Cassie ft. Diddy – Must Be Love
After 70-gajillion leaks, Cassie finally puts out a proper single – and guess who’s dropped by to wish her luck…

[Video][Myspace]
[6.23]
Alex Ostroff: On first listen, this felt underwhelming and slight. THIS was Cassie’s lead single? After a year’s worth of leaks better than most things on pop radio? But insubstantial though it may seem, Must Be Love seeps into your mind. The guitar is warm and summery, and the triangle/bells are light but insistent in the background, while Cassie glides effortlessly above it all. The vibe is classic 90s Bad Boy, as evoked by Diddy’s return to his original moniker (although his presence is wholly unnecessary). In other circumstances, this would merit a 10, but Cassie can and has done better. If her sophomore album is ever going to be actually released, she needs to do better than just ‘great’.
[9]
Frank Kogan: The percussion suggests an outdoor ambiance, half-busy, like a market or a street cafe, Diddy just kind of genially there, representing the mundane, Cassie showing up and her dreamy presence being as inexplicably powerful as always.
[8]
Al Shipley: Worse singers have sounded better than Cassie, so let’s not get hung up on her chops like that’s the only problem. Whoever is patching her performance together in ProTools can’t seem to make line 1 from take 6 sound natural next to line 2 from take 17, and isn’t making much of an effort to layer her voice into faux-harmony. And she could still have saved it all if she had the slightest ability to emote, but let there never be said there’s no difference between a model and an actress.
[3]
John M. Cunningham: Cassie’s never been a particularly showy singer, probably because she has little to show, but she uses her vocal limitations to her advantage: everything I’ve heard from her is suffused with this vulnerable intimacy that draws me in, and when she does break out of her narrow range, it’s more dramatic than if she’d been doing scale runs the entire time. At the same time, this puts the onus on the rest of the track to sparkle, and though the warm Spanish guitar and hushed cafe clatter here set a seductive mood, it feels less well-crafted than her previous singles. Not to mention that Diddy’s verses are awfully extraneous.
[6]
Alex Macpherson: The late-night languor of delicate Spanish guitars and dusty crackles suits the compelling stillness of her voice to a tee, and as ever the magic is in the minutiae: those multitracked vocals at the end! Diddy’s “Bad Boy turned good” guest verses, meanwhile, what with their tortured “all through my pain, how could it be you?” angle amid references to Cannes and beaches made of white diamonds, are tantalisingly promising with regards to his imminent Last Train To Paris concept album.
[8]
Dave Moore: Mario Winans’s lovely Ryan Leslie-esque loop — super-smooth jazzy acoustic guitar chords w/ flamenco flourishes and a distant clanging — helps a gaggle of Cassies float through the song in all their entrancing waify majesty. But Jesus, Diddy, just STEP AWAY FROM THE SINGLE.
[6]
Martin Skidmore: A version of this breathtakingly lovely single without Diddy (or with someone who can suit the song better – I can imagine Prince Be of PM Dawn on this) would very probably get a 10 from me. Cassie enters a while in, small and subtle and sweet, her voice trembling up and down gorgeously, the music quietly tinkling, the very restrained backing vocals creating a swaying tonal watercolour wash. When Diddy is away this is magically, gently, swooningly beautiful, and I absolutely adore it. I can’t remember the last time I resented a guest rapper so much.
[8]
David Raposa: Love the production, love Cassie’s state-of-the-art singing on the chorus and in the background, but someone please remix this thing and dump the verses. Especially Diddy’s handiwork — whoever’s ghostwriting for him on this track must’ve also written the awful slab of street knowledge Farnsworth Bentley dispenses in this PSA.
[5]
Ian Mathers: Well, Diddy almost ruins things with the lines everyone is going to quote (“every passionate kiss blows my mind like a terrorist”), but this is fucking lovely enough that it doesn’t really matter, all circumspect Spanish guitar fillips and triangle spangles. Cassie remains a singer who lives and dies by her production, but on her really good songs (“Me & U,” obviously, but also “Just Friends” and “Is It You?”) she meshes with it well enough you wouldn’t want a more extroverted singer, and that’s especially true here, her most minimalist single since “Me & U” (although this is lush instead of stark). Now someone fetch us a Diddy-less edit.
[8]
Hillary Brown: Rather classy in a sort of Q-Tip vein (and why do LP sound effects equal fancy, anyway?), and Diddy manages to stay back for the most part, plus it’s got a hint of Rich Harrison in the cowbell rhythms, but it’s more of a groove than a bang, and, if I have to choose, I want the explosions and the hooks.
[5]
Jonathan Bradley: Cassie isn’t one for dominating an instrumental, but on “Must Be Love” she seems to sink even farther into the background than usual. In this case, she can afford to. This beat is quite a surprise; a spare and anomalously grimy rattler that has more in common with RZA’s haunted soundscapes than anything going on in R&B at the moment. Of course, it’s wasted on Diddy, a rapper who can deliver an affable verse, but usually doesn’t. I would have loved to hear Ghostface or Raekwon occupying the guest spot, but I guess a strong rapper would have made the supposed leading woman even more forgettable.
[6]
Martin Kavka: How many other blurbers successfully resisted the urge to include “must be hate”? Diddy’s rap is worse than his usual poor showing, but that bell rhythm in the background is so insufferable and oppressive in its constancy that I ended up dreaming an entire video centered on Cassie screeching at the boys ’round the campfire, letting them know that grub’s on.
[1]
Erika Villani: Diddy still can’t rap, Cassie still can’t muster up a personality, and the chorus is nothing more than the world’s stupidest couplet: “I know this can’t be love / but baby, this must be love.” But then there are those ‘90s touches – vinyl pops and a muffled thump of a beat – and that summery guitar, and Cassie harmonizing with herself, and I’m kind of hoping this will be all over the radio all summer long. I know this can’t be a good song, but baby, this must be a good song.
[8]
I have to apologize — the version of the Farnsworth PSA I heard on the radio must’ve been a minute long; the 30-second version I linked to doesn’t do it justice.
I just wished the team behind Cassie had the balls to go for one of the songs which really are HER, all her. This is, as many have mentioned, pleasant, and even more pleasant when Diddy’s not involved, but what about giving Cassie the benefit of the doubt? Maybe she should go indie so she wouldn’t have to make 100 tracks to release an album, and could get rid of all guest rappers.
In my perfect world the feel-good ‘Summer Charm’ (impossibly lightweight and impossibly excellent for its lightweightness) would be lead single, followed by ‘turn off the lights’ which shows the world how her detached, cold delivery is PERFECT for creating detached, cold, hook-up songs (better than any single other singer in the world), followed by ‘Nobody but you’ which is somewhere in between the two and has a nice the-dream vibe.
This is a more detailed preview of that Diddy concept album. I am totally on board with this. idk why y’all are hating, have you forgotten how great Press Play was?
Also, odds on Cassie being one of the two young ladies Diddy mentions? LOL I bet the other one is Aubrey O’Day. As a fully paid-up Cassie Fan Club member I have to say that I’m a bit over being invested in whether her career will happen, and if she decides to go with that terrible RedOne production as a single/new direction, I may well be over her.
Except for the score and the line about not being able to emote, I pretty much agree with Al. (“Emote” is the wrong word one way or another. There’s a presence that Cassie has that I’ve never been able to describe, but it’s not devoid of feeling. But on the other hand it’s not as if there’s, like, the passionate part of a song and she turns on the juice.) The track sounds like a sketch, with erasures and drawovers. In this instance I apparently like erasures and drawovers. And maybe the track wouldn’t be better without all of Diddy’s blundering around, which sets the stage for Cassie’s delicately powerful whatever. And I wouldn’t be surprised to learn that she has a say in the arranging of a lot of her stuff, since she’s as commandingly/eerily herself when working with the non-Ryan Leslies as she was when limited to him. But there are at least fifteen Cassie tracks I like more than this one. “Turn The Lights Off” would be my favorite. (Lex, I think she comes across fine on that RedOne/Akon thing that horrifies you: her voice is prettied up atypically, but still retains that vulnerable/powerful air of hers. But then, I like RedOne.)
Yeah, ‘Turn The Lights Off’ is my favourite Cassie leak, maybe one of my favourite songs ever. Most played on last.fm, anyway. But…it’s two years old now. I think if it was released as a single now I’d be weirdly underwhelmed.