The Singles Jukebox

“M.U.S.I.C. LEGEND” – not quite, no…

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[3.18]

Hillary Brown: Great idea bogged down by early-Diddy-style execution (i.e. just singing parts of the original song over the original song).
[3]

Briony Edwards: The only good bits are the bits that have nothing to do with Ironik – the sampled piano, strings, and chorus lifted from the Elton John original. The intro and verses kind of sound like the clunkier, more jarring areas of the Sister Act soundtrack. This is no good thing.
[4]

Edward Okulicz: In being sped up, the original hook loses all of its dignity and gloss and even then it’s still the best thing about the song. The rapping badly longs for some variety of point or even originality – it’s like an improvisation done while looking at the original’s lyric sheet.
[2]

David Raposa: This is nominally Ironik’s track, but with his verses sounding like fattened-up rewrites of the song’s hook, he comes off as the special guest-star. That’s more than can be said for the hilariously unnecessary turn offered by Chip-Diddy-Chip. Thankfully, both of these chumps are outshined by the sample, which gets retuned and tricked out to approximate the dance-floor grandeur of “Dancing Queen”. But then the track rides its one good thing into the ground, reaching for that piano crescendo the way a chronic masturbator reaches for the hand lotion.
[2]

Martin Kavka: This approaches travesty territory. I’m not that big a fan of Elton’s “Tiny Dancer,” but I do know that it is *not* a song about impressing the ladies. “And now she’s in me/always with me/tiny dancer in my hand” is a line from a song about loss. (Or possibly about masturbation, although I s’pose that’s about loss too.) Shouldn’t artists acknowledge a responsibility to quote/sample in context, or at least give an explanation for their creative departures?
[3]

John M. Cunningham: Most of the time, I think “so-and-so did it better” is a dumb argument to make regarding songs that aren’t strictly covers, since it represents a failure to take the music on its own terms, but look: you can’t go and drop a rap on “Tiny Dancer” without expecting to call to mind the most famous minute of Girl Talk’s career, and you don’t have to be a Gregg Gillis acolyte to admit that Chipmunk ain’t got Biggie’s chops.
[3]

Jordan Sargent: If this is a meta-punking of Girl Talk it’s a 9, if it’s the biggest song in the UK this summer it’s a 2. I suspect the latter.
[2]

Michaelangelo Matos: I admit it: I giggled, which is almost certainly what was intended. I hope.
[5]

Additional Scores

Rodney J. Greene: [4]
Ian Mathers: [4]
Martin Skidmore: [3]