It’s cash-in, bitch….

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Katherine St Asaph: Behold: the collaboration hyped because bloggers conveniently forgot that the #willpower singles and “Big Fat Bass” both suck! The track is “The Time (Dirty Bit)” minus Dirty Dancing and any residual dirty bits. Instead, we have Britney, alternating between sounding like Lady Gaga mocking herself and like a soundboard loaded with Meme Britney(, Bitch). Will is nothing, except maybe on that part where he’s like “it goes on and on” right when you start accusing the track of it. There are crowd nothings, because it’s will.i.am. There’s a robot spouting bullshit, also because it’s will.i.am. I want every critic who fawned over Britney being a producer’s vessel on Femme Fatale to defend this, because it is your fault. 
[3]

Will Adams: My problem with will.i.am is that he is all tell and no show. His beat is so 3008, his beat is banging, oh my goodness, this beat is so hard, and when you hear this in the club, you’ll wanna turn that shit up (that’s just asking for it from the DJs, ain’t it?). The concept of letting the music speak for itself never crosses his mind. Instead he opts for throwing down some miserable vocals rapping miserabler lyrics, all swathed in gloppy AutoTune. The result is dance music so insistent on its danceability it might as well be propaganda flown in from the future. Will’s ego is too large to let Britney do any more than play backup singer and affect a ridiculous accent, a decision seemingly only made to attract LOLs the same way a Buzzfeed listicle does. He also holds Lazy Jay back, reducing a beatmaker with a diverse and unique CV to indulge will’s stale Eurocheese fantasies, to the point where will.i.am’s additional producer credit seems the most dubious aspect of the whole thing. And finally, if you’re gonna scream and shout, you better fucking scream and shout.
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Anthony Easton: Britney has been on the vanguard of the computerized, the gappy, the unreal, and her refusal of the human is made even more explicit here, when it seems like she doesn’t even need to be in the studio and is most likely not even in the same room as will.i.am. She becomes a perfect encapsulation of Halberstam’s post-human. 
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Patrick St. Michel: Spears is most recognizable as a dated sample, and the production sounded dated when it was basically the same thing on “The Time (Dirty Bit).” Not falling for this, will.i.am.
[1]

Alfred Soto: It was only a matter of time before will.i.am or somebody condensed Britney into a major key note on a sampling keyboard — a sample that neither screams nor shouts, which puts more pressure on our boy than he’s willing to rise up to.
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Jonathan Bradley: I think I heard this in The Ivy back in 2009. Heinekens were nine dollars a bottle.
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Alex Ostroff: Why bother trying to elevate a flimsy, worse-than-usual will.i.am track with a Britney feature if she doesn’t even sound recognizably herself? The “Gimme More” sample conjures up the ghost of Blackout, when it was impossible to separate the person, the persona, and the performance, but the rest of the vocals are less Brit Brit and more Brit Awards. Or at least Lady Gaga attempting her haughtiest fake accent at the Brit Awards, mangled vowels littering the stage.
[1]

Ian Mathers: The weird thing is, around 3:30 in the beat gains some strength, the synths get darker and deeper, the singing gets more forceful, and for nearly a minute you get an idea what “Scream & Shout” could have been (maybe if it had just been turned over to Britney fully?), and it’s kind of heady and amazing. But the rest of the song just feels like a too-long prelude; even during renditions of the “chorus” the backing sounds like it’s building up to something, not like the song’s reached it. There’s really no reason to delay the good bit that long in a song like this.
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Edward Okulicz: A slew of artless will.i.am sounds without any dancefloor appeal or hooks — two things even a non-fan must grant he’s awfully good at — is going to take a lot more than Britney making a funny voice and having her timeless throwaway (“It’s Britney, bitch”) thrown in for attempted giggles. will.i.am is a lot of things, but he doesn’t do funny. No, scratch that, he shouldn’t do funny.
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Brad Shoup: Will only knows, like, five rhymes, so the quicker we get to Britney and that “oh-we-oh” indie-pop market research, the better. Spears won’t even hide her boredom; they have to (poorly) patch in a catchphrase. I approve of her bad English as a symptom more than as a goof. Nate Ruess, you’re on deck.
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Frank Kogan: The beats are made of comic-book rubber, which I like extremely except that Korea did it way better two months ago. In the verse Britney is a strange talking signifier, an electronic demand for attention. But I don’t want her as a signifier, I want her as a singer. The fake Nicki fake British accent ought to be hilarious but is just kind of there. When Britney’s singing shows up in back of the chorus, it’s beautifully sad for a couple of bars. But then we arrive at vast expanses of will.i.am, who’s nothing but boring as a singer. So the song’s a debate between beauty and bouncy and what-the-fuck. Down in the beats and tones the whole thing is casually catchy, maybe brilliantly so. Yet the result is inexplicably subdued. Is it about not having it in you to scream and shout?
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