The Singles Jukebox

Another “One”…

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[2.12]

Andy Hutchins: So very appropriately named. Khaled runs back “I’m the One” with the same lineup — minus the one guy who tried hard enough to come with “straight up out the Crescent, fly your bae down for the Essence” for that hot mess — and nearly the same formula: The infamously newly engaged Bieber does his louche douche act as if it were appealing even before that, Quavo could not be phoning his verse in any more if he had literally done it, and Chance is simultaneously embarrassed by his company and excited to be considered the caviar on the plate. This is slightly shorter, but that comes at the expense of giving the chipmunk sproing of the beat any space to breathe — there just had to be an incoherent three-part Bieber hook and a Bieber verse here, huh? So this is “The” … 
[1]

Jacob Sujin Kuppermann: Re-doing “I’m the One” but replacing 2017 Quavo with 2018 Quavo, exultant, post-fame Chance with pissy, post-backlash Chance, and Lil Wayne with Justin Bieber was never a good idea, but “No Brainer” fails to reach even the incredibly low bar that its concept sets up. Quavo’s verse alone is so dire that it inspires real concerns about the viability of DJ Khaled’s whole enterprise.
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Ashley John: The bumbling, meandering flip side to “I’m the One” where you wake up the morning after and see him in the light without the blurred glow of rum and Cokes. 
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Tobi Tella: This is one of the most blatant attempts at grabbing a hit I’ve seen recently, and yet everything about it is so un-catchy, bland and uninteresting that it’s hard to even look at it as a real song. It’s clear that Chance and especially Quavo are phoning it in, and even Bieber trying to inject some life doesn’t do much when he’s given that nothing of a chorus. DJ Khaled has proven to not have very many tricks in his bag (see: trying to remake “Shining” with “Top Off”) and this boring retread is showing his diminishing returns.
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Alfred Soto: These exercises in multi-platform stream maximizing aren’t joyless so much as allergic to joy. Up and down it goes, each performer mouthing his prescreened allotments of macho testifying. The title writes its own jokes, but I won’t flatter Khaled. 
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Nortey Dowuona: Justin sucks, Quavo is lazy and Chance… is actually hilariously wack, which makes me give him some points. The music itself is lazy, average pop trap which bears no brunt of problems — everyone else fucked up.
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Micha Cavaseno: Still staggered that the industry expects RnBass aesthetics to be all we should do in 2018, years and years after the style peaked creatively. Bieber here sounds surprisingly pitchy, Quavo is per usual just the limit of his generic capabilities, Chance is a bunch of infantile chortles to make up for no personality. It’s not that such an industry identikit record could come out from a braintrust as this lot that has me astonished as much as the fact that we’ve LITERALLY had this record before from them, and far less cynically!
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Will Adams: Finally, DJ Khaled’s cry of “another one!” achieves its inevitable connotation of rote mill-churning.
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