The Singles Jukebox

We think the message is a little bare.

[Video][Website]
[4.00]

Brad Shoup: Oh look, it’s music with a message. A vision of millennialhood seemingly sprung from the skull of an ad agency, “Wild Things” earns sympathy anyway. Cara’s glum matter-of-fact delivery is absolutely #relatable — I mean, I never felt like I and my peers had any special knowledge, but I get that a lot of people who are actually the future do feel this way. And eventually you snap out of your reverie to find that someone’s made you a bowl of hot soup.
[6]

Micha Cavaseno: Anthemic motivational tune no. 4701 is cool and all, but this only gets another point for referencing 808s.
[3]

Thomas Inskeep: “We make our breaks/If you don’t like our 808s/Then leave us alone” is the best line in the song. There is no second-best.
[4]

Iain Mew: Where the Wild Things Are and 808s are the reference equivalents of “Here”‘s familiar Isaac Hayes sample. Leaning on them in a song that’s trying to be about standing out would be a bad move even if it had much else going for it.
[3]

Anthony Easton: This song strives for a more specific contemporary aesthetic than the charming acoustic covers of her initial fame on YouTube. Even the claims to uniqueness settle on a Lorde-influenced, post-Bieber, formalism for formalism’s sake pseudo-R&B.
[5]

Danilo Bortoli: I lost track of how many times Cara says “we” in the song, and that may be indicative of something: the narcissism, the deeply rooted feeling of entitlement that is supposed to back up whatever she has to say about feeling young and insecure and, in this case, “wild.” “Here” was a good demonstration of that, yet her sense of entitlement was mistaken for confidence. And in “Wild Things,” the fragility of her whole discourse appears uncensored. She should be able to develop her own voice before trying to speak on behalf of a whole generation — and almost ironically, while doing so she ends up capturing the spirit of our times.
[3]

Katherine St Asaph: Like many of us on these here horrible Internets, I’ve now read that open letter to the Yelp CEO, and the open letter to the open letter, and the Twitter snarkers and conservative newspaper-commenter types shouting both sides into shame. My only thought, really, is someone in the Bay Area better snap up the perpetual sanctimony machine we’ve all made, but millennial-baiting songs like this tap that damned nerve in me that makes me want to contribute. The message is nothing new; I’m sure I’ve got a copy of The Conquest of Cool around here somewhere. The backing vocals and handclaps are what some suit thinks means “tribal”; they pair nicely with festivalwear with feathers where feathers shouldn’t be. The arrangement is crowded like the Times Square skyline, and the drums Cara says she brought are barely audible. The rebellion muddles Footloose, “Brooklyn Girls,” the worst Maurice Sendak book and rebranded bootstrapping (adding an 808 pun doesn’t make it less fatiguing to hear adults make a kid exclaim “we make our breaks”). Essentially, “Wild Things” takes a girl’s personality and transforms it into Personality, the more anodyne and marketable sort; I don’t know if there’s enough sanctimony around for that.
[2]

Jonathan Bogart: An outsider anthem delivered in a fashionably half-swallowed voice and pitched to as many people who can attach themselves to it as possible. Which is not in itself a problem — it’s right out of the 2010s popstar playbook, from Kesha (#FreeKesha) to Lorde — but that it’s so bland and unmemorable, without their flashes of lyrical wit or striking delivery, is.
[6]

Leonel Manzanares de la Rosa: Alessia’s greatest musical asset is the way her voice leads through spacious instrumentals. The heavy-hitting piano chords anchor her melodic runs, but their main purpose is to outline the song’s inspirational motif. Still, if this one’s for the freaks, there were a lot of more interesting sonic places those elements should have gone. It’d be much better if we had more moments like those hi-hats in the post-chorus. 
[6]

Cassy Gress: There are many songs with chord patterns that never resolve to the tonic; some of them I quite like. But the trick with that is that since the song doesn’t have a chordal resolution so to speak, you have to put in something else to carry the listener to your destination: a good drum beat, a great sample or hook or riff, something. This is a song you can leave in the background and barely notice it’s there.
[2]

Will Adams: “Here” had just enough holier-than-thou sentiment to sully its relatable message; “Wild Things” unfortunately doubles down on this, priding itself on being apart from the cool kids and referencing 808s as if those have never been name-dropped before in pop, all without offering anything exciting. It’s posturing so inept that I’m thinking the next single is gonna be a cover of “Stand Behind the Music.”
[4]

Alfred Soto: The politics of dancing, right? Filling every bar with words, contemptuous of the 808s she says she embraces, Alessia Cara eschews the politics of feeling good.
[4]