Are we letting this feller’s hyphen muck up our formatting? Are we heck…

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[4.80]

Katherine St Asaph: Timbaland reworks “Carry Out” without the idiotic fast-food plugs! T.I. owns the hell out of yet another appearance! Danity Kane members are getting work! There’s just one problem, and it’s kind of major: Diddy can’t hack it. No matter what you do to his voice, he brings about as much charisma as a jetlagged accountant. On the bright side, though, all that processing means I can pretend he’s a wonky synth and get back to loving this.
[7]

Anthony Easton: How does Diddy maintain a career as a cultural impersario?
[2]

Erick Bieritz: Has Diddy always just wanted to be Timbaland? A re-inventive pop svengali equally adept at channeling white and black musical motifs, presented with a sort of self-aggrandizing Bigness. But Timbaland’s Bigness was always a means to an end. With Diddy it feels like the Bigness itself is the point, and Dirty Money does little to hide that flaw.
[4]

Alex Macpherson: What I love about Diddy’s grandiose ambition is how it manifests itself in the music: no overreach, but a real sense of tension and motion, a theatricality to how the string flourishes interact with the 808 bassline and the switch-ups of the beat. It’s a Bond action scene that starts on a nightclub dancefloor: your principals are T.I., making your knees go weak by simultaneously pulling off suave and dangerous as only he can; Dawn and Kalenna, urgent and ready to spring into gear to get what they’re owed; and, in case you forgot, Diddy himself coming in last, letting an astonishingly great break (“Bad Boy, bitch!”) create the drama that his voice can’t. Props, too, to Nicki Minaj on the remix: “Like eleven hundred horses when I switch that gear, I just swerve on ’em sorta like I missed that deer,” and a brand new voice to boot.
[9]

Kat Stevens: To all intents and purposes this is the same song as “Carry Out”. However, Diddy, TI and whatsherface out of Danity Kane don’t sound as insufferably smug as Timbers Lake and Land so “Hello Good Morning” manages to be just about listenable.
[3]

Martin Skidmore: He’s never been much of a rapper. The Danja/Tim production pulses and throbs along strongly enough here, but his lifeless flow and dull rhymes suck the strength from it. I think he’s more or less attempting to sing in parts, but it’s hard to be sure. If he stood aside in favour of TI (say with other remix guests Rick Ross and Nicki Minaj) this could be a very good club number, but I think Diddy wrecks it.
[3]

Al Shipley: Inevitably, some DJ will put together a best-of T.I. mixtape that snips this song down to just his verse, and those 36 seconds will be a far more enjoyable listen than all 4 tedious minutes. Within that verse, Danja strips the beat down to its barest elements, and then slowly builds it back up piece by piece while Tip raps his ass off, which is just a hell of a lot more enjoyable than hearing the thing go full steam with a bunch of boring singing over it.
[5]

Alfred Soto: T.I’s become so good at dropping into boring musical settings that he forces me to rethink my feelings about said musical setting. Here he bounces on Timbaland’s usual sawtooth-synth bed like Timbo created it for him, and hasn’t this always been Diddy’s problem — confusing the architect for the dweller?
[6]

Tal Rosenberg: One of the best T.I. verses in recent memory–juggling the track blindfolded, with swagger the likes of which neither Kanye, Weezy, or Jigga have. If it was just the beat and Tip then this could be an 8. But if it was just Diddy’s tacky voice and sub-Black Eyed Peas spangles, it could be a 0. I’ll go for the middle.
[4]

John Seroff: Tired production aside, an 8 for TI and a 2 for Puff Daddy averages out neatly and correctly.
[5]