The “Dip It Low” star slightly overstates her money-making abilities…

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[6.50]

Matt Cibula: HEAVILY in favor of psuedo-a capella jams name-dropping zebras and introducing racial (and gender?) ambiguity. This might be highly annoying to a lot of people, but you have to break a lot of lizard eggs to create a chameleon.
[9]

Andrew Unterberger: Ooooh, Christina! Apparently her recent engagement to R&B superpower The-Dream is going to be a mutually beneficial one, since Mr. Nash has saved his best beat in years for his blushing bride’s comeback. I don’t know if it’ll be enough to get her back on the charts, as the song is fairly risky in its unnerving minimalism, but man is this thing hot — Milian at her breathy, whispery best, boasting of her artistic and/or sexual versatility. The key to the song — the steady bass rumble in the background, barely audible, but causing a near-unbearable tension throughout. Give me 20 more listens or so and I might even have to bump that score up one more.
[9]

Al Shipley: This unholy union has already killed a major music magazine, reignited old “she fucks for tracks” rumors, and helped to publicize the worst blonde dyejob since Jessica Alba. So it’s nice that Terius interrupted his hot streak to make sure his new girlfriend wouldn’t get a song good enough to make us feel at all confused about where we should stand on this whole thing.
[1]

Chuck Eddy: If you put a chameleon on top of a plaid shirt, would it explode? And if you put a vocal this puny and detached on top of an intriguingly spare rhythm, and had the voice mention zebras and monsters, and added a gang of tough dudes yelling “hey ho,” would that save it from tedium?
[6]

Anthony Miccio: If you could be anything or anyone, why would you choose to be an autotuned Renee Zellweger?
[3]

John M. Cunningham: While I’m sure the stripped-down production was designed to create intimacy, Milian’s lifeless vocals make it sound like an unfinished demo. The best I can say is that she wisely keeps the “chameleon” = “C. Milian” wordplay at the level of subtext.
[3]

Alfred Soto: She’s not chameleon enough to help me forget Britney. She’s not polymorphously perverse enough to be anyone’s ghetto bitch. She’s not smart enough to pronounce “gazelle” correctly.
[4]

Anthony Easton: How she whispers about disappearing is chilling, how she whispers about being as big as an elephant is charming, and how she talks about being a zebra or a gazelle is just plain hot — there is something both eerie and lovely about her voice, a strangeness that works wonders. Love this better than I can tell.
[9]

Martin Skidmore: This is extraordinary: she sings so quietly, whispering in parts, and The-Dream and Tricky stay mostly quiet too, with subdued Latin bongos and some subtly throbbing bass. It’s spookily beautiful and kind of breathtaking, and Christina carries it superbly, with real control and fine judgement.
[9]

Alex Ostroff: The more I listened to “Chameleon” over the past week, the more I suspected and feared that it’s an unfinished demo. Sparse and minimalist, The-Dream makes an exercise of excising as much as possible, leaving nothing but the tabla and Milian’s voice, which alternates from a drone to a whisper to a purr. The wordless melismatic hook is note-perfect. There hasn’t been this much open space in a pop song since Ciara’s reign as the Princess of Crunk, and filling it would be criminal. Here’s hoping Terius knows better.
[9]

Hillary Brown: Totally rhythmically and production-wise interesting, but someone forgot to put a melody in.
[4]

Alex Macpherson: Self-consciously weird and attention-seeking, “Chameleon” doesn’t bother hiding Christina Milian’s desperation to get back in the game; indeed, it plays on it compellingly, her promises to be all things to all people coming off less as braggadocio than a downtrodden need to please. Its scattershot, stream-of-consciousness wordplay is Fergiesque, but whereas Fergie Ferg would be bullish and larger-than-life, Cha-Milian tries to slip past unnoticed, fading into the background. So, like any good boyfriend would, The-Dream takes away all of her background and leaves her to fend for herself: a rabbit in the headlights, but isn’t that where she wanted to be all along anyway?
[8]

Ian Mathers: The-Dream mostly keeps his maximalist streak in check (although his “hey, ho”-ing during the chorus is great), so the whole thing just purrs along on a very subtle bassline and some hand percussion – and Milian’s impeccably digitized, surprisingly effective vocals. You really do think she can do anything for three minutes, which, given how personality-free most of Milian’s work to date has been, is maybe too fitting.
[9]

Doug Robertson: While it lacks an immediate kick, which is going to lead to a lot of people dismissing it out of hand, repeated listens demonstrate an infectious, subtle groove that burrows its way deep inside you, growing more powerful and more potent with each exposure. The pop version of swine flu? Let’s hope so. Although without the associated death toll. Obviously. That’d be bad.
[8]