Congratulations, Patrick! You win the day’s contrarian medal! Your prize is a Wonder Girls metaphor.

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Andy Hutchins: When K-pop lops off the glorious weirdness that makes most batshit K-pop great and trades it in for the cheap sentimentality of love equaling material gains, then adds Akon phoning in a six-digit feature (so named both for consultant’s fee and the fact that it’s a little short of the full thing), you get this.
[4]

Katherine St Asaph: The Wonder Girls are breaking the States the way you feared they would: making themselves anonymous for a hypothetical-or-not U.S. audience that can’t process K-pop without clicking LOL or WTF afterward. Akon sounds like he composed the track and his verse three years ago in a FutureMe email.
[2]

Jonathan Bogart: Generic, anonymizing bosh is maybe the safest possible format for anyone attempting to crack the current US pop market. Which is fine: safety first, and so forth. Akon, unfortunately, is far from a safe thing these days — 2007 was a long time ago — and is outshone in interpolated parts by Yenny’s rap.
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Brad Shoup: I know Wonder Girls are trying to break Stateside, but listening to Akon’s global mercenary work makes me think of A.I. languishing in a Turkish basketball league. Oh Akon, what happened?
[3]

Iain Mew: For their English-language career, Wonder Girls appear to be accepting only songs with lyrical conceits so ridiculous that no one would touch them without having a career in a different language to fall back on.
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Anthony Easton: Love you like an abstract concept that makes the distribution of goods and services easier? Usually the only things that are purchased like money are whores or slaves.
[3]

Will Adams: Every time I hear yet another sub-RedOne (RedZero?) track I’m reminded more and more of a TV dinner that is still half frozen after being popped out of the microwave — whether you throw it out or put it back in, it’s a chore that has little payoff. Even worse is the Wonder Girls’ request to love them like inanimate objects, which grosses me out on several levels, namely that it means the message’s target is shallow enough to love cars more than human beings. Also: “love me up close, love me from afar”? What is this, the Hokey Pokey?
[2]

Patrick St. Michel: Wonder Girls know us better than we do. How no Western pop, rap, R&B or country star thought of the simple-yet-smart line “love me like money” leaves me a bit stunned. The “featuring Akon” gives it away, but “Like Money” is Wonder Girls’ biggest stab at breaking into Western — particularly American — markets, and in the process they’ve somehow hit at a major facet of our contemporary culture. I’ve seen a few message boards and comment sections, ones with pretty anti-K-pop stances, accuse this song of misogyny, of reducing women to objects. Trick is, Wonder Girls just want you to love them as much as you love currency, a car or a “fresh new haircut.” Intentionally or not, “Like Money” captures the West’s material obsession in one great line and then tries to sell it right back to them.
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