Monday, March 10th, 2014

Salaam Remi ft. Akon – One in the Chamber

In which the Singles Jukebox Metaphor Preservation Society hauls Akon in for questioning…


[Video][Website]
[3.30]

Scott Mildenhall: At risk of seeming dense, what is this actually about? The woman Akon is talking about “did everything” — good for Akon — and though she was “a pain” — like some kind of working men’s club comedian’s wife or something — it was all worth it for “her brain” — her mind, presumably — not that that completely detracted from her being “colder than glass.” More than that though, she had “one in the chamber.” A metaphorical bullet? An unborn child? A partner? Whatever it was, it made sure sleeping with her ruined everything for Akon; why he thought he was “out of danger,” or even in it to begin with, is unclear. He feels he “should’ve known the first time” as well, and if — whatever it was he should have known — that was because even though the “first time felt good” it was “the worst time,” how was that juxtaposition possible, other than with the benefit of hindsight or with it being the only time? Maybe he should have just thought things through a bit more.
[5]

Andy Hutchins: I watch all the videos (if they exist) for the songs I review, and so I watched the one for “One in the Chamber” on YouTube, then scrolled down to see two comments of startling clarity.

Billy Coskun sad melody. when I hear this song in the future I’ll remember 2014 Jay Leno

Billy Coskun did I mention I saw Jay 3 times, once on Santa Monica pier. once in Hermosa beach driving his Lamborghini and once in his Mustang SVT

While I will admit that I have no idea what the point of Billy’s comments are, and very much pity a person who saw this song performed on Jay Leno’s show, then looked it up and left two YouTube comments, they are both clearer and more valuable to humanity than this song. I think Akon is either lamenting impregnating a woman, lamenting having sex with a pregnant woman, lamenting having sex with a woman who literally had a single bullet in the literal chamber of a literal gun, lamenting having sex with a woman who had one (1) something in a sex dungeon, lamenting having sex with a woman who ruined sex with anyone else for him, or whining about having had sex. (Akon’s self-flagellation has never been particularly compelling.) And the video, in which Akon is rich and has sex and then gets shot at, makes even less sense. The greatest failure here isn’t the waste of a beat that Nas could have underwhelmed on, Akon deciding to make the polar opposite of “I Just Had Sex,” Salaam Remi’s inexplicable decision to launch a solo career with this song, or the song continuing after the line “There’s nothing more to say now”; It’s the existence of any of this.
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Brad Shoup: If you forgot that Remi hit that next level with Amy Winehouse, this gender-flipped boom-bapper will remind you. A man who’s made a career from impeccable choices (see the spaghetti touches at the end) still lets Akon get silly (the fillip in his pronunciation of “everything”, the zombie spin he puts on “brain,” and especially the falsetto section). The track gets appealingly widescreen in the second half, but perhaps it should have happened as soon as Akon mentioned a “movie zine.” If only to drown him out.
[5]

Katherine St Asaph: Remi, who produced half of Back to Black as well as Nas, Mis’Teeq and a host of other R&B guys left unnamed because I’d rather write the word Mis’Teeq again, just put out a solo album, and its title track is as good an intro as any to his general steez: turning R&B stories into noir and committing to the point of sheer camp. (Check “Sins of My Father,” one of the many solid album tracks buried in the torrent of microtargeted genres that was Looking 4 Myself: “But she didn’t… make me pay for it… with my money — AHHH!”) Feminist noir this is not, and your tolerance for it probably depends on your tolerance for femme-fatale stuff (litmus test: have you read a True Detective thinkpiece this week?), as well as for camp and for Akon — specifically, Akon making climaxes of lines like “She’s a drama queen — queen” or “I banged her!” Yeah, OK, this is probably terrible, but I’m cool with camp and noir, sorta… miss Akon(?!), and admire the hell out of undercovered commitment.
[6]

Jonathan Bradley: Salaam Remi has a long and unexpectedly varied résumé that reaches back to Ini Kamoze’s “Here Comes the Hotstepper” and the Fugees’ “Fu-Gee-La” and takes in singles by Jazmine Sullivan and Alicia Keys. But his most characteristic sound is a dark and brooding boom-bap, characterised by cracking snares and creeping basslines. It manages to be spare and claustrophobic at the same and it’s well suited to New York rappers who want to maintain their hometown’s traditions without sounding like they’re auditioning for a golden age costume party. His sensibility was one well suited to cutting the Gordian Knot that Nas had made of his career round the end of the millennium: once the two had collaborated on “Made You Look” in 2003, Nas seemed to realize he could settle into a reasonably fecund professional autumn by recording  endless iterations of the same. “One in the Chamber” would be a great Nas track — unless it would be too on-the-nose to have him rhyming over a sample of Mobb Deep’s “Shook Ones Part II” — and it might be a decent Akon track too if he’d channelled the eerie sorrow of “Locked Up” or his Jeezy collab “Soul Survivor.” “She had one in the chamber” is a pungent metaphor, but it’s about the only thing Akon does right here. Remi’s noir-western beat deserves better than a bathetic stream of single-syllable a/a/a/a rhymes, and it really deserves better than a chorus that culminates with the moronic lament, “I still went out and banged her” like the world’s most remorseful frat pledge.
[3]

Crystal Leww: I get that this is campy, that the sincerity is self-aware and slightly false, but Akon’s “I banged her!” cannot be set over this music and not make me grimace. The rest of the song is pretty one-note and boring, too.
[4]

Madeleine Lee: The subtext and double meaning found in noir is largely a product of its time — the Hays Code, dime novels’ tin-eared reproductions of street slang — but it’s since become coded into the genre. This is why the vaguely dangerous clichés in Bond themes work, and why a dude’s recounting of a particularly bad hookup to his buddies does not, no matter how smoothly classic the setting he’s telling it in. And no, “I miss her brain” doesn’t count.
[4]

Alfred Soto: “I miss her brain,” Akon whines before rhyming “brain” and “train.” Working with Miguel didn’t convince Salaam Remi to avoid holding himself so cheaply.
[3]

Anthony Easton: One of the stupidest collections of non sequitur and failed extended metaphor ever. The overly dramatic dick measuring that musically surrounds it drags the whole mess even further into the muck. 
[2]

Mallory O’Donnell: This might legitimately be the stupidest shit I have ever heard in my life. One in the chamber? She had to poop? She was pregnant? You cycled through a list of trending cliches and settled on this one without really caring what it meant? You found a dull early ’90s backbeat and slapped some Franco-American spaghetti western crap on top? You called up Akon because he’s such a giant turd that he might actually be corralled into performing his singing-type services upon it? The only positive spin I can see here is that everyone involved in this will one day come to their senses and go out into the middle of a field and shoot themselves in the fucking head(s), however many in the chamber that might require.
[1]

Reader average: [5.5] (2 votes)

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5 Responses to “Salaam Remi ft. Akon – One in the Chamber”

  1. I probably should have just written “This might legitimately be the stupidest shit I have ever heard in my life.”

  2. But then I wouldn’t have had the joy of reading “a woman who literally had a single bullet in the literal chamber of a literal gun”. Actually this whole thing was a joy to read when I woke up, possibly funnier than the dramatic pregnancy test shot at the end of the video.

  3. I hope everyone knows brain = oral pleasure here in this year of our Lord 2014.

  4. Also, just wanna mention how much I, too, enjoyed Andy’s review.

  5. well, yes, “brain” has one meaning unless you take into consideration the screengrab, and its literal depiction of a literal sex-induced aneurysm