“Long ago, in ancient times, the world didn’t have Uber Eats. This stressful period was known as… 2013”
Back in the early 2010s, everybody was shuffling. LMFAO’s Party Rock Anthem rose to the top of the charts in Australia and around the world for months. Redfoo says Australia can take the credit, or the blame, for the dance that helped turn Party Rock Anthem into a global earworm.
“The shuffling is kind of an Australian-born dance,” he told news.com.au after filming. “I was seeing a dance in the rave culture, and I pulled up a YouTube search, and I saw these people from Melbourne doing the Melbourne Shuffle.”
That clip, featuring viral dancers Pae and Sarah, was already a couple of years old when LMFAO were making the song. It hadn’t broken out of the underground. It still stuck.
“It captured me because it has the Charleston, it has the Running Man, and then Australia invented the T-step, that sideways move,” he said. “That bit that is like a horn lick on the track reminded me of the dance I’d seen these kids doing at raves. And the line ‘Every day I’m shuffling’ was born by my friend Goon Rock, who was like, ‘What is the name of this dance?’”
The track also featured Redfoo’s nephew and bandmate Sky Blu, rapper GoonRock and the late GRL singer Lauren Bennett.
More than a decade later, frontman Redfoo is leaning into both the celebration and the cringe.
He’s rebooting the shuffle flash mob for Uber Eats’ latest celebrity campaign and dragging the country back to 2013 with him. The ad is a nostalgic trip to the era “before Uber Eats,” when getting dinner still meant going to the shops. Aussie pop star Troye Sivan co-stars as a baffled supermarket checkout operator. In a time before cabbage became a fine-dining staple, when it was still mostly the pale stuff in coleslaw, Sivan holds a half cabbage aloft and requests a “price check on green half-round vegetable.” A queue snakes down the aisles. Then the shoppers have to pass through a Redfoo flash mob. They are not delighted.
The campaign was filmed in Penrith, where the wild-haired pop star once again sent a street full of people sideway
LMFAO called time in 2012 after another smash, Sexy and I Know It, and a cameo in Madonna’s Super Bowl halftime show. Redfoo kept his profile up in Australia as an X Factor judge in 2013 and 2014 and with solo singles including Let’s Get Ridiculous and New Thang. A dedicated tennis tragic, he stayed in the headlines while accompanying then-girlfrien Victoria Azarenka to her matches and even made an effort to qualify for the 2013 US Open as a wildcard. He lost in the first match of his first tournament.
Then he largely disappeared from view.
He says the reason was a change in how he wanted to live. He quit drinking about 10 years ago, later met partner Jasmine Alkouri, and now has two daughters, aged three and 19 months.
“I was having so much fun, globetrotting around. That was the dream: just be at hotels and party and all this stuff,” he said. “I haven’t had a drink of alcohol for about 10 years, and in that transition, the toughest part was I would go to the clubs and just be drinking my water bottle and enjoying the music and dancing and shuffling, and people would expect me to do shots.
“I had to tell them, ‘Hey, I’m not partaking anymore.’ And they were just upset. So that was weird.”
The party-starter of the 2010s now talks like a dad with a calendar:
“Now I’m a family man. I met my soulmate Jasmine and we have two daughters, and now I’m back. There’s no pressure to party and stay out late. Now we got tennis Tuesdays. I’m teaching the kids.”
The new spot puts Redfoo and Sivan in a long line of Australian Uber Eats celebrity pairings. Previous campaigns have featured Kim Kardashian and Kath & Kim’s Sharon Strzelecki in 2019, the Irwins and Paris Hilton with her chihuahuas in 2020, and Cher’s time-travelling turn last year
This time, the joke is simpler: remember how much harder dinner used to be? Remember the shuffle? And remember when a half cabbage could stop a supermarket cold?
What are some other nostalgic trends you think Uber should play on?
