Maroon 5 – Animals
Today we round up some hits we missed for various reasons. Can you look at Adam Levine and think he’s feral?
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Will Adams: Adam Levine remains the cautionary tale for the rule set out by K. A. Applegate: if you morph into a goat for more than two hours, you’re stuck like that permanently.
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David Moore: The violent insinuation of animal-instinct stalking and killing as a metaphor for romantic conquest (especially the conquest of a lover scorned) doesn’t preclude the possibility of finding truth or pleasure in the resulting song. But there’s something particularly cowardly and calculated about this one that makes it many times skeezier than it might have been. In part it’s that they don’t sell it — the representative howl in the bridge is downright pathetic — so it winds up as an oddly sanitized “Under My Thumb,” far more offensive for being “less offensive” and in the process missing all of the thorny specificity. Painting a picture of a creep isn’t a deal-breaker, but doing it by the numbers is.
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Katherine St Asaph: Maroon 5’s glib shiny professionalism makes even uninhibited animalistic lust sound boring.
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Patrick St. Michel: Let’s ignore the creepy-as-heck theme and focus on how lazy this is. I mean, he can’t even think of a specific animal! Some animals are really nice — has Adam Levine seen the Baby Goats And Friends blog? And they can’t even go full-Mumford, just settling for lukewarm hootin-and-hollerin. I guess one point for the howl.
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Anthony Easton: I have been reading a lot of Slevine bondage slash fiction, and most of it features Levine as a top, which kind of makes sense considering charisma and personae, but it also makes me want to think what happens when Levine works against his own charisma and allows him to be the erotic subject. That this has not really entered into communities that spend time thinking about him sexually suggests that it might also be a musical problem.
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Alfred Soto: Watch out, girl, he’ll chew you up! Nah, never mind. With Adam Levine singing he could be slurping oatmeal.
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Micha Cavaseno: Maroon 5 attempting to rewrite your typical creep stalker song that were halmarks of the 80s (Blondie, The Police, Duran Duran, take your pick, y’all know one of them) through the Kanye West Pop Maximalismo filter.
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Crystal Leww: Not a turn-up and not a turn down so basically middle of the road garbage anchored by a cat yodel. A cat yodel that is basically a series of words turned into nonsensical syllables. Basically.
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W.B. Swygart: I do not think I will ever understand anyone who finds this man arousing.
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Brad Shoup: I’m buying this purely on Adam Levine’s feral sense of self-preservation. The beat kinda bumps, the guitarist settles on sustained rhythm chords instead of, I dunno, reggae upstrokes or something, and while Levine’s never even heard of a countermelody, that wolf howl is really putting yourself out there, man.
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Edward Okulicz: In “Animals,” a fascinating take on Kafka’s Metamorphosis, Adam Levine wakes to find that his feelings of inhuman lust have caused his body and — let’s not forget, his voice — to transform into those of a small, annoying chihuahua. A yelp is not a howl.
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