Wa$$up – Shut Up U
Everyone compared to everything compared to everyone!
[Video][Website]
[6.30]
Alfred Soto: Toss Charli XCX and the sung bits of Nicki Minaj into this bubbling stew. Like the best K-Pop, “Shut Up U” treats verses, choruses, and bridges as discrete units that require only habitation — and Wa$$up do.
[7]
Mo Kim: “Everybody’s staring at my butt, everybody’s staring at my gaze,” went the refrain to their debut single, named after themselves. “We’ll be completely different from a basic girl group and let Wassup’s own color known,” they said in interviews immediately after. Even before they had proven anything (and let’s be real, any Korean girl group sold on the concept of twerking had an uphill battle), they had swagger to match the dollar signs in their name; the genius is that ever since that mission statement, they’ve continued to put their music where their mouths are. “Shut Up U” is the best iteration of their sound yet, a whip-smart concoction of bubbling synths and feverish jump-rope beats. The text implies exhaustion, the speaker having to deal with this asshole guy that just won’t stop calling and bringing apology flowers, yet the voices pull it in unexpectedly joyful directions. Nari launches into the first chorus with a delightfully silly trill. Woojoo delivers the titular kiss-off in the chorus with blissful relief. Nada delivers a verse undressing her clingy ex, and though it’s ferocious in its indifference, its most affecting moment is when she takes a brief moment to catch her breath before launching back into a tirade she probably rehearsed ten times earlier that day. It’s all show and play, seven girls who know they’ve already gotten full marks and are now just gunning for extra credit.
[9]
Iain Mew: I’m just pleased that anyone’s still making K-pop as gloriously busy and new as this! I mean, apart from the bits that f(x) just made on “Rainbow” and are therefore less new, cool as they are. When you’re packing a song this full of ideas and energy and sudden turns that still feel like part of the same exciting journey, though, one section being familiar is eminently forgiveable.
[8]
Michelle Ofiwe: This started off as Rihanna Rihject and disintegrated into noise. I’m always intrigued by how much attention K-pop pays to American hip-hop/rap music, but it seems they’re now catching up to that unfortunate bout we had with EDM “trap” music in early-to-mid 2014.
[2]
Patrick St. Michel: Gotta be a bit more creative/better when you bite something else so thoroughly.
[2]
Micha Cavaseno: That song everyone always described 2NE1’s discography as, but whereas everything they do is tediously logical, this is a bit backwards and forwards. “Shut Up U” is overfed and busting at the seams, a chattering ethno-electrobeat grinding along the nervous system to the point I’m going to have to replace mine. Is it a perfect pop song? Nah, not really, but there’s something a little better going on. Wa$$up here are devoid of real impact, all magnesium flash, but they’re distracting as all hell.
[7]
John Seroff: An M.I.A. vs Ariana Grande cage match where everyone wins, “Shut Up U” is a creamy mound of architecturally metered anarchic joy and bubbling presets; rigor and wreck in precisely, deadly effective apposition. I have never in my life heard unspoken punctuation so clearly (the colon after Nada’s “YO:” in the rap break, natch) and only rarely divined this much pixy stix pleasure from a purely id-driven pop track.
[8]
Brad Shoup: Exquisite programming: the synths tumble like digital waterfalls. The contrast between the “yeah boy” callout and the cloudbusting, half-English section make this feel bigger than it maybe is. Three minutes of breakneck sequencing and chants would steal some breath.
[7]
Scott Mildenhall: Like Tinie Tempah’s “Trampoline”, but freer and lighter in tone. The insulting lines feel like a playground chant, piercingly serene, but the best parts are the revelled-in exhortations that kick off and pop up throughout the song. If anything that’s a failing though – they should be no more than accoutrements of a stronger body.
[6]
Madeleine Lee: “Shut Up U” fills in the currently unoccupied space opened up by imperial-phase 2NE1 and rap-phase Girls’ Generation, with the former’s self-assured swagger and the latter’s bubbly rainbow energy (and, because I have to say it, exactly none of the latter’s cringing concern for the male ego). I like how in so many of their videos Wa$$up are just hanging out and having fun, looking hot because they know they look hot, and even if all of that is external to talking about the music, I swear that I can hear that same giddiness, mischief, and confidence in the song, too.
[7]
“Red Light” is nice but I prefer this interpolation.
I’m kinda shocked this scored so high, it seems too simple to hold up to repeated listens and I dunno know that the pop-ification/removal of menace really works in the song’s favor. MIA’s songs are hypnotic but this is too bubbly to work the same way. I’d have given it a [3] or [4].