The Singles Jukebox

Pop, to two decimal places.

Kreayshawn – Go Hard (La.La.La)

Punctuation reproduced exactly, as much as it pains us…


[Video][Website]
[4.58]

Michelle Myers: While her White Girl Mob cohorts Lil Debbie and V-Nasty continue to produce their annoying, questionable and occasionally enjoyable brand of Bay Area rap, Baby Kreay has gone pop on us. I think she is trying for Ke$ha’s trashy party girl spirit, but lacking K$’s joie de vivre, she ends up more of a female 3OH!3. Kreayshawn takes you to the mall with her and spends the entire time making fun of you. Instead of inviting you into her world, she mocks, judges and makes you feel small for working a minimum-wage job.
[4]

Michaela Drapes: What would we do without Kreayshawn, currently filling a void as the dark side of Ke$ha, to remind us what it’s really like to party in white trash America? Never been there? Will you trust me if I tell you this is excruciatingly accurate? However, verisimilitude doesn’t always equal quality, and though I find this gloomily wonderful, it is a smidgen phoned-in, don’t you think?
[7]

Anthony Easton: I like how she admits poverty pretty early, and the line about Forever 21 is almost as good as the line about the stepfather’s credit card. “Stepfather” is the key here; it’s the perfect little family detail. It sounds like bored teenage hijinks recast as gangsta fronting, which isn’t a new idea — in fact, the small details that provide difference are a bad patch job. The musical and social details are better dealt with by other artists, or even her first single or two. 
[6]

Andy Hutchins: This is what it sounds like when your ghostwriters desert you, your creativity never really existed and your flow is sub-Birdman. One point for the beat; one point for the “Do it like” bit at the end, because it reminds me of “Cupid Shuffle,” and that music that is not this exists; a deduction for the video’s shameless and dismaying biting of every “popular” art style possible.
[1]

Alfred Soto: Grime-y programming encourages a kind of grade school singalong, but generally the rhymes should not be at a grade school level.
[5]

Kat Stevens: So this is where Fischerspooner have been hiding!
[4]

Brad Shoup: Cat dug this after the first listen; I asked her if it reminded her of devilishly disposable dance-pop from her adolescence, but she was engrossed with Something Awful, so I’m going to answer “yes” for her. I’m starting to accrue a suspicious record of preferring hip-hop artists’ pop efforts, but I gotta own it here… this is just obnoxious. It doesn’t describe a situation so much as predict it: nostalgic electro-house with an assload of quotables, an ode to small secessions and the mean-girls dynamic. A sarcastic “go hard” tips Kreayshawn’s hand; she’s confined the chaos to the studio this time.
[8]

Jonathan Bogart: A year later it seems increasingly ridiculous that Kreayshawn was ever at the center of a controversy about white female rappers eating up conversational space that could have gone to black women. And not just because Azealia Banks, Angel Haze, and many more are deservedly blowing past her in terms of both recognition and acclaim, but because calling her a rapper is a category error; she makes goofy pop music, closer to the way Ke$ha, Cher Lloyd, and most K-pop riffs on 90s pop-rap than to anything based organically in hip-hop culture. And as the product of a goofy Internet-fueled pop star, “Go Hard” is exactly right: sing-songy, purposefully dumb, and attached to a splashy, cartoony video that makes clear just how seriously anyone should take the imperative of the title.
[7]

Katherine St Asaph: I do not hate this song by Kreayshawn. I don’t mind her Kreayshit when it’s over a Grimes-y, Rye Rye track. Excuse me while I gorge on dry ice.
[5]

Patrick St. Michel: The song strikes me as the equivalent of an I Can Haz Cheeseburger meme. “Gucci Gucci” could be an eye-rolling affair, but it did boast a good beat and some funny lines, plus an out-of-nowhere quality that at the very least made it seem fresh. It was sort of like a new image macro that popped up on your Facebook feed one afternoon that caught you off guard and made you laugh, though you soon grew sick of everyone else posting it. “Go Hard” is like the same picture with some new, lamer text superimposed over it.
[0]

Will Adams: RIP, the happy period of my life where I believed I would never hear from Kreayshawn again — (2011-2012) :,(
[1]

Edward Okulicz: Kreayshawn is fake and cartoonish, and is probably incapable of being otherwise — that much we knew. “Go Hard” is not so much revelling in her own limitations, but finding out that you can actually do a surprisingly large amount with a palette the size of a fingernail (see Perry, Katy, who could take this to Number One, no problem). She delivers white-brat as good as you could hope, can’t fill an entire song with good lines and pads and stumbles occasionally, but she’s got a cheeky backing that swipes from grime and electro and makes something that fits her personality well. She is, for this single, a perfectly adequate pop star.
[7]

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