Making hits outta airplanes – a thing, apparently…

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Michaelangelo Matos: True story: My roommate Jason came home on Saturday afternoon and asked, “Have you heard this Far East Movement song, ‘Fly Like a G6’? The words don’t make a lot of sense, but that bass is so good, who cares?” I dug around bit before realizing the song was on the Jukebox! And further realized that, in fact, I’ve heard this a bunch of times already, that old “Oh yeah, I thought this had been around for a while already” trick some songs play when you just hear them and don’t read about them first or whatever. Moral: The words don’t make a lot of sense, but that bass is so good, who cares? Especially when you do a robot dance around my living room like Jason did as I was typing this.
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Al Shipley: I’m happy anytime a pop hit presents me with an opportunity to purposefully mishear a lyric as “cheese sticks”, but as far as that admittedly arbitrary standard goes Beenie Man’s “Dude” still works better.
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John Seroff: It helps that “G6” has no real aspirations to anything more than dumb fun, but it’s not got enough power under the hood to do more than motivate drunks who already want to be motivated. This is rap for people who want to hear rap about people who are rapping about rap, which is to say it’s glorified production music for Viacom reality shows. Considering how many people wish their real worlds were as exciting as The Real World, I’m afraid I may have to hear this doppler booming from far too many car speakers this Fall.
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Martin Skidmore: They are the producers, I believe: this is all electro beats and synthesised claps, approaching the minimal at times. There’s a female voice (Dev?) mostly repeating the hook, and some rappers, some rather good (I like the first one in particular), at least one autotuned to death. I find it sort of groovily compelling.
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Katherine St Asaph: Cut Dev some slack. Yes, you can hardly call her a great singer. Yes, she’s just speaking in the vicinity of one note. But there’s a relatability, even likability to her voice, as if one of the party girls listening to this phased into the song all of a sudden. You hear it in the half-giggle on “blizzard”, the tossed-off autopilot swag of “when-we-drink-we-do-it-right-getting-slizzered” — more giggling. You really hear it in “now I’m feeling so fly”, Dev tentatively reaching out for the boast to see if it’ll carry her. She distills thousands of voices plucked from bars or clubs or apartments littered with Solo cups, and I imagine that this — not the blips, not the booze — is why it’s connecting with so many people. They recognize her. It’d be easy for the producers to have robotuned melody into her voice. Thank god they didn’t.
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Chuck Eddy: Spare, funky, drunky post-Ke$ha/”Boom Boom Pow” electro-club nonsense (hasn’t the former G-6 actually been the G-8 since 1997? Though I guess it wouldn’t rhyme with 3-6 that way), with beyond-perfect Latin freestyle now-n-now-now stutters gettin’ slizzard (whatever that is), and the chorus girl more than making up for the dime-a-dozen dude pretending to rap. Much of the rest of Far East’s album is a blast too, btw — would take the tracks interpolating snippets of “Love Shack,” “So What’Cha Want,” and “Hollaback Girl” over the songs they interpolate. And my two-year-old daughter does a way-cool car-seat robot dance to the beginning of “Girls On The Dance Floor,” but be careful about playing “Go Ape” feat. Lil Jon around toddlers, who will love the delirious catchiness and jump-jump-jump-jump parts, but may well try to parrot the “s” word. Other favorites so far: “White Flag” and “She Owns the Night”.
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Frank Kogan: A woman drifts through in a half-bitchy monotone, the track as corrosive and bleary-eyed as she is. At a thousand miles away, I don’t know if this single is an oddity or the tip of an iceberg: I’m hoping the latter, a massive submerged world of cut-rate Ke$has and severe, acidic beats. And I really liked typing the phrase “cut-rate Ke$has”, a compliment.
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