DCM! THE STIIIIIIIIIIICK!…

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[7.17]

Alfred Soto: At a party during Labor Day weekend two friends who can’t spell “Mediafire” were blasting this from an iPhone. That’s the audience for whom this track seems designed: casual listeners who know a good novelty record when they hear it. So do I.
[6]

Doug Robertson: It’d be easy to dismiss this as a bit of a sweary novelty, much along the lines of Eamon’s abomination, but there’s an upbeat joyousness about this that’s hard to ignore. Bouncing along like an aggrieved toddler on a space hopper, this is the fun side of bitterness; a raised middle finger with a fluffy puppet on the end.
[6]

Rebecca Toennessen: Yes! *Punches fist in the air* This is what I’m talking about. How much fun is this song? (A: all the fun). Cee-Lo’s got sarcasm, wit and humour and he ain’t afraid to use it — lyrically and vocally. I had to listen to this three times in a row. Possibly my favourite single so far this year.
[10]

Al Shipley: Recently here I defended the Neon Trees song as “catchy,” and Raposa zinged me back with “I think the adjective you really want to use is ‘virulent’.” I think the word applies well to this song, way more than “viral.” In short, fuck this.
[2]

Katherine St Asaph: Titling your new track “Fuck You” is such an obvious move that it almost shouldn’t work. In one fell swoop, you’ve roped in the fratty set (my downstairs neighbors have played it twice so far in one night) and gotten countless juicy headlines and blog posts, even if half of them think they need to use symbol soup. It speaks volumes about our ridiculous “decency” standards that this works so well, but if you object, just listen to the thing. The cursing isn’t the point. It’s just the vector that lodges Cee-Lo’s melody into your brain, indefinitely.
[9]

Martin Skidmore: He’s possibly my favourite new singer of the last twenty years or so, with gorgeous sweet soul tones combined with a nimble and muscular post-hip hop sense of rhythm and a convincing way with throwaway asides. I’m also all for being so blatantly radio-unfriendly, and I like the conflict in the lyric, the impulse to yell “fuck you” at your ex fighting the “I still love you” feelings. The disco backing here suits him fine too, giving him space and reason for a whole range of vocal styles and effects. A total joy on every level.
[10]

Mallory O’Donnell: This is way more enjoyable if you forget that it’s just the novelty single of last month and instead inject a subtext into it. Like, how hilarious would this be if this song and its whole bizarro retro-soul shtick were actually directed at Amy Winehouse? ‘Cause, really, fuck her.
[5]

Alex Macpherson: Yeah, you may as well accept — or resign yourself to — it now: you’ll be hearing “Fuck You” many, many more times in your life. Office parties, weddings, bar mitzvahs, probably wakes as well. It’s just one of those songs that seemed to emerge as an already-ubiquitous, fully-formed pop culture standard. That’s no reason to go overboard, though, either with “BEST SONG EVAH!” nonsense borne from the mistaken equation of popular with good, or with pre-emptivey creeping ennui. It’s too soon to tell whether “Fuck You” will be a “Single Ladies”, a mediocre song made great by its cultural position, or a “Hey Ya”, a mediocre song that swiftly becomes actively hateable from ubiquity. So, what we have here: a pretty catchy, moderately funny, but not especially distinctive ditty that plays a bit too heavily on the public’s uncritical adoration of retro signifiers, though at least Cee-Lo’s wry, shit-happens shrug of a performance is light enough to avoid bitterness. Definitely better than Gnarls Barkley’s boring-ass “Crazy”, definitely not as good as Cee-Lo’s collaboration with Fantasia on her new album, and several hundred miles behind Amy Winehouse’s “Rehab” in both craft and charm.
[6]

Anthony Easton: The writing is so sharp, the vocal delivery is wry, those ooos are just lovely, the chorus might be the easiest to sing along to this year. This is a smart song that is so slippery that it cannot be written about smartly — sure you can trace the antecedents, where it came from and where it is going, but it’s as pleasurable, and as sophisticated as Koenig’s Case Study House 13, and so you just live in it.
[10]

Rodney J. Greene: You can be reductive and say the appeal is entirely Motown-plus-cussing. Yeah, sure. But that ignores two important factors. One, the more obvious, is Cee-Lo Green himself. Sweet Suga Lo is such a joy, so open and magnanimous, that any malice in the lyric just sounds like a smile and a rejoinder to sing along. The other factor at work is why Motown-plus-cussing works. Of course everybody and their great-grandma likes Motown and we all chortle like schoolboys when we encounter dirty language unexpectedly, but it isn’t as simple as that. The anachronistic cursewords serve to strip away any context implied by sound. Cee-Lo writes a song a Motown staffer would never write, and thereby avoids any risk of “Fuck You” sounding like a dusty period piece. Amy Winehouse gets this. Raphael Saadiq doesn’t. However, unlike the more lived-in, analog feel of Winehouse’s work, Cee-Lo opts for as bright and shiny and modern of a production as possible. This ironically aligns him with the Sound of Young America’s commerce-minded spirit more than the tambourines and “ooh-ooh-ooh” backgrounds ever could, cleverly reaffirming this song’s retroness and modernity at once.
[10]

John Seroff: As a long-time Goodie Mob/solo Cee-Lo/Gnarls Barkley fan, it pains me to pan what’s likely to be Carlito’s biggest break-out solo hit but this is a glazed doughnut: painted with sugar and hollow in the middle. It’s catchy, sure; it’s also built on surprisingly weak and formulaic songwriting. Cee-Lo’s voice is amazing as always but there’s no emotional grounding; Kelis covered this ground much more convincingly and madly and in a way that holds up a decade later. On the other hand, “Fuck You” goes from fun to frustrating in only a few listens. What a bummer.
[4]

Kat Stevens: The unlucky protagonist in Weird Al’s “You Don’t Love Me Anymore” lists a number of assassination attempts he has escaped, committed by his rather creative girlfriend. The delicate acoustic guitar picking contrasts the descriptions of bathtub piranhas and cranial drilling, which in turn contrasts the singer’s naive melancholy as it slowly dawns on him that there’s a possibility his girlfriend is no longer enamoured of him. That song is eighteen years old, and it was an ancient joke even then. Thousands of similar retreads of violent, profane, lewd or surreal lyrics over traditionally heartbreaking ballads or breezy gospel choirs (see also William Shatner’s “You’re Gonna Die”) have now found their spiritual home on YouTube. So what makes the cheerful swearing in “Fuck You” so fresh and enjoyable in 2010? Buggered if I know.
[8]