Britney Spears – Ooh La La
If nothing else, a worthy successor to the song Mya and Blackstreet made for The Rugrats Movie…
[Video][Website]
[6.25]
Alfred Soto: Not a Faces cover, which is not to say she couldn’t illuminate the original. (Does she know better than what she knew then?) No, it’s Britney sprinkling unnatural chirrups over acoustic strums and vertiginous rhythmo-skronks straight out of K-Pop, the only American performer whose laryngeal permutations dovetail with the genre’s conventions. It’s also fun to listen to.
[7]
Rebecca A. Gowns: I heard this song on the radio and had a really hard time trying to figure out which K-pop group had finally made it big in America. And then I looked it up and said “this is Britney Spears?!?!” This is full of great pop tricks: the intro with the volume turning up on an unrelated series of notes so you can’t quite tell what song it is; the Toni Basil/Madonna cheerleader march verses; the lighter-than-air chorus sung by a trio of ageless Britneys; the nonsense syllables left in the hook, as if it was an ad-lib that was never filled in with a punchier description of a sweetheart. It’s an airy cotton candy morsel, perfectly fit for summertime radio (and the Smurfs 2 soundtrack).
[7]
Brad Shoup: The partite production would seem to mean that everyone involved has been studying their Korean. In two of those parts, Spears yields the spotlight to a couple of pretty chord progressions, one a Erlend Øye thing, the other a high-flown synthpop deal. Even on a track that shifts gears so jarringly, she locates all the pleasure centers (while, wonderfully, indulging her cod-British accent). This is a nearly pure confection. I don’t think she’s giving it her full attention, but the Doctor is, and that’s enough for me lately.
[8]
Scott Mildenhall: At the start it sounds like this is going to turn into some kind of remix of Stevie Nicks’s “Stand Back.” It doesn’t. What instead emerges is something a little non-cohesive — for all its sights on simplicity, it’s quite an un-simple song — but positively peppy and PG-rated. It’s certainly worthy of its place on The Smurfs 2 soundtrack alongside – brace yourself — “I’m Too Smurfy.” It’s not exactly “I’ve Got A Little Puppy,” but it’ll do.
[6]
Katherine St Asaph: It’s pointless to rag on some throwaway song from the Smurfs soundtrack (even if it comes with the most hilarious PR statement this year), but “Ooh La La” is emblematic of everything wrong with Britney Spears’s career since Femme Fatale. Britney, who used to sound weird and froggy and distinctive, now sounds either like Robyn (and not in the good way) or like the Smurfette of vocals, a generic feminine perk. The chorus (“baby come with me and be my ooh la la”) is awful in the same way “If U Seek Amy” was, except this time it doesn’t even make sense dirty. The vocal breakdown is tired, the acoustic buttrock is more tired, and the will.i.amscray bridge is beyond tired, which naturally means Spears’ camp is betting on it. “Ooh La La” probably sounded better as the demo by Fransisca Hall and Lola Blanc (the woman from Interpol’s “Lights,” and the reason this is called “Ooh La La” in the first place), because there’s no Britney here. “Ooh La La” is the sound of a woman beholden to 20 people making horrible decisions. Can we get them conservatorships?
[2]
Jonathan Bogart: It sounds like a leftover, or even a collection of the most recognizable bits, from Femme Fatale — the Dr. Luke keyboard pulse, the bubble-pop Bloodshy & Avant breakdown on the middle eight, the exhausted come-on of the title — but in the genre of pop-song-attached-to-a-terrible-computer-animated-movie-for-kids, it stands head and shoulders above the inspiro-dreck being peddled by Owl City, Pharrell, an ex-Swedish House Mafioso, and even (sob) Beyoncé this summer, mostly by ignoring movie, kids, and convention altogether and sticking like glue to post-Blackout Britney’s trusty flirty-domme schtick. “Baby come with me and be my ooh-la-la” doesn’t mean anything, of course; and that’s what makes it such a bubbly relief. Compare to the bathetic significance of a power ballad sung by the actual voice of Smurfette.
[7]
Anthony Easton: The first 2 minutes of this is angular, mechanical and kind of anonymous, but the abstraction around 2:55, where she seems unable to speak, where the programming breaks down, is one of the smartest moments of pop this year. That it moves back to an almost unanchored chorus is a disappointment.
[7]
Will Adams: Britney shines here, sounding like she’s having more fun than ever. The rapped bits alone could debunk any naysayers who claim she’s just a cipher. But there’s also the way she sells the gentle absurdity of “baby come with me and be my ooh la la” as well as she could have fifteen years ago. I wish I could get past the production: another example of Dr. Luke’s attempt to be all things to all people. “Ooh La La” is half summery FM gold, half hard-edged club thump. These components sound fine on their own, but there is no attempt to bring them together, so they jar instead of flow.
[6]
this is like the happy version of “Scream And Shout” (also it’s better).
No.
this is absolutely awful and the high scores baffle me.
One of the rare times I cheated and looked at the accumulated scores before posting, and your criticism, Katherine, made me pause and think.
“Baby come with me and be my ooh la la” is better than “If you seek Amy” because I read it as just a dumb euphemism (unless there’s a sex joke I’m missing), whereas the latter is trying to be clever and only succeeding partway.
It took me several listens to warm up to. Hearing it in a playlist, where it snuck up on me uncluttered by Schtroumpfs: The XTreme Generation branding, helped a lot.
The readers apparently hate this. Good readers!
The video upsets me for reasons I cannot articulate.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NVcSNnqRD0c
The fact that she’s borrowing from the California Gurls Academy of sexualized children’s-book mugging? That when she fist-pumps she looks like a preschool teacher at an elementary school pizza party? That it’s blatantly a trailer, not just quietly?
Her youthfulness is eery.