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[6.50]
Al Shipley: Early in his career, Rick Ross seemed like one of the only mainstream rappers who didn’t have to soften his sound much to get on the radio, breaking through with “Hustlin’” and even not skewing too R&B with the T-Pain-assisted “The Boss.” So I’m not totally sure why one of the fattest, ugliest motherfuckers in the history of rap has made slick sexy R&B jams his lane in the last couple years, and it’d make more sense if he was at least good at them.
[3]
Martin Skidmore: I tend to like him in close proportion to the production. This has a lovely Isleyish summery funk backing (is it sampled from somewhere?) and Ne-Yo adds some effortlessly gorgeous singing. Frankly Rick is rather a drag on it, his flat tones rather muffling the delightful warmth of the rest. The lyrics are rubbish too, including, as far as I can hear, Ne-Yo rhyming “October” with “October”. Still, if you let it wash over you and ignore Rick, it’s absolutely beautiful.
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Jonathan Bogart: It’s kind of unsettling to realize that we’ve come to a point in musical history where this sort of thing is a throwback not just to the 70s widescreen soul it’s sampling, but also to the 90s hip-hop that originally constructed its cool worlds out of that 70s widescreen soul. So that makes this a classicist track in more ways than one, and good on Ne-Yo for giving it his best Curtis Mayfield. Like most classicism, it’s a little redundant — we could just as easily listen to Mayfield or A Tribe Called Quest instead — but Ross gives it enough specificity to keep it from being pointless, and in this summer of high-gloss furnace-blast synths its old-school sigh is deliciously cool.
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Spencer Ackerman: Let no one confuse this for approval of Rick Ross: the Albert Anastasia mixtape on which this track appears is a comically bad collection. Ross has exactly two styles, both of which are based around monochromal repetition — rapping for half a bar then resting for the other half, or rapping AABB all throughout. This is the latter example. It so happens that that’s the better style, if still amateurish. More saliently, if you like coked-out Miami funk beats, this one is great, which is to say it’s so good Rick Ross can’t ruin it.
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Chuck Eddy: Inspirational summer-at-dusk driving music, more deserving of a “retro soul” tag than most R&B people classify that way. Sweet how they swipe that N.W.A. hook. And Ross’s Fran Tarkenton shout-out is a cool old-school non sequitur; maybe he’s a That’s Incredible fan, like Black Flag.
[7]
Alfred Soto: The thick, bustling groove is attractive enough; then there’s two stars whose strengths coincide with a certain gold standard of feminine acquisitiveness. Swinging shopping bags of American Apparel and Barney’s on their way to a condo on the beach, Rick and Ne-Yo make like Carrie and Charlotte in “Sex and the City”.
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