Anyone who’s looked at a calendar today has definitely thought these two things: (1) Ah, it’s almost the autumnal equinox, when summer fades to fall, and (2) It’s the date from the song!The song is, obviously, Earth, Wind & Fire’s classic banger, “September,” which is named after the overall month, but specifically references the 21st day.
In case you need further reminding, here’s a viral tweet from television writer Demi Adejuyigbe. Pay close attention to the lyrics.
Adejuyigbe spoke with Select All for a few minutes about the significance of September 21, which is still something of a mystery.
So I assume this tweet has been blowing up again.
Yeah.
What’s the reaction been, generally?
The general reaction has just been a lot of people saying, like, “Oh, this is my favorite day of the year.” Or saying that they were happy — like they had sent a reminder to themselves to retweet it again this year, which is always funny to me. The new ones are the ones that I’m looking at and being like, “Oh, that’s nice.” People who didn’t see it last year and didn’t know about it and are just like, “Oh, what? What is this?”
Uh, what is it?
I have no idea how to even explain it. It’s just a video of me dancing to a weird mix of “September,” which I thought was funny.
What came first, the shirt, or the song?
The song came first. Last year, I was sitting in my room with my roommate, and I think I saw someone tweet about it being the 21st of September, and I was like, “Oh, holy shit, it is.” And I had an idea just to do that, and then I immediately was like, “Oh, okay. Can I find the a cappella on Google. Can I edit it quickly?” And I got that done quicker than I thought, and then went into my room to shoot a video of me dancing to it, and then was like, “Wait, how far can I take this.” And I remember I had stencils and blank shirts, so I stenciled that on the front of the shirt and on the back of the shirt, and just kind of went for it.
I have another video that I guess is a follow-up video to the September video. I took a behind-the-scenes video of me filming that from a different angle, and then I watched that and was like, “Oh, well, I don’t want to show anyone this.”
Have you ever put the song on at parties or in social settings and waited for people to figure it out?
No, I haven’t. But I should. A friend of mine had the idea to do that same thing with the part at the beginning of “All My Friends” that’s just piano. The LCD song. Just the idea of that continuing and never turning into the song, and seeing how long it would take people to be like, “Wait a minute.”
It always takes longer than you think it will.
It always does, and it’s really funny to me, just the idea of it. I think a lot of people have seen the video and don’t recognize that the audio is severely fucked up, so I’m sure some people will be like, “Wait, how long has that been like that.”
Have you heard from Earth, Wind & Fire about it?
No, I haven’t. And I can’t imagine that … I guess I don’t know what their reaction would be. I can’t imagine it would be entirely positive.
I’ve seen “September” appear in other contexts today. There’s a GIF set going around Tumblr, there’s a video of Spider-Man dancing to that song. It seems like “September” has taken on a life of its own a little bit.
I haven’t seen any of those, but, like, yeah. I guess this is a thing now that we do once a year.
What does September 21 mean to you?
Absolutely nothing. And hopefully it means even less in the coming years. I don’t know. I truly didn’t think about the song, or this day, in any sense other than, Oh, that was a funny thing that I did. And I get reminders of it every so often, of people just being like, “Oh my god, September 21 is gonna be great this year!
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