The Singles Jukebox

The second video this year your editor owned an entire outfit from already (guess the first)…

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[4.10]Micha Cavaseno: While you were busy complaining about Sia, the worst voice in music has finally returned to the kingdom, bearing gifts in new hideous “exotic” accents. The return emerges with assumptions of wisdom, yodeling grotesqueness, and her usual colonialist bullshit.
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Alfred Soto: On her first two records she treated genres and producers like items bought with a ten-dollar bill at a rummage sale, and good for her. Now she’s hoping for a Rihanna-Sia top five hit.
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W.B. Swygart: Sassy Ellie Goulding And 27 Other Halloween Costumes That Aren’t Worth The Effort
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Will Adams: Or, How Not to Do a Comeback. Reheated dancehall and Stefani singing like she’s auditioning for the role of Sia in a high school production; it’s not even worth the melodrama of a line like “if we give up, then we’re gonna die.”
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Anthony Easton: This is weird. The sound is not anonymous — Rock Steady inspired, pop infused, brilliant production (see how she sings that line about getting warm) — but for someone who has one of the most distinctive voices in pop, “Baby Don’t Lie” just doesn’t sound like her. I want like a dozen other voices singing the lyrics in the midst of this updated remix of a Slim Aarons luxe-in-Mystique tropical production.
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Dan MacRae: It’s a shame Gwen didn’t trot out “Wind It Up” again to see if it might fly in 2014. “Baby Don’t Lie” just strikes me as alarmingly plain. It’s the sort of song I imagine was pumped out in a cubicle to pair up with an also-ran YA film adaptation. “Check out Gwen Stefani’s new single in the trailer for Travis Crumbler: Defiler Of The Warlock’s Pastels!”
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Kat Stevens: If you told me this was Serbia’s 2015 Eurovision entry I would absolutely believe you, and absolutely put money on it failing to make it out of the semi-finals.
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Josh Winters: Never has Olympic ceremony-level jubilation been so misplaced, or forgettable.
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Brad Shoup: She cut a big ol’ portentous blanket out of Maroon cloth, the sort of pounding, yearning New Wave track that probably should have started with that synth/human hybrid hook. The taunting bridge refers to her Neptunian pop peak, but there’ve been a lot of less interesting voices warped a whole lot weirder since then.
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Katherine St Asaph: I don’t know what pop radio sounds like anymore; as someone who used to keep a notepad by her bed to record every song the DJ played and now makes non-trivial income from writing about the stuff, I probably should. But I only know what pop radio sounded like in cars in the late 2000s. It sounded like despair, a determined minor key, and it felt like drive — death drive, the kind of drive best felt while actually driving. Listening to those hits produces almost a synesthetic response; each song teleports me to specific NC interstate exits. Junior year, temping at a custom-publishing company: that lonely curve of sprawl and strip malls that leads from Wendover into Burlington on which hits like “I Gotta Feeling” and the inescapable dratted “Down” felt like zombification music for dead-end commuters. Senior year, interning at the Winston-Salem paper: “I Made It” for flying smug down the power-plant parking lot expanses past I-40’s Death Valley at commute-in-the-morning with a job ahead of me; “OMG” for slumping the hour home through dry windshield heat and traffic jams, sneaking Blackberry sudoku moves and classmates’ tweets from NYC sites and DC parties that felt so distant from the stranded car and void of a love song. In Chapel Hill it was “Take It Off” and “Rock That Body” and “LoveGame,” music for determined dancing with three drinks as sunk costs and disaster at the end. In Durham it was “Tonight,” “Blow,” and “Till the World Ends,” music for relationships and jobs already rotting on the stems. Even radio’s mainstays were bleak: “Say It Right” and “Sweet Dreams” and “Disturbia” and the pinnacle of this sound — Dave Moore calls it the “Rihanna death drive“: “Don’t Stop the Music.” Gwen Stefani predates all of this, and the pop zeitgeist is too scattered to sustain a coherent mood let alone this one, but “Baby Don’t Lie” is practically a time trip. The beginning echoes the xx sample from Rihanna’s “Drunk in Love,” the spoken-word interlude its one concession to Gwen then; the rest could have been played on the radio anytime from 2009 to 2011. It would have been bleak filler back then, but I miss back then, and I miss bleak filler.
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