"Just Dance" was Lady Gaga's first single, bringing us into her world where inhibitions and pants are purely optional. The song finds her getting drunk and disoriented at a nightclub - she tells herself to just dance, and everything will be OK.

Lady Gaga, Akon, and the song's producer, RedOne, teamed up to write "Just Dance." She was signed to Interscope Records, which teamed her with the pair. Akon had a lot of juice at the label thanks to his 2006 hits "I Wanna Love You" and "Smack That." RedOne was a rising star, having done remixes for Christina Aguilera and Shakira. Akon also sang backing vocals on the track and recorded a verse as a featured artist, but label entanglements forced him to lose the feature, so he had a singer named Colby O'Donis, who was signed to his KonLive label, do it instead. O'Donis and Akon previously teamed on the songs "What You Got" and "Beautiful." O'Donis faded from the spotlight soon after "Just Dance" was released.

Lady Gaga wrote "Just Dance" soon after flying from New York to Los Angeles to work on The Fame album. She knew she'd be in LA for a while, so she had a big farewell party before she left New York and was hungover when she arrived. She got right to work at Record Plant studios with RedOne and Akon, using the previous night's party and subsequent hangover as inspiration for the song. "I was taken very quickly out of my party lifestyle," she told HX Magazine. "I wrote it instantly - like it flew out of my body." In the same interview she said the meaning of the song is, "If you've ever been so high that it's, like, scary, the only way you can deal with it is not deal with it, so you just kind of dance through the intoxication."