Wednesday, February 6th, 2013

The Lonely Island ft. Adam Levine & Kendrick Lamar – YOLO

Now, if only Lonely Island songs were all as good as Andy Samberg’s hilarious and amazing face…


[Video][Website]
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Katherine St Asaph: 10 Pieces Of Supposedly Paranoid Advice From A Lonely Island Song Called “YOLO” That Would Probably Genuinely Improve Katherine’s Life Were She To Follow Them (And They’re Not Even All Kendrick Lamar’s) (Because The Joke Is Kendrick’s Verse Is Just As Outlandish In This Economy, Or Would Be If These Guys Were Ever Subtle) (And One Is Adam Fucking Levine’s Even)
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Anthony Easton: This is a mildly amusing reversal that musically nails the genre, but takes way to long to get to a punchline, and suffers under seriously diminishing returns. Extra point for the genuine financial advice in the middle. 
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Iain Mew: Yields only lame one-liners. Oh sure, the idea idea of reversing the meaning of the phrase is a clever one, but it’s one that they don’t have the confidence to follow through on and the increasing absurdity dilutes it completely. Lamar and Levine with words in their mouths that you’d never normally hear from them ends up funnier than anything else. On the musical side, The Lonely Island manage to take an uplifting sample and fuck it up completely by turning it into a hesitant stutter, with the music and the humour suffering as a result. 
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Alfred Soto: Let me remind Levine that in last week’s Fiddy-Eminem collaboration he took these bromides seriously.
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Patrick St. Michel: It’s a joke that has almost certainly been told on someone’s Twitter run into the ground, but it at least gets a few chuckles, even if said laughs come courtesy of Adam Levine singing about cooking meat. The Kendrick Lamar part, though, is good because he doesn’t even tell any jokes, just raps about financial advice (for some reason the line “that’s a great deal!” slays me). So yeah…I laughed. If I could give this points for creating that Kendrick Lamar real estate sign, though, this would score way higher.
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Daniel Montesinos-Donaghy: For a song that turns a party slogan into a mandate for sensible living (before turning suitably insane), Samberg et al definitely play it sensible by booking the guy from The Voice and that guy on everyone’s top ten list. Perhaps it’s an in-joke? If you know the Lonely Island, you know the deal: funny, but lacking an ingenious quality past its video’s spot-on styling and posturing. Levine’s a great cornball, something you may already know from a decade-plus of Maroon 5 records, but Lamar’s surprisingly as game. It’s a good problem for Lamar to have that his voice carries more wisdom than he intends to display, which kills the joke the second he starts rapping. If “dick grow as big as the Eiffel Tower” sounds vital coming out of his mouth, then I’m convinced to stop laughing and, yes, quit freelancing (“right now,” he warns).
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Scott Mildenhall: One joke, executed no more than satisfactorily, paired with a chorus that feels completely disconnected from the rest of the song. Kendrick had a dream, apparently.
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Edward Okulicz: Parodying something lame is easy meat, but it also creates something else lame at the same time. Though ostensibly jokes, I always grade Lonely Island tracks as songs. Even initially funny ones like “Jizz in My Pants” wear out their welcome; this one fares even worse as it only induced one chuckle, and that line (“Cook your meat ’til it’s done”) only works because of Adam Levine’s excitably earnest delivery of it — truly, he’s found his calling here. The rest of what’s on offer here only works if you think the central idea of the song is funny, and if you do, then you’re very, very easily amused. I’m hedging, giving it a point more than it deserves because I was wrong about “I Just Had Sex,” but I doubt I’m wrong about this one.
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Jonathan Bradley: You only live once, so exercise excessive levels of caution? It’s a good joke, but not one worth stretching out over three minutes; the Lonely Island members clearly know how to wear out a gag’s welcome in true Saturday Night Live style. The points here are for the Joy Formidable sample and K-dot’s inspired turn as an investment advisor. (Is Wu-Tang Financial hiring?)
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Brad Shoup: Like pro wrestling and the career of Bruce Campbell, Saturday Night Live is one of those things I try to keep up with out of ancient fealty. It’s kind of a bummer to see them back on the show, really. But hey, Hollywood is hard, and I’m sure most hosts jump at the chance to pre-record something that plays to their strengths. As usual, Akiva and his frat-a-tat delivery is the best thing the principals do save the obligatory non-rhyming bit (sorry y’all, I love “killing machines”). Unlike the “I’m on a Boat” and “I Just Had Sex,” which were actually legit celebrations, the (stale) joke of “YOLO” is a pure bummer. Glad to see someone taking the piss out of fun., though.
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Will Adams: I have a tough time approaching The Lonely Island’s grandiose comedy-pop, because I can never pin it down. Is the dopey rapping integral to the song, or are they just annoying? Is the abrupt ending the sound of the well drying up, or is it just a part of the medium? Can this song exist without the video? “YOLO” almost solves these problems, because its construction is just so smart that it could maybe stand on its own. “You know that we are still young” sounds plucked from some undiscovered #1 in 2012. And there’s a great moment when the song trades the cynical “nuts to YOLO” approach for self-mockery. But the winking, like the rest of The Lonely Island’s songs, is distancing. For me, “YOLO” will remain nothing more than really good novelty.
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Jer Fairall: The Lonely Island aren’t very funny, and as music they are generally execrable, but this actually comes close to working as actual satire if only because it so closely resembles the very Inspirational dreck that it purports to spoof, to the point that I could honestly see several Classes of ’13 using it as their graduation anthem with only partial irony. But then I remember that this is by far the biggest audience that The Joy Formidable’s music is probably ever going to get, and suddenly I’m too depressed to laugh.
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Reader average: [6.08] (12 votes)

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