If you’ve ever rocked out to “Party Rock Anthem,” you can thank LMFAO. The party-rocking duo of Stefan Gordy, known by his stage name Redfoo, and his nephew Skyler Gordy, aka Sky Blu, are both relatives of Motown Records founder Berry Gordy, Redfoo being his son and Sky Blu his grandson.
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The family members joined forces musically in 2006 and became torchbearers of the EDM music scene in Los Angeles. After Redfoo’s friend will.i.am, hit songwriter, producer and member of the Black Eyed Peas, got ahold of their music, the duo was signed to will.i.am Music under the umbrella of Interscope Records. They soon started topping the charts with ear-catching hits in the mid-2000s.
Meaning Behind the Band Name
The duo was originally called Sexy Dudes, but after receiving a negative reaction from friends, they were on the hunt for a new moniker. Interestingly enough, it was Blu’s grandmother who inspired the name LMFAO.
“We were on instant messenger and we asked her, ‘What do you think of our new name, Sexy Dudes?'” Redfoo explains to NPR. “And she simply replied, ‘LMFAO. Are you serious?'”
Those four letters, which are an acronym for the phrase “laughing my fucking ass off,” got a family-friendly spin when the duo said it actually stands for “laughing my freaking ass off” in trademark documents. The Hollywood Reporter stated in 2012 that when they first applied for the trademark in 2008 with the name LMFAO that it was rejected, as the name “consists of or comprises immoral, deceptive or scandalous matter.”
Despite the rejection, Redfoo and Sky Blu carried on as LMFAO and became known around the world when they dropped “Party Rock Anthem” in 2011. Co-written by Redfoo, Sky Blu, David Listenbee and Peter Schroeder, “Party Rock Anthem” was released as the lead single off LMFAO’s sophomore album, Sorry For Party Rocking.
The song spent six weeks at No. 1 on the Billboard Hot 100 and charted in multiple countries, also hitting No. 1 in Canada, Australia and South Korea, to name a few. They followed “Party Rock” with singles “Champagne Showers” and “Sexy and I Know It,” the latter of which also became a No. 1 hit around the world and made them the first duo to have two No. 1 singles on the Hot 100 since OutKast did with “Hey Ya!” and “The Way You Move” in 2003 and 2004, respectively.
In 2012, they released their last single, “Sorry For Party Rocking,” and appeared with Madonna during her Halftime Show at the Super Bowl before going on an indefinite hiatus. “We’re not breaking up, I know that for sure,” Blu told MTV News at the time. “We’re family and stuff, so it’s always love.” The two cited the reason for the hiatus was to focus on their own creative pursuits as a way to help fuel what they do as LMFAO.
“We’ve been working as LMFAO for so long and we’ve been working on a lot of other projects as well,” Blu continued. “And so I feel like our creative paths, we need to kind of realize these projects we’ve been working on. It’ll free up our minds and stuff to be able to take on another LMFAO project because the next one we do it’s got to be [an] amazing crazy album and stuff like that.”
