The Singles Jukebox

It’s also Songs That Make Poor Hangover Cures Monday, for all you people who know exactly who you are…

[Video][Website]
[2.38]

Will Adams: Tonight on 20/20: the version of “Love the Way You Lie” they DIDN’T want you to hear.
[2]

Alfred Soto: Martial beats, schlocky message, anonymous singer, crap stentorian raps.
[3]

Brad Shoup: This is unfortunate. These sorts of tracks usually are. Maybe that’s on us for preferring the fire to the ceasefire? The plodding snares aren’t martial so much as courtmartialed; it’s indicative of the producer’s ponderousness-by-numbers approach.
[2]

Iain Mew: At one point K Koke says “Listen to my voice, can you hear my pain?”, so I guess the strained ugliness of tone that drowns out his actual words is a deliberate choice, if a terrible one. Rita Ora’s decision to go more “Love the Way You Lie” wallow than “Written in the Stars” soar, meanwhile, is sort of like one of those choices you get given in RPGs to give you the illusion of agency when the outcome is functionally identical regardless. The song was doomed either way.
[2]

Jonathan Bogart: She inflects well but to no end; he gets his mumble confused with the backing track.
[3]

Jer Fairall: I get, though I rarely appreciate, anthemic rap. I don’t get, nor do I ever appreciate, maudlin rap. What I certainly don’t get is why anything thinks it would make any sense to try and merge the two.
[2]

Scott Mildenhall: Note to songwriters writing lyrics that Have Meaning: don’t offer the merest suggestion that, actually, they don’t, for example by following one of your most Significant lines with “if that means anything”. It’s nice that K Koke wants to stop people doing bad things, but with that he’s made it very easy for people to make bad jokes about this being a bad song, and that represents two whole levels of bad things. Then again, it could be worse: this is probably what Sir Gary Barlow thought his still-hilarious “Teardrop” cover sounded like.
[4]

Katherine St Asaph: I’m too hungover for this shit.
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