Songfacts®:

• The lyrics are a list of drugs: nicotine, Valium, Vicodin, marijuana, ecstasy, and alcohol, punctuated by a stuttering "C-c-c-c-c-cocaine." Band mainstays Josh Homme and Nick Oliveri wrote the song; Oliveri said that the lyric refers to their ingest on one particularly unhealthy day.
• Josh Homme came up with that distinctive vocal melody, which may have been influenced by a 1985 song called "Apathy" by the British punk band Subhumans where they rattle off a similar list (drink, sex, cigarettes...). "It's not stolen from, but it's definitely an 'inspired by,'" Nick Oliveri told Songfacts. "It's a list of things like that on it."
  
  Oliveri adds: "It's a great song. Fantastic. I think the drumbeat was a Josh idea. The bass follows that drumbeat, and I don't know who came up with putting the kick in between the march, but wow, did it turn out cool. For a two-note song, it's quite amazing. I think it's a great song."
• Judas Priest lead singer Rob Halford is one of the vocalists on "Feel Good Hit Of The Summer," singing on the beginning part of the list ("Nicotine, Valium, Vicodin...") starting with the second verse. They tried him out screaming the "Cocaine!" part, but Josh Homme wanted the "more sinister Rob" more appropriate for the beginning of the list.
  
  The collaboration wasn't planned: Halford was working in the same studios on the Resurrection album for his band Halford. Queens Of The Stone Age producer Chris Goss approached him and asked if he'd jump on the song, and he agreed. When they showed Halford the lyrics, he said, "A Rock And Roll cocktail, I know this one."
  
  Ordinarily, appearances by star performers need to go through proper channels with lots of paperwork and record company intervention, but Halford just did it. "I remember being in there and Rob Halford being super-cool to us," Nick Oliveri told Songfacts. "We asked him, 'Hey, what do you want to be credited as?' He goes, 'Just put down 'vocals by the Metal God,'' and he walked out!"
• The title doesn't appear in the lyric. It's sarcastic.
• The song contains no foul language, but some radio stations refused to play it, and Walmart banned it for a while. They eventually agreed to stock the album without a warning label, since it was already called "Rated R."
  
  According to Queens Of The Stone Age frontman Josh Homme, the controversy was all part of a master plan, as the point of the song is to see how people react to it. "It lists drugs, but it doesn't say yes or no," he said. "You say things that make them react. For some people, they were like, 'That song, I gotta tell you, is bad, and you guys really need help.' And other people realized that it's almost like a social experiment. It got banned in some places and went to the top of the charts in other places."
• In 2007, QOTSA was forcefully removed from a rehab center in California for playing this song. They were going to play a lighthearted show for the patients there, but Josh Homme and his twisted sense of humor decided to open their set with this song, and they were immediately unplugged. >>

  Suggestion credit:
  Bert - Pueblo, NM
• If you feel a bit uneasy when listening to this song, it's working. Josh Homme told NME July 24, "All of our records have some loose theme that's put a rope around all the songs and drawn them in tight... Rated R is about paranoia and about paranoia that someone's putting you in a box forever and trying to escape getting out of their box.
  
  'You're free to do what you want as long as you do it in here' - and that is the frustration that your voice means nothing."
• Want to hear this song with the lyrics replaced with "ha ha" laughter? Listen to the end of "Song For The Deaf" from the group's 2002 album Songs For The Deaf. That section leads into a hidden track called "Mosquito Song."
• This was one of the songs Josh Homme and Nick Oliveri wrote in Joshua Tree National Park at the end of 1999. They stayed at the 29 Palms Inn and came up with the tracks they needed to complete their Rated R album, including "Better Living Through Chemistry" and "Quick And To The Pointless."
• Along with the rest of Rated R, "Feel Good Hit Of The Summer" was recorded at Sound City Studios in Los Angeles using analog tape and the studio's famous Neve console. Dave Grohl, who joined Queens Of The Stone Age on their next album, Songs For The Deaf, later bought the console and made a documentary about the studio (titled Sound City), released in 2013. Josh Homme shows up a few times in the film.
• Homme discussed the experimental elements of Rated R with Mojo: "I used to make mix tapes for my girlfriends and friends - Can next to Björk and Slayer and Hasil Adkins - and I wanted my own record to be like the mix tapes I was making. On Rated R I wanted to play a love song and a paranoid song and an art song and a heavy song - all on one record. There's this unseeable force wants you to conform, and I was fighting that. We'd try anything we thought was 'wrong.' We'd experiment on anything. On ourselves too. We got ourselves in an otherworldly state."
• Both Kerrang and NME placed Rated R #1 in their Top Albums of 2000 list. The record also came #2 in Mojo's list.