The Singles Jukebox

OK, you can keep it…

[Video][Website]
[3.78]

Will Rivitz: Bazzi’s annotations of this song on Genius include the following sentence: “I really made the song less about a person but more about wanting to give people a feeling of acceptance in a really sad world right now.” Said annotation accompanies the following lyric: “Hit it from the back and drive you wild.” I don’t know if Bazzi understands that words have meanings.
[1]

Hannah Jocelyn: This has a weird Star Trek curse-style thing where every odd-numbered line is beautiful and then every even-numbered line is cringey. The first line is the already iconic “fucking precious” line, but “hit it from the back” kills the mood, then the “eyes” revives it, then “you’re mine” should be sweet but kind of creepy when he just met the girl… But then there’s the chorus, the best possible (only good possible?) result of “early-2000s CVScore applied to the trap era.” The amount of reverb would make Swae Lee blush, and the grandly romantic gestures, if flawed in execution, would cause any recipient of the song’s lyrics to blush too. I wish that chorus went on for longer, as the abrupt ending of “I just gotta say…” doesn’t work when the song is already so short as it is. Because without that chorus, it’s just a sparklier-than-average tune by a former Vine star, and with it, “Mine” has a real reason to be a massive hit.
[6]

Stephen Eisermann: If One Direction released their debut single in 2018, it would sound like this. Bazzi sounds cute and even with all the sugary corniness, it never comes across as too much, just too young for my taste.
[5]

Jonathan Bradley: The slow-dance tempo and tip-toeing chorus melody are far cuter than Bazzi, who would like to be a poster hung in a bedroom, but is only as exciting as wallpaper.
[3]

Katherine St Asaph: Get you a guy who can be edgy, goofy, sexy, and romantic at the same time — just at the same time, not lurching gracelessly between modes.
[4]

Iain Mew: I guess the abrupt switches of vocal mode are meant to have a similar effect to the pauses and lush swells of the instrumental. The actual result is Bazzi sounding like a worse version of Post Malone, Ed Sheeran, and Owl City, all in one song.
[3]

Micha Cavaseno: A charmless wall of gimmicks masquerading as a lover’s come on. Hell, there’s a lot of dating going on that kind of functions like this record, so I shouldn’t be too surprised. All the same, Bazzi’s grating warble is hardly sultry enough to make the moments in between the eye-rolling gags feel worth overcoming.
[1]

Alfred Soto: Finally — a warmer take on The Weeknd’s spacious misanthropy, capped by a vocal that mimics the occasional empathetic sweep of Swae’s falsetto. The stop-start rhythm gets me. Not much of a tune, but it gets me.
[6]

Ryo Miyauchi: “Mine” reminds me of the California dreamin’ crush song of Rex Orange County’s, except instead of a steady diet of Mac DeMarco-adjacent soft rock, Bazzi tuned into the blend of yesterday’s soul and boom-bap featured on Soulection radio. The music channels Los Angeles like it only knew of the city through an Instagram feed. And though he sings it sweet, “Mine” also sounds more like a caricature of how Bazzi imagines young love to feel.
[5]