The Singles Jukebox

Where are Ü now, God, when we need Ü

[Video][Website]
[2.33]

Katie Gill: Put in a synthesized backbeat, rerelease this as a radio remix, and we’ll have the Kroger brand answer to “Somebody that I Used to Know.” The problem here is that “Somebody” could bring the emotion when needed, while Gnash and Olivia O’Brien settle comfortably in listless melancholia. It’s less of “I Hate U, I Love U” and more of simply “Eh.”
[3]

Alfred Soto: “The strength of Gnash’s songwriting has always been his genuineness. The LA singer-producer uses his pen as a knife for the BS. When you listen to his verses, you are hearing feelings,” someone wrote. What I hear is psychobabble, someone who won’t translate therapyspeak into plain English because his melodies are weak. Olivia does a blank Rihanna imitation of Rihanna singing with Gnash’s Drake, playing an asshole playing an asshole.
[2]

Katherine St Asaph: This YouTube cover of Drake is kind of iffy.
[4]

Taylor Alatorre: Gnash (or is it G-Nash?) sounds like a survivor of the late 2000s “powerpop” debacle who was airlifted into an environment teeming with sadboy rappers and, for some reason, still Mike friggin’ Posner. Stranded in an unfamiliar world, he was forced to take on the attributes of his competitors. In reality, of course, he’s just another rootless kid raised by the internet who took “Marvins Room” a bit too close to heart (been there, dude). Olivia O’Brien does most of the emotional heavy lifting, but had it just been her singing into the void, the sketchy hate/love dialectic would tire quickly. These two need each other the way two teenagers in the throes of their first relationship “need” each other.
[4]

Cassy Gress: I, I apologize, but a duet lamenting and raging for a broken relationship over mournful piano? There can be only one. I might have given this one more credit if Gnash’s use of profanity didn’t make him sound like a kid with his hand in the cookie jar.
[4]

Brad Shoup: Given enough time, pop-punk was always gonna triangulate Drake.
[0]

Peter Ryan: I’m here for a good old she-said-he-said, but to work both parties’ claims have to resonate some, contain a few glimmers of truth within the requisite bullshit; the problem here is that she’s critically underwritten and he’s just being a full-on tool, so I don’t much care about or believe either of them. But what this really doesn’t get is that if you’re gonna do this particular sentiment, especially as a duet, you’ve gotta go absolutely face-meltingly HUGE.
[3]

Mo Kim: This is the worst song I’ve heard in my entire time as a music fan, and not worst as in amusingly bad or as in interestingly bad, worst as in is this my life now worst. Let’s break this down: 1) That fucking chord progression. Like, I get it, bro, playing piano’s a great way to woo chicks, but only if you passed the first book of Alfred’s theory and know to play more than the same four chords ad nauseum. That the four chords GNASH!! chooses are the musical equivalent of wet paint is even worse. 2) Let’s talk gender politics. Namely, the proliferation of terrible ballads about sad white heteros who have broken up, leaving the girl pining for her betrothed’s kiss “against her lips” (as opposed to where, her nipples?) and the guy spitting the f-word like an angry toddler trying almond milk for the first time. Thing is, it’s always the girl in these songs angsting in the background about how she still lurves her Miracle Whip ex-boyfriend, who is too busy renewing his Mucinex prescription and thinking of words that rhyme with “harm” (like “arm”!) to give her more of his song than the first verse and, uh, the bridge. 3) Which would have been a shame had GNASH!! recruited a female vocalist with more emotion presets than a toaster. Instead, when Olivia O’Brien builds to the climactic “you don’t give a damn about me” in the bridge (ooh, she said the d-word), she sings less with the tranquil fury of a lover scorned than with the entitled outrage of an IHOP patron denied an orange juice refill. 4) The flipside of this imbalance is that we get a fully minute and twenty seconds of GNASH!! trying to sing-rap in that beautifully congested voice. A minute and twenty seconds of “If I pulled a you on you, you wouldn’t like that shit” and “Caution tape around my heart”  and “If I were you, I would never let me go” (because in the tradition of many Sad Bros before him, GNASH!! is really into projecting all of his feelings onto the women no longer dating him). It’s so painfully melodramatic that even he can’t take himself seriously, a discouraging sign: committing to sincerity (even unfounded) is one thing, attempting to salvage bad writing through asking your fanbase to chortle at you is another. 5) Seriously, the guy rhymes “like that shit” with “bite that shit,” “mind that shit,” then “mind that shit” (yes, twice). And then he rhymes “fucking did” with “fucking fix” and “fucking mixed.” 6) “I know that I control my thoughts and I should stop reminiscing,” he sing-raps in one particularly poignant moment, “but I learned from my dad that it’s good to have feelings.” While I am proud of GNASH!!’s dad for resisting the norms of hegemonic masculinity, the moment in question is so awkwardly realized that I question its rendition in song. 7) Was the percussion on this song performed entirely on a single timpani and a half-empty box of Apple Jacks? 8) Bonus point of awfulness, but the entire music video is just a series of nature shots and bad attempts at emoting, like this fucking moment in which GNASH!! warbles while leaning against a tree trunk like he’s cosplaying Henry David Thoreau or some shit. 9) JUST SPELLING OUT “YOU” TWICE WOULD HAVE TAKEN ONLY AS MUCH EFFORT THAN WAS INVESTED INTO THE WRITING, PRODUCTION, AND PERFORMANCE OF THIS SONG. I hate this; I love, however, that spilling this much ink on this floating turd of a song has, at the unlikely hour of 4AM, cured my Singles Jukebox writer’s block. I almost want to give it a point for that, if nothing else, but then I remember 10) I have to report for work at 8:45 in the morning, so…
[0]

Will Adams: I wish I could go the whole hog with a goose egg here, especially when the song offers new, spectacular failures at every turn: bloated pauses after choruses like copy-pasted ellipses, pathetic piano, uncompressed vocals, expletives with NERF gun impact, unjustified melodrama, the lyric “I learned from my dad that it’s good to have feelings” — it’s astonishing. But the more I envision “I Hate U, I Love U” as the sound of two high school freshmen nervously fumbling through their first talent show — one covering Drake, the other covering Skylar Grey — I don’t hate it so much as I pity it.
[1]