"Empty Cups" is Charlie Puth's Magnum Opus
An ode to the greatest song of our time.
“Two words, nine letters. Say it and I’m yours.” -Not Blair Waldorf but me, re: “Empty Cups”
After weeks, months, and seemingly years of teasing new music on TikTok in an extremely cringey yet flustering fashion, Charlie Puth finally released an all-new single last week entitled “Light Switch,” the first piece of the puzzle that is his now-confirmed upcoming album, Charlie. Now that the TikTok macroinfluencer is finally answering my years-long prayer for a follow-up to his last full-length album, Voicenotes, and since recently adding my favorite Puth-made track and the subject of this post back into my daily repertoire thanks to a Harry Styles- and Shawn Mendes-induced meltdown with the group chat the other night, it’s finally time I speak my truth.
Yes, I stan Charlie Puth’s discography. Yes, I’m embarrassed to say that because Charlie Puth sometimes (most of the time) gives me a sense of secondhand embarrassment so deep it rattles my soul, brain, and body, and clouds my judgement and vision like I just scrubbed too much Farmacy Green Clean Makeup Meltaway Cleansing Balm over my eyes. And yes, I’m a firm believer that “Light Switch” is good, great even, but it’s no “Empty Cups” — or as I now refer to it, Mr. Charles Otto Puth Jr.’s1 magnum opus.
And it’s not just Puth’s magnum opus, the best-kept-yet-not-so-hidden-secret within his fairly large discography, the defining moment of his career. It’s also perhaps the greatest anthem about partying (not “party anthem,” that’s a different thing) to ever grace the public’s ears.
To summarize the objectively best track off of Puth’s 2018 album, Voicenotes, bluntly, it’s the kind of song that makes me want to put on a black Brandy Melville tube top and get mildly tipsy off of white Zinfadel and PBR in a humid frat basement and make googly eyes at the guy who always plays devil’s advocate in my Intro to Political Theory class until he walks up to me and asks me what grade I got on the last paper and then we make out in his shared double until his roommate interrupts us, then never speak to each other again and watch each other’s Instagram Stories until his dog almost attacks me in the park a year later and I finally decide to unfollow him.2 In short, it’s a song about parties and crushes and hence a very particular kind of nostalgic yearning that I’m always subconsciously yearning to feel again myself.
Say what you want about Charlie Puth, an alumnus of the other Berkeley (which is instead spelled the French way, like “Timothée Chalamet,” as “Berklee”), but the man knows how to make a good song. Maybe it’s the mentorship he received from thee most irritating (and forgotten) American Idol judge in the history of the reality singing competition program, Kara DioGuardi, maybe it’s his messy relationship history with Bella Thorne, or maybe it’s his particular “Charlie Puth Way” of creating music, which is now often showcased in frantically filmed and edited TikToks that feature several spliced clips of Puth playing various drum beats and guitar riffs into a glorified version of GarageBand and repeating and layering them over each other along with short vocal adlibs and harmonies until he makes objectively the best music there ever was. As of late, I’ve even noticed other renowned producers, like Seventeen’s short king Jihoon AKA Woozi, and this presumably five year-old boy, picking up on the “Charlie Puth Way” too:
Regardless of which facet of Puth’s musical background and methodology makes him so good at what he does, all roads have led us here, to the 21st-century masterpiece that is “Empty Cups.”
I distinctly remember when Voicenotes, and hence “Empty Cups” first came out. It was the end of my (mostly terrible) sophomore year of college, I had just turned 20, and my mom and sister were helping me move out of my three bedroom, one bath apartment located a mile from campus that was shared between six people and ended in perhaps the most drama I’ve ever endured in my entire life. Like for Hunter Harris, “Empty Cups,” one of the hornée-est pieces of music ever written, became my emotional support song, and I insisted we listen to it at least 20 times over the course of the six-hour drive back home from school.
Junior year then quickly rolled around, I met Elena (<3) during our sorority’s pre-rush hell week (lol), and I also started going to more parties and having what I’d like to think was a real social life. Since mid-May of 2018, I had never quite shaken “Empty Cups” out of my system, but now that I was “living” the “Empty Cups” experience, it was pretty much the only thing I insisted on listening to until I received my 2018 Spotify Wrapped and realized it was quite literally the only thing I clicked on every time I opened the Spotify app for upwards of six months.
Sure, you have “Attention.” You also have “Slow It Down,” which very well could be the sequel to the events that take place in the “Empty Cups” cinematic universe. But what makes “Empty Cups” so good, besides the clear implementation of the CPW (“Charlie Puth Way”) is its lyrics and the way in which they’re sung, an emulation of Puth’s own sexually-charged, Licorice Pizza-type yearnings. While I could dissect the song’s lyrics word by word, line by line, like I had to do with my Helen Vendler poetry packets in my AP English class, I won’t, but a few sections in particular are worth pointing out.
First, there’s the opening verse:
Oh, the way that you dance on me makes me not wanna leave
You wanna go upstairs but you don't wanna sleep
Oh, right now we're in a rhythm
Your boyfriend's no competition
Turn off your phone and blame it on your battery
Right off the bat, Puth paints a vivid picture of the song’s setting. It’s giving dark, dingy frat house. It’s giving themed party that no one actually dressed up for. It’s giving 11pm on a Friday night after a long day of classes and a botched pop quiz. It’s giving “I hope so-and-so is here” and then voilà, you see them the moment you walk through those hefty wooden doors. Puth/my imaginary crush is on the ground floor of the establishment, and the girl (me), not him, wants to take the lead and “show him the roof.” She has a boyfriend (unlike me), but Puth/my imaginary crush doesn’t seem to care (the drama!).
Now that frat boy Charles has set the time, place, and mood of “Empty Cups,” he slyly yet still semi-earnestly takes us “upstairs” and into the pre-chorus (“Oh-oh-oh-oh, we’re getting real, real close/Oh-oh-oh-oh, can’t let this moment go”), which brings up the tension until the release that happens at the chorus:
Hands on your body like there's no one at the party
Just me and you and these empty cups
If you wanna like I wanna
Let me take you to another room
So it's only us
Turn that television up so nobody can listen
Hands on your body like there's no one at the party
Just me and you and these empty cups
I’ve likely listened to this song over 500 times, and there’s nothing about this chorus, the chorus of all choruses, that doesn’t make me go absolutely feral every single time I hear it. Crush or no crush, in college or not in college, I’m instantly transported to this other room where the television is turned up so nobody can listen, where there’s nothing but me and you and these empty cups. It’s the harmonies! It’s the juvenile romanticization of single-use plastics! It’s the palpable image of empty, red Solo cups filled with remnants of Vitali and Sprite and boxed red wine and germs and probably STDs! It’s the hands on your body like there’s no one at the party and the if you wanna like I wanna! It’s every fleeting feeling packaged into one excessively tangible 4D experience.
While I could and would’ve if I had the opportunity to write a 10-page paper on the mood, tone, word choice, atmosphere, and every other literary element of this song, as I sit here on this Saturday afternoon typing this out on my laptop while listening to “Empty Cups” on repeat and allowing myself to once again surrender my soul to the Charlie Puth musical industrial complex, I instead leave you with the wise words of Hunter Harris, the president of the “Empty Cups” fanclub herself:
Yes, this is Charlie Puth’s real, full-name. Yes, I am a Charles Otto Puth Jr. historian.
He, however, still follows me. No, we never made out!