in the club (Let's see it! Let's see it!) I like to party with all of my friends (I like to party) But we don't go outside We stay in and pretend that we're in the club (we stay in) (Let's see you clap your hands) Yah, we're in the club! Let's see you clap them hands! ``` ## Source notes - **Grounded (released music, the video, official posts and merch).** The lyric structure and every quoted line (Spotify-verified). The credits: *33* track 4, single first released July 23 2021, Roy English + Matt Pauling writing, **Pauling sole producer**. The **official video** and its description — *"this party may be dangerous and could result in… loss of identity, the creation of a self created hell, etc. Bring your friends; Let's party!"* — the artist framing his own lyric as identity-dissolution staged as fun. Roy's pinned comment naming the masked ring *"a beautiful group of mind/body/spirit complexes."* The **Tell-A-Vision Tee** grounding the *tell-a-vision* pun as intentional band language. The **2021 manifesto card** (the "official audio" title card: *"PRESENTED BY JAGWAR TWIN," "LET'S SEE YOU CLAP THEM HANDS!,"* a praying-hands/cross/JT sigil-triad, and a micro-manifesto quoting the bridge — the second of the early [[Concepts/The Manifesto Cards|Manifesto Cards]]). The **Saturn-cake cover art.** The **2022 "cake party" campaign**, in which Roy auctioned his first-ever 1/1 music NFT of this song to launch a public "upload of my consciousness to AI" (tweets incl. *"If this works we are going to party tomorrow!!," "It's not a party without cake," "What is a party?"* — the [[Concepts/The Upload|upload]] persona was the public face of that stunt). The reused TikTok captions over the song's sound (*"we stay in and pretend," "Follow me tho #influencer," "Do you like to party?," "Dubai likes to party"*). - **Strong readings.** The narrator as the *Pay Attention* attention-force operating a crowd; the Pied-Piper structure; mass culture as secular ritual; the broadcast war; the Chaplin relay re-voiced; "Lucius-coded, not Lucius-voiced"; the video as the "cake before the Circus." Grounded in the material, but interpretive — held as such. - **Framework (esoteric, correspondence — not authorial intent).** Plato's Cave, the specifically-Gnostic awakening apparatus, Malkhut / the kingdom-within mapping, "in circles" as the Circle inverted, the drum-as-allegiance motif. The system *permits* these; it doesn't claim Roy intends them. - **How we'd be wrong.** If the plain "society is fake, stay yourself, the media sedates you" reading accounts for the song as fully as the attention-force/kingdom-within apparatus does, the apparatus is decorative. The counterargument is kept live on purpose: this works, start to finish, as a straight ironic stay-home party banger with no metaphysics at all. - **A note on dates.** The single is 2021, the album track is 2022 — worth stating cleanly, since a couple of pages once mis-dated the video to 2022. ## Read next - [[Pay Attention (feat. little luna)]] — the attention-force, introduced; this song shows it at work. - [[Welcome to the Circus]] — the consumption mechanism, finally named in lyric. - [[Bad Feeling (Oompa Loompa)]] — the cross-album twin; almost the same recipe. - [[Down to You]] — the inward correction that refuses the false gods this song sells. - [[Sir Lucius]] — the figure this song codes without naming. - [[Concepts/Consumption]] — the cake, the mouth, the thing that eats you.