Songfacts®:

• "Are You Gonna Be My Girl" was the first single for the Australian band Jet, and also their biggest hit. It was one of the first songs used in a series of popular iPod commercials where a black shadow of a person listens to a white iPod while dancing to a tune in front of colorful backgrounds. These ads helped boost sales of iPods and also gave the songs featured in the ads lots of exposure; many of us discovered Jet because "Are You Gonna Be My Girl" was in an iPod ad. (The iPhone wasn't released until 2007, so iPods were a great way to get portable, digital music in 2003.)
  
  Other songs to feature in these commercials include "Hey Mama" by The Black Eyed Peas, "Rock Star" by N.E.R.D, and "Vertigo" by U2.
• Jet was part of a rock and roll revival of the early '00s that included bands like The Strokes, The White Stripes, and their fellow Aussies The Vines. Some called it "garage rock," others saw it as a new spin on classic rock from the '70s.
  
  Musically, "Are You Gonna Be My Girl" sounds similar to the 1977 Iggy Pop song "Lust For Life," which many critics pointed out.
• Nick Cester, frontman of Jet, shared with The Guardian the backstory behind "Are You Gonna Be My Girl." He explained that much of the band's early material, including their debut album, Get Born, was written in a little shed in his backyard where he would strum his acoustic guitar and bring the raw ideas to the band to refine.
  
  The spark for "Are You Gonna Be My Girl" came when The Strokes released "Last Nite." Cester was inspired by how their rock sound was something you could also dance to, with a rhythm reminiscent of Motown classics like "You Can't Hurry Love." He also cited The Who's "My Generation" as an influence, particularly its stop-start energy, which fascinated him at the time.
  
  The song first came to life in a small live setting, where Cester performed it with no real lyrics, just mumbling gibberish that sounded like words. Fortunately, the venue's terrible sound system helped him pull it off.
  
  Initially, the lyrics had a much more negative vibe, drawn from a rough night out when he found himself walking home alone. At one point, the line went, "She's just like every other girl." When Cester showed this to the band, their feedback was simple: "Dude, that's so negative. How about, 'Are you gonna be my girl?'" Cester took the suggestion, went home, and rewrote the lyrics in under a minute. The simplicity of the song, he said, is what makes it powerful. "It's very direct in its delivery. There are no tricks."
• "Are You Gonna Be My Girl" was a hit twice in the UK. In 2003 it reached #23 on the singles chart, and the following year it was re-released after being featured in the Vodaphone picture messaging TV ads, this time rising to #16.
• The song was released in August 2003, and Jet performed it on Saturday Night Live that December, but the song didn't dent the charts in America until April 2004 when it was used in the iPod commercial. The Get Born album ended up selling over a million copies in that country, and Jet made the chart with subsequent singles from the album, "Look What You've Done" and "Cold Hard Bitch." Their next album, Shine On in 2006, didn't do nearly as well, and in 2012 they called it quits. Jet got back on the runway in 2017 to serve as Bruce Springsteen's opening act on his Australian tour, and in 2023 they embarked on the 20 Years of Get Born tour.
• The music video, which is in black and white, shows the band performing against a white background as pools of ink form images around them. It was a groundbreaking look that influenced design trends of the era and earned the MTV Video Music Award for Best Rock Video (Jet were nominated for Best New Artist but lost to Maroon 5).
  
  The video was directed by Robert Hales, whose other videos include "Crazy" by Gnarls Barkley and "Can't Be Tamed" by Miley Cyrus.
• "Are You Gonna Be My Girl" shows up in the 2007 video game Rock Band and also in a bunch of movies and TV shows, including the pilot episode of One Tree Hill in 2003, the 2004 movie Eurotrip, the 2005 movie The Longest Yard, and the 2008 movie What Happens in Vegas.