The Singles Jukebox

On a scale from 1 to 10, how inevitable was this?…

[Website]
[4.30]

Alex Ostroff: Given the explosion in popularity of the noxious genre that merges the unpleasant whining and misogyny of emo with the gloriously fun noise and misogyny of crunk, it was only a matter of time before Lil Jon attempted to regain relevance via a crabcore collaboration. By all rights, this should be awful — that it’s not is mostly due to Lil Jon’s seemingly unending reserves of enthusiasm and genuine sense of fun. Unfortunately, the production leans more crabcore than it does crunk. At its best, crunk balanced dissonant noise with a quasi-minimalist use of space and silence. 3OH!3’s reliance on Autotune and synth washes manages to simultaneously replace Lil Jon’s gloriously sleazy strip-club sonics with too-pristine-by-half electro and bombard listeners with overproduction, until any potential for fun is smothered.
[6]

Jonathan Bogart: There’s a certain elegant logic to the pairing — Lil Jon was trading in gold-plated party-hearty sleaze when the 3OH!3 dudes were still in middle school — but the juxtaposition mostly only points out how tame and suburban 3OH!3 really are. The badass SuperFinger-throwing anti-heroes of their own songs, here they sound almost respectable in the presence of the Master Horndog. And without his trademark thundering crunk behind him, even Lil Jon sounds a lil lost.
[5]

Martin Skidmore: I always like Lil Jon yelling at me, and that’s true here, but musically it is 30h!3’s track, electro rock with them rapping as if they have heard nothing since the Beasties, which is a giant waste of talent, and I have no idea why Jon wants anything to do with them. There are lots of better guests on the album, so I don’t understand why we get this one thrown at us.
[3]

Ian Mathers: A friend of mine with a peculiar sense of humour has the “SHOTS! SHOTS! SHOTS! SHOTS!” bit from this on a loop as his ringtone. Watching him annoy people with it is about eight times as good as the best bits of the actual song, i.e. the ones without 3OH!3 (who keep almost reverting to the same melody they always use). Quick, someone point out to Lil’ Jon that he’s better than this.
[3]

Anthony Easton: What does Lil Jon add to the genius of 3OH!3?
[5]

Pete Baran: Of the many revisionist innovations in the Russell Crowe Robin Hood movie, perhaps the saddest omission was the iconic meeting and quarterstaff battle between Robin and Little John. However, Crowe could make up for it (and the whole sorry film) by taking a quarterstaff and bludgeoning Lil Jon until his jaw breaks and he can no longer growl his infantile nonsense over any more tracks like this.
[2]

Alex Macpherson: It’s almost a relief that this collaboration, as inevitable as concussion following a car crash, has now happened, so now we can move past it as a culture. A silver lining: maybe working with someone as past-his-prime as Lil Jon means that 3OH!3’s career is now on its downwards slope? If so, can we chuck Ke$ha on this for the remix?
[3]

Alfred Soto: With vocals so moronic that they create an unexpected sense of expectation just before the next interjection, the Euroglide lubricant of a backing track is easier to take. But not like.
[4]

Kat Stevens: This song is a) dreadfully irresponsible b) an uncomfortably accurate description of my feelings at 4.55pm most weekdays.
[7]

Chuck Eddy: Probably exactly as good, and as important, as any pass-the-torch collaboration George Clinton may have done with the Red Hot Chili Peppers in the mid ’80s. (Not gonna check if there was one.)
[5]