12 of pop culture’s best birthday moments

The Beatles’ “Birthday”

That’s right, one of the greatest bands of all time (don’t argue with us, just accept it) wrote a song about birthdays. Specifically, it is about your birthday.

Well, the listener’s birthday, to be a bit more specific … and the singer’s birthday, too!
It is, in fact, a pretty common alternative to just playing the standard birthday song, because it’s a lot more fun and driving thanks to the guitars everywhere. When compared to “Happy Birthday to You,” “Birthday” really only has a few more lyrics to learn, and as long as you repeat them, you’re good to go. (Even if you don’t know them all, just chime in with the “yeah, yeah”s! It’s perfectly fine.)

Now, whether or not you dance as The Beatles request you to is entirely up to you, but, well, “take a cha-cha-cha-chance!”

All in all, The Beatles as an album has some really great songs — “While My Guitar Gently Weeps,” anyone? — and then you get to this one. As linked above, Genius notes that “Birthday” basically was thrown together in the studio, and that’s what it sounds like: when your friends show up, completely excited about your birthday, not sure how they’re going to celebrate it beyond getting down and having a good time because it’s your birthday, their birthday, and possibly everyone’s birthday, and how fun is that?

Seriously: two of the three Genius annotations of this song are variants on “It’s time to party.” The third talks about “Happy Birthday to You” as a song.

-Cheryl Wassenaar, co-expert