The Singles Jukebox

Pop, to two decimal places.

Ludacris ft. Shawnna – How Low

And here’s one we should probably have made earlier…



[Video][Website]
[7.00]

Al Shipley: 10 years after “What’s Your Fantasy” catapulted him to stardom, Luda still hasn’t come close to topping that song for me, but this is the first time in a while that it sounds like he’s even trying to. The pitched up Chuck D and the revving-up rave synth that only appears in a couple bars before every chorus make this one of the weirder, more unpredictable by-the-numbers club bangers in recent memory.
[8]

Martin Skidmore: I can’t be at all objective about Ludacris – I’ve been listening to some of his peerless guest verses this week, and I am a huge fan. Having said that, the Pinky & Perky hook here is pretty annoying. The verses make it, though: Ludacris’s inflection, flow and rhymes make me smile regularly, as ever. Shawnna gets very few words, and while that would make for a pointless guest appearance normally, I don’t want anyone else rapping when I could be listening to Ludacris.
[8]

Alex Macpherson: The raw ingredients are present and correct, but the shot of genius needed to be addictive is not. The beat is pleasingly hyperactive and the way the synths rise up even as evil gremlin voices command you to go down a rather nice touch, but Ludacris is merely adequate; while he hasn’t yet officially Lost It, those once-elastic hop-skip-jump cadences are a touch one-dimensional and hectoring these days. Needs more Shawnna; her departure from DTP at the worst possible time for the Battle Of The Sexes project was unfortunate.
[6]

John Seroff: I presume Shawnna makes the byline solely to maintain the “duets with women” conceit that strings the Battle of the Sexes album together. No matter; this is still easily the best single Luda’s released in the past year and a quality return to pure mindless booty jams. Lyrically barely there but the beats, haunted house whistle and smooth flow keep it soaring.
[8]

Rodney J. Greene: This has to be the best single he’s released in five years, yeah? The problem was that in the meantime he’d gotten away from what he does best: tongue-twisting club bangers with unmistakably Southern beats. While a few corny late-era punchlines land soft and some of the production ideas are of more recent vintage, this is Luda picking up the baton right where he left it mid-decade.
[7]

Chuck Eddy: I like “My Chick Bad,” the single Luda’s got now with Nicki Minaj and the Chalie Boy interpolation (sample?) on it; I’d give that a 7, maybe even an 8. That one has funny jokes, even if I don’t care how kinky some rapper’s girlfriend gets, or get why he feels the need to tell me about it. This one mostly feels like music for ignorami, but its Martian robo-chipmunk comes on like the revenge of electronica — definitely earns a few gabba points, or ‘appy ‘ardcore points, or something.
[4]

David Moore: I think this achieves the absolute bare minimum I might have expected of a Ludacris track in the first half of the last decade. And since generally the trend in pop-culture capital has been toward deflation, the bare minimum ten years ago goes a longer way today.
[8]

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