The Singles Jukebox

It’s you, it’s you, it’s all for you…

[Video][Website]
[3.73]

Thomas Inskeep: STOP YELLING AT ME.
[0]

Micha Cavaseno: I don’t know, it’s some terrible dude screaming over a generic beat while P Money reminds us he’s been a beast since the Fatal Assassins era. At least for a window.
[4]

Ramzi Awn: It’s hard to sound dated and extraterrestrial at the same time, but KSI almost pulls it off. 
[5]

Alfred Soto: The beat is garbage, which explains the sloganeering.
[4]

Will Adams: For a while, it seems there’s nowhere to turn. KSI’s unpleasant shouting and merely competent rapping pound the listener, while the beat drills about as hard as a Fisher Price toy. But P Money saves us — barely — from oblivion for the song’s midsection. But even he checks out mid-verse upon recognizing the steaming pile surrounding him.
[4]

Jonathan Bradley: To go off foaming at the mouth like this requires a deceptive amount of precision, and KSI doesn’t hit with the right force at the right time to sound properly unhinged. P Money is more proficient but also more perfunctory, which makes his spot both a relief and snooze. The forged-signature Lex Luger-synth whine might be intentionally trying to stir memories of “B.M.F.,” and I haven’t worked out yet whether that’s a good thing or not.
[4]

Josh Love: I listened to this song a couple of times but then ended up falling down a rabbit hole of investigating this dude’s primary claim to fame as a “video game commentator,” a phenomenon I was previously only aware of because of that South Park episode about Pewdiepie. The episode seemed to derive much of its indignation from the idea of kids watching someone else play video games instead of playing the games themselves. Admittedly, contemplating that many layers of removal from “reality” is pretty funny, but personally I can’t front on the actual practice too much since I’ve generally found gaming too frustrating and stressful throughout my life to ever make it a genuine hobby and would definitely rather watch my wife play Uncharted or The Last of Us than make a go of it myself. Anyway, I could certainly envision gaming commentary being entertaining and even insightful and I’m sure there are people out there doing it, but from what I sampled of KSI he isn’t one of them. His popularity with the kiddies, like Pewdiepie’s, seems to boil down entirely to forced wackiness and sheer volume, which is hardly inexplicable no matter how gratingly inane it seems to someone who grew up on Mario and Tetris. The best thing I can say about this professional dick as a musical artist is he seems more or less anonymous.
[4]

Katherine St Asaph: There’s a fairly active Internet-folk tradition of Let’s Play musical tie-ins, and if you can get past the fact that you’re not just watching someone else playing video games but listening to the decontextualized audio of someone else playing video games, they’re not so awful; but they tend to be more stuff like cod-dubstep intros or electronic “remixes” of the Doppler-effect ramblings of French-Canadian dudes. Again, not so awful, but not something you’d presumably admit to listening to — unless you’re British, in which case you’ve put one of them on the honest-to-God charts. (I’m probably eliding so much context and I don’t care.) The quality of the song will come as no surprise, unless you want to count how rapidly it goes from grimacing-face-emoji to KIND OF A BANGER, then back, depending on whether the track’s under the command of an actual rapper or KSI the Lonely Island Level.
[2]

Iain Mew: One of my favourite things about the UK charts is that the barriers for entry are just low enough for the occasional Yeovil Town FC or “Masterchef Synesthesia” or Alex Day to get in, sometimes even when it isn’t Christmas. The last one there is the most relevant here, since KSI is also a YouTube personality, though he’s even more focused on video games rather than music. Like Alex Day, KSI has opted for a genre where his technical limitations are less of an issue. In his case, that’s a pop-grime track about his Italian whip, referents obvious, where the excess of enthusiasm in his hoarse yell fits rather well, given a banging enough beat and hook. The song is still a particularly aggressive and even cruel take on it, though. It takes P Money’s more measured verse to keep it from outstaying its welcome, and his DRS/PRS rhyme is my favourite in a while.
[6]

Scott Mildenhall: KSI, overall, seems pretty dreadful, but is at least interesting. As a runaway British YouTube success he has received attention from old media, but as a cursory search of newspaper websites will reveal, far less than, to pick a name at the opposite of random, Zoella, a woman whose subscriber figures he can far outstrip. Granted, his crass beat-you-round-the-head-with-a schtick is perhaps less suited to Bake Off, but that’s also not to say some places haven’t taken advantage of his online roots as a way of overriding some of his more unsavoury aspects, ones they might not cosign had he a more traditional rise to prominence. It’s all enough to make a young man feel old, but “Lamborghini” itself is little more than an attempt to absorb KSI into that old world of institutions like the top 40, upsetting no applecarts and, truthfully, an emblem of his regressive, middle-class masculinity. As on video, he has a compelling and at times comic fervour, and the video game angle is somewhat novel — even niche, when he invokes blogger beef — with the former being the main reason this is halfway decent. But really, it’s just history’s warnings unheeded.
[6]

Brad Shoup: Clarkson sure landed on his feet, huh?
[2]