The Singles Jukebox

There’s a clever rhyme in this song…

[Video][Website]
[3.75]

Edward Okulicz: Rhyming “spaceship” with “facelift” is a horrible yet bordering on genius rhyme in search of a more appropriate home than a punchy but biteless pop-rap number in which absolutely nothing else interesting happens. Whereas “Number One” was triumphant and buoyant, this stakes out a comfortable pace and level of excitement and moves not one bit. To be honest, you’d be hard pressed to tell one verse from the next.
[3]

Michaela Drapes: There’s really absolutely nothing new or remarkable going on here, but Dappy’s line about getting his mom a facelift cracks me up every time. It shouldn’t, but it does. Gets the job done, mostly, but you can’t help but feel Tinchy’s grasping at straws.
[3]

Jonathan Bogart: Wait, so the spaceship isn’t a metaphor for huge leaping emotions, a sense of adventure, exploration, uncharted territories, speed, power, thrust, or even cosmic journeys of a chemical nature? It’s just the most expensive living quarters he could think of? Man, fuck capitalism.
[3]

Matthew Harris: A song about how you should get your mother a facelift when you’re rich, and also that she might like a spaceship? I don’t know. The rap keeps hitting unintentionally weird lines (“keep shit running/never get constipated”) that feel lazy rather than inspired. And the backing-track initially made me think of Taio Cruz: sparkling, polished synths stabbing out an okay melody, but lacking in any sex or power. Apparently Tinchy is trying to find a sweet spot between grime and pop. I think I would have been fine if he aimed convincingly for either direction, rather than try to claim everything for his own.
[3]

Jonathan Bradley: About that whole grime jawn. The thing UK rap had going for it around 2003 was that the abrasive production rubbed up against the knotty rapping, each complementing the other by making both sound unsettled. Now that those rappers, along with their descendants, have moved on to club-friendly pop-dance tracks, the jittery flow has transformed into a stumbling block rather than a selling point. On “Spaceship,” Tinchy Stryder isn’t smooth or charismatic or commanding. He’s lost.
[3]

Pete Baran: Hmm, it suspiciously seems to me that Simon Reynolds might have commissioned this song, with its nostalgic callbacks to Tinchy’s epoch shaking collaborations with The Saturdays and Pixie Lott. But perhaps looking across the mike at Dappy, he needs to cheer himself up. The song (facelift gag aside) is a shadow of decent Tinchy.
[4]

Alex Ostroff: If you’re going to do an “I’ve made it” song à la Big Sean the least you can do is make it as ridiculous as possible. The chorus is too over the top to not love, especially in its final iteration, which features screams of glee and triumphant vocal harmonies on the concluding question: “My momma thought I wouldn’t make it/But now she’s living in a spaceship/She said, ‘Son I’m getting older’/I told her money buys everything — ‘Would you like a facelift?'” There’s not much to like here besides that couplet, but it’s enough to turn “Spaceship” from a nothing-y background club song to something I’d sing along to while drunk.
[5]

Frank Kogan: I’m watching the vid, and everything is puttering and bubbling and burbling along nicely, yet I’m straining to hear something more. Don’t know what it is, really, maybe some arms-raised exuberance, a rhyme better than “spaceship” and “facelift,” and… The problem is, there’s no T-Pain, and there’s no big sound, and there’s no one singing, sweetly, “I fucked a mermaid.” Not on this trip.
[6]