The Singles Jukebox

And finally we find out, once and for all, who actually watched The Idol! (Yes, we fell short on the CONTROVERSY, but we sure did learn a lot today…)

[Video]
[3.26]

Aaron Bergstrom: Facts I have learned in the last fifteen minutes: (1) This was written for a TV show that scored a 19% on Rotten Tomatoes and was almost immediately canceled. (2) One of the main plot points of the show is that this song isn’t very good and is actively hindering the attempted comeback of the pop star who performs it. (3) The pop star herself doesn’t even like it. (4) That pop star is played by Johnny Depp’s daughter, who is very much not a pop star in real life. (5) The song was written as an obvious parody of The Weeknd … by The Weeknd himself. It is both boring and deeply unsettling at the same time, but I guess that was the goal? So, congratulations, I hate it.
[0]

Rose Stuart: “World Class Sinner / I’m a Freak” has the same problems as The Idol: it’s not just bad, it’s obviously bad, in a way that becomes only more stark when you know what it’s trying to do. The song is a parody of woman-centered sex jams that doesn’t understand why the originals work. It tries to give Tove Lo–especially with the moans in the beat, the only interesting idea the song has–but falls flat. The song wants to drip with sex, but the lyrics feel more like an oil spill than a tease, unless you happened to take a sip of your drink just in time for the line “and every weekend/ I’ve gotta find someone to bang.” Musically, it’s a low drone, with Depp sounding like your bored coworker at karaoke while the instrumental lies cold and lifeless underneath her. Worse still, the droning beat, oversexed yet sexless lyrics, and attempts at bravado that are more humiliating than impressive are from a song by The Weeknd, the lost companion to “The Hills” and “Earned It.” While a singer delivering a terrible acting performance is a long and well-worn road, “World Class Sinner / I’m a Freak” is even more damaging to The Weeknd’s reputation than The Idol‘s long list of damages. A bad performance and an embarrassing series of tweets can be forgiven, but “World Class Sinner / I’m a Freak” says the worst thing a song can: if this is the hit The Weeknd writes for his passion project, maybe he’s not as good as we thought. Maybe he never was. 
[1]

Katherine St Asaph: Producer Asa Taccone co-wrote “Dick in a Box” and also a Charlotte Gainsbourg song, a factoid that explains this single better than anything you or I can write. You have a nepo baby dropping “Barbie Girl” references, extolling the virtues of the “dumb but cute” himbo ratio (which isn’t even phrased as a ratio) and bragging about looking for “someone to bang” — all played as unironically dead-eyed seduction. Even without watching The Idol — because why whould anyone do that — it’s exceedingly obvious that this was intended as a “Buddha’s Delight” atrocity. It’s also typical that the Weeknd couldn’t imagine a woman delivering one of his standard scumbag songs without adding bitchy gold-digger lines and half-assed pseudo-femdom-but-actually-sub posturing. But that backing track — crystalline, nocturnal, perfect — is as undeniable as the song is unserious. (Ciara’s “Dance Like We’re Making Love” comes to mind.) A corrosive fave.
[5]

Taylor Alatorre: “But that’s not what ratios are!! That doesn’t make any sense!!!”” I scream, helplessly banging my fists against the sealed glass walls of the enclosure. The woman on the other side offers only a forlorn smile and a set of downcast eyes, replying in a small, apologetic voice, “I know. But I can’t do anything about it. I’m trapped here, in a fictional hit song within a fictional universe, where the normal laws of sense-making and hit-making don’t apply. As long as it sounds vaguely like something that would’ve made the bottom rungs of the Rhythmic charts five to ten years ago, that’s all they really care about.” Hearing this, I strike the wall with my fist one last time before slumping down onto the tiled linoleum, muttering something about a “Lonely Island Popstar throwaway” as I shake my head in resignation. “If you want, though,” the woman continues, “you can pretend it’s supposed to be a parody of one of those loopy Max Martin-written lines.” “You mean like, ‘now that I’ve become who I really are?'” “Yeah, that one.”
[4]

Ian Mathers: I never watched the show — is there an in-universe reason for this being so boring yet so ostensibly horny? Did they hire a Depp for the method authenticity of not being very good at music?
[2]

Josh Winters: As the only person at the Jukebox who has admitted to watching the entirety of The Idol (hear me out), I find myself at a loss when I try to think of how the context of the show helps to make a case for the strength of this song. If the showrunning team was self-aware in how the show folded into the banality and vapidity it was trying to depict, the big risk they took didn’t really pay off. And if Lily, Abel, and co. thought this was a quality tune, might I suggest they take a class at the Ally School of Pop Songwriting if they ever get the chance to go for a second season? What tries to present itself as an irresistible appetizer delivers only empty calories that leave you questioning what the hell you just ate, and in that sense “World Class Sinner / I’m a Freak” does its job in representing the experience of watching The Idol without having to see a single episode.
[4]

Claire Biddles: I actually watched all of The Idol in my capacity as a citizen of Troye Sivan Nation (“Rush” would have gotten a [10] from me!!), and had the show actually succeeded as a satire/take-down/whatever it was supposed to be, this would have gotten a higher score. It’s a decent facsimile of a dead-behind-the-eyes sexy comeback, but in the context of the show it’s positioned as serious and actually transgressive (I think?) It’s not knowing, so it doesn’t work at all. “Every weekend I’m trying to find someone to bang” got a genuine laugh from me though, so I guess I’ll give it a:
[2]

Harlan Talib Ockey: I did not watch The Idol, and I absolutely will not be watching it knowing the horrors it contains. But this is obviously and literally a Weeknd song. I can hear him singing it. The lyrics are so hilariously over-the-top that there is no way to read this other than campy irony. (And they’re still not too far off from some Weeknd songs.) It’s objectively funny that the Weeknd’s parody song sounds almost exactly like the rest of his discography, but it is a truth universally acknowledged that most fictional songs written to be bad will end up being very good.
[7]

Leah Isobel: These hooks are big and juicy, but Lily-Rose Depp is a screen actor, not a pop performer; she doesn’t have the vocal charisma or presence to really sell this, and I can hear The Weeknd’s ghost in the empty space between her and the song. That could be by design. But I can also hear that ghost wrestling with the spectre of camp — and, fortunately for us all, losing.
[5]

Alfred Soto: Based on a show I’ve never heard of and am supposed to despise, “I’m a Freak” drops one of the more unexpected “bitch” lines in recent years and is okeedokee as far as mid-tempo synth jams. Docked a notch for the flat vocal.
[4]

Joshua Minsoo Kim: I still remember when I first tried talking dirty, and this girl had to be like, “No, you don’t have the inflection right. Say it more like this.” It was funny and fun, and I’m grateful we communicated so openly, for both our sakes. It’s rare you hear a song that channels this sort of unpracticed unsexy, the kind where you end up thinking, “Oh, so no one’s told you yet…?” I laugh every time Lily-Rose Depp sings, “Get ready to become my bitch” without any intensity, or when she mentions “whip and chains” with the enthusiasm of someone reading a grocery list. And then she throws me for a loop during the bridge, mistaking speed for seduction. “[I’m] no beginner,” she eventually claims. It’s okay, I tried saving face too.
[6]

Tara Hillegeist: One of those single-line critiques that’s always stuck with me for the precision with which it said, with both empathy and brutality, the exact failings of what its writer was tasked with reviewing was a now-vanished review of the then-new debut single from the Pussycat Dolls, “Don’t Cha.” The review noted that Tori Alamaze’s original release of the song, from her own attempt at a solo career, had the energy, edge, and personality to give the song’s boast about “a freak like me” actual weight, while the Dolls couldn’t sound less sincerely freakish if they’d actually tried. In much the same way, I can’t pretend my reaction to this song isn’t colored by the working experience that comes from my having a girlfriend I’m blessed to be the domme for in a 24/7 D/s relationship. No matter how thirsty and yearning they might be to get the good good strap, no self-respecting submissive in the world would be able to fool themselves enough into believing a word of a performance that sounded like the limp, unremarkable delivery Depp provides for “so get down on your knees and get ready to become my bitch” for a fucking second, much less long enough to respect her with a second of their fucking. It’s insulting to every single girl who wants to be a bitch for someone to act like they don’t deserve a better effort than this. I mean, for Christ’s sake, they’ll get freakier than this in public at the Vatican.
[1]

Brad Shoup: No I did not watch The Idol. Yes my head slumped to my chest when I heard “whip and chain”. I like that it’s languid; when Depp picks up the cadence it never bodes well. 
[4]

Nortey Dowuona: As someone who admires Prince’s incredible musical talent and dreams to reassert control of his art, let us never forget he married a teenager and conceived a child with her once he could not legally be prosecuted for it. And then made a whole press conference to dump her. And tried to kill Sinead O’Connor for covering his song. And fired Jimmy Jam and Terry Lewis. And kept firing his band at a whim. And I wanted to say all that because when Abel Tesfaye dies while visiting Ethiopia once again and is given a state funeral, and we are writing tributes to “Die For You,” this terrible show and song will be swept under the rug so we can justify the delusion we have about the artists we loved: that their most vile, egregious behavior should be forgotten once they pass. We can’t let that happen. And we also need to remember Graffiti Bridge. Can’t forget Graffiti Bridge.
[0]

Michelle Myers: The best thing I can say about this song is that it makes me want to listen to Tove Lo.
[2]

Kayla Beardslee: We have Tove Lo at home.
[4]

Will Adams: From “On a Roll” to “Hair Body Face” to this, the micro-genre of “fictional pop song that is a huge hit in its universe” remains as tiresome as ever. Forget the commentary that’s meant to evoke “this is the pop machine at its worst! behold how cynical it is!!” We’re supposed to believe that this post-Weeknd sludge is some chart-topping smash? That’s where the illusion falls apart; difficult as it may be, if your fake platinum pop star doesn’t sound like platinum, then what’s the point?
[4]

Jacob Sujin Kuppermann: Largely indistinguishable from a Tate McRae song.
[3]

Jackie Powell: Lily-Rose Depp’s delivery on the hook of “World Class Sinner / I’m A Freak,” where she nonchalantly croons “I’m just a freak, yeah,” twice per chorus, was made for the TikTok algorithm that it conquered. That edgy yet self-deprecating phrase is relatable enough without the context of the television show that the song was written for. But the latest musical installment of the fictional woman pop star is also the least compelling. A common thread between the pop songs that Lady Gaga sang as Ally Maine in A Star is Born, Miley Cyrus sang as Ashley O in Black Mirror, and even what Natalie Portman sang as Celeste in Vox Lux was the fact they were composed by actual women who have experienced what the music industry is like for women in pop: suffocating, emotional and sometimes abusive. Depp is an actress but not a musician, and The Weeknd and Asa Taccone of Electric Guest are men. Dr. Paula Clare Harper, a musicologist at the University of Chicago, told Vulture that there are sonic similarities between “WCS/IAF” and The Weeknd’s smash “Can’t Feel My Face.” But for this song to be effective, it couldn’t just be a more feminine version of a Weeknd song, and that’s mostly what it is. Taccone has written and produced a lot of musical satire for television and has also written catchy pop songs, like “Feel it Still” by Portugal. The Man and “Feels Right,” an underrated Carly Rae Jepsen track from Dedicated. So why did he come up short here? It all comes back to the source material. On “Feels Right” Taccone had Jepsen as a co-writer and referred to her as “a natural leader.” In other words, she is an authority on how women function and are treated within the music industry. That’s something unattainable on “World Class Sinner,” a song written about a woman and her plight by two men.
[4]