The Singles Jukebox

One two, one two… testing, testing…

[Video]
[4.29]

Crystal Leww: Big Boi is well beyond the days of his chart peaks, and I’ve always appreciated that he’s never gotten complacent or even precious about his sound. Many of his peers will just keep throwing out lines about how the young guys don’t get it, and while I don’t think we’re going to see Big Boi on a Metro Boomin beat or mumbling like Lil Uzi Vert anytime soon, he genuinely tries to bring in new collaborators, many entirely outside the realm of hip-hop — remember that entire album he did with Phantogram? It’s not a huge leap to work with Adam Levine, but “Mic Jack” is wavy and synth driven, a leftover from the Phantogram influences, I guess. Ultimately, Big Boi is a good rapper pretty much on any kind of beat that you can imagine, and sometimes that is enough to carry a song.
[6]

Alfred Soto: Adam Levine, dear god in heaven, sounds like he’s having fun and not turning us into choads; he’s been singing on DJ Khalil and DJ Dahi variants since, well, 2010, the same year when Big Boi dropped his last solo album. He’s out of practice as rhymer and schemer.
[5]

Tim de Reuse: The instrumental is well-executed gloss and swagger, letting Levine’s hook work in the exact way that a Levine hook ought to work, but Big Boi’s material ranges from questionable (“we pimp ink pens / to provoke the folks and keep ’em thinkin'”) to laughably incoherent (the most ill-conceived Pokemon reference of 2017).
[5]

Ryo Miyauchi: Big Boi goes cruise control on all fronts. His wordplay runs too limp to represent a Big Boi record. The chorus rests a little too much on the rapper’s oh-so-reliable reminder of his polar-bear coldness. And his tasteful choice in collaborators leads to Adam Levine as a guest. It’s a waste of a solid double entendre by a rapper known to run his mouth.
[4]

Thomas Inskeep: This has a kinda electro-synthy thing going on, and Big Boi is of course always a joy to hear rapping — but there’s no deviation in his rhymes, just a “duh-duh-duh-duh-duh” rhythm, and then it all gets ruined by the Sultan of Smug on the chorus. 
[2]

Will Adams: It’s hard not to be upset by the probable industry machinations that forced Adam Levine’s name on here, thereby relegating Sleepy Brown to understudy status and neglecting to credit the woman singing the outro. But “Mic Jack” is appealing as a darker alternative to the shiny plastic disco of Bruno Mars and Justin Timberlake. It’s easy, breezy hip hop house to file alongside that fantastic Wolfgang Gartner album, so I can forgive the periphery.
[6]

Megan Harrington: Say what you will about their respective careers, both Big Boi and Adam Levine are capable of writing something catchy. There’s no excuse for the utter phoned-in boredom of “Mic Jack” except to notarize their mutual irrelevance.  
[2]