The Singles Jukebox

Boy very much not in da corner any more…

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[6.60]

Matt Cibula: That Brit sumbitch done did it again.
[8]

Katherine St Asaph: Thanks to Dizzee, the rhyme “vomit / quicker than a comet” exists. What luck.
[3]

Mark Sinker: DIZZEE IS MY GOD! A: this slathers a thousand well loved disco riffs and hooks RIGHT ON TOP of one another, like Stravinsky in a Russian fairground. B: in a song about the experience of the classic British disco it deploys the lines “drink till we can’t stand up then VOMIT…” DIZZEE!
[10]

Alfred Soto: I didn’t mind Dizzee’s sudden interest in Eurodisco and adapting the likes of the Adventures of Stevie V; his flow remains unimpeachable, as is his knack for thinking in song. Here he exploits disco’s communitarian vibe to crash a party to which he thought he deserved an invitation. Three albums after Boy in Da Corner, he’s still a super-sponge. “Holiday” and “Bad Behaviour” have already covered this terrain, though, so as infectious as it is he’s treading water.
[7]

Iain Mew: As his third successive single with the word “Dirtee” in the title, its formulaic nature hardly comes as a surprise. There’s no doubt that Dizzee can do (and has done) much better things, even in the realm of the massive pop banger, but this gets its job done in a straightforward and good-natured manner that’s hard to actually dislike.
[5]

Martin Skidmore: Involving a Staple Singers sample and the one who could sing out of One True Voice, this is a frantic disco number. I hope it’s not watching him do a football song with James Corden, but I seem to be going off him a touch. I think it’s that energetic house music means his personality more or less vanishes, and that’s what made me smile every time I heard him.
[7]

Doug Robertson: Dizzee seems content to not so much embrace the mainstream, but become the official court jester and do whatever novelty nonsense will help keep him in the public’s heart as the sound of the summer season. Any edge he might once have possessed has vanished, replaced by the smooth, polished surface of a sphere instead. It’s fun, it’s bouncy, and I’ll probably end up dancing to it, but as discos go, this is about as dirtee as your average mobile wedding kind. But at least he brings his own lights.
[5]

Tom Ewing: This hyperdrive version of disco dates not from the 70s but the late 90s — singles by Bus Stop, Clock, N-Trance et al which stripped ideas of poise, cool, sex etc out of the music in favour of a pure pleasure-rush of strings and basslines. Dizzee, in other words, is playing the role of Daz Sampson or Ricardo Da Force — and he’s doing it with glee: it’s a tribute not to disco but to his school discos, and I can’t listen to it without grinning.
[8]

Chuck Eddy: This would possibly come off less clumsy if Diz didn’t feel the need to put “disco” in big neon lights, and he just let everybody figure disco out for themselves, from the sound. But I still can’t argue with his tempo, or Chic strings. He explicitly admits an influence that hip-hop’s been running away from for a quarter century. Cool.
[8]

Ian Mathers: I like disco. I have enjoyed some of Dizzee’s singles in the past. They don’t go together well at all. Points awarded for the backing vocalists’ “the pleasure is yours to define” (ooh err!), the disco strings, and the way Dizzee’s exuberant “disco! disco! disco! disco!” does briefly make this seem like a good idea.
[5]