The Singles Jukebox

This is a request Mr. Radio Man…

[Video][Website]
[5.50]

Hazel Southwell: Remember Black Eyed Peas before Fergie when they were sort of like a less interesting version of the Roots? I guess this but now they are a less catchy version of the Black Eyed Peas. Pleasantly understated but Will.i.Am has forgotten how to not deliver lines like he’s not over an enormobanger.
[5]

Thomas Inskeep: This could be a 20-year-old lost single by the Roots, which is about the highest praise I can deliver. “Street Livin'” is a political non-hot take anchored by a mournful horn sample and sounds 100% nothing like anything BEP have done in at least 15 years. It sounds, in fact, like early BEP, when they were a Fergie-less crew of backpacker hip-hoppers. It’d be easy to mock this — because Black Eyed Peas — but it’s actually a fine single, just one utterly out of time.
[7]

Alfred Soto: They released “Where is the Love?” fifteen years ago, using Motown gloss to sneak in disses of the CIA during the height of Iraq War hysteria. Fifteen years later, will.i.am, Taboo and apl.de.ap are no less clumsy about these disses, but I’m ready to give’em a pass because I bet they still earn a mint from “I Gotta Feeling.” The jazz sample stinks of death. will.i.am sounds drained of hope. Nothing has changed. “No way out of the Reaganomics” — no way, brothers.  
[7]

Ryo Miyauchi: While “Street Livin'” can sound like a too-convenient back to basics after rewriting their place in music as proto-EDM party starters, it’s only the truth that the B.E.P. came up as earnest backpackers first. And really, the straightforward reporting does better than their more popular and more out-of-touch takes on rally pop. The rapping isn’t, say, Ice Cube, but there are hundreds more raps of this quality by others who get by with less critical backlash from verses vaguely scanning as political.
[5]

Micha Cavaseno: I’m kind of happy that an actual L.A. Backpacker record full of both stern sanctimony, strong technique and structure and modern exhaustion with the contradictions of the world around them came out in 2018. I’m also incredibly happy that its not the kind of half-assed attempts fans of Kendrick Lamar and Vince Staples have been foisting on me, but amazingly its from longtime veterans like B.E.P. who’d I’d written off (along with many others) as too caught up in the rapture of pop chasing. A fitting sort of surprise with delight that they chose not to let their last notes be blinding burn out, but fiery condemnation.
[7]

Crystal Leww: The last time we heard from the Black Eyed Peas, they were in the middle of co-inventing EDM-pop with Lady Gaga, which pretty much still endures today. To this day, that sound is deemed as “trash music” by rockists and high-brow poptimists, who preferred the theatrics of Gaga over the unsubtle baps of BEP. To say that “Street Livin'” is a surprise would be an understatement — they’ve overtorqued in the opposite direction by making conscious rap. Unfortunately, it’s a mess. This fake deep nonsense does go after some of the systemic problems at play, but also uses the kind of rhetoric that Tr*mp would use around black on black crime, how TV is rotting the youth of the nation, and how poor youth are poor because they’d rather buy new Nikes. Oh, and on top of that, it’s boring, too.
[2]