The song ‘Party in the U.S.A.’ celebrates making it in America
When Americans hear the Miley Cyrus song “Party in the U.S.A.,” I imagine they think of tailgating in American-flag-themed clothing while drinking from red Solo cups at the back of a truck on the Fourth of July. The song has secured its place in the American pop canon and now acts almost as an alternative American anthem, to be played at special moments of national triumph and pride. When Joe Biden was elected president in 2020, people blasted the song on the streets of major US cities. Yet for a transplant like me, every day is — for better or for worse — a party in the U.S.A.
If you listen closely to the lyrics, you hear in the song a story of intense outsiderhood. Each verse underscores feelings of alienation, even fear: “Welcome to the land of fame excess (woah). Am I gonna fit in? . . . My tummy’s turnin’ and I’m feelin’ kinda homesick,” Cyrus sings.
Although Cyrus is often perceived as the song’s narrator — the lyrics were tweaked to fit her storyline, with a nod to Nashville, the town she left for L.A. — the song was originally written together with, and for, a US transplant, the British singer Jessie J.
That foreignness shines through. “Party in the U.S.A.” captures in vivid terms the blind optimism it can take to survive — and stay sane — in immigrant America. There is emphasis on total surrender: “I got my hands up, they’re playing my song / I know I’m gonna be okay.” In what is a largely random immigration system, there is much that is out of an individual’s control.
I’m fascinated by the song’s staying power. “Party in the U.S.A.” was released in 2009. By last year, the song had hit 1 billion streams on Spotify. Over the same period, America’s reckonings with things like racial inequality, police brutality, and poverty have dominated the American discourse. “This can’t be the same USA Miley was partying in,” a recent tweet noted. It got nearly 200,000 likes on Twitter.
Yet the song continues to be played across the nation. Perhaps it is the foreignness, then, that makes “Party in the U.S.A.” so aptly American. In a nation of immigrants, the themes of arrival, survival, and belonging will always resonate.
I’ve lived in the States now for almost a decade. The years here have felt exhilarating — but also tenuous, like a house of cards that could collapse at any moment.
Added to my sometimes uncertain immigration status are more unknowns: haphazard freelance income and periods of no health insurance. There have been times when I have been really, really close to calling it quits. As Cyrus sings in the song, “Feel like hoppin’ on a flight / Back to my hometown tonight.” But then, as the lyrics say, “Something stops me every time.”
Because here’s the contradiction: “Party in the U.S.A.” also captures for me how euphoric it can be to live in this country. When the song comes on at gay bars in West Hollywood, I am reminded of the things that made me want to move here in the first place: the freedom to be queerer than I can be in my homeland, the opportunity to pursue my dreams (and maybe even make it big), and the pure exhilaration that it is to start a new life somewhere else, in a bigger city, where anything is possible. So, as the song says, I got my hands up, they’re playing my song, I know I’m gonna be OK.
Kalle Oskari Mattila is an essayist in Los Angeles. He has written for The New York Times, The Washington Post, and Vogue and has taught creative nonfiction writing at Columbia University. Learn more at www.kalleoskarimattila.com.