The Singles Jukebox

What’s she done to get us so mad this time?

[Video][Website]
[2.82]Taylor Alatorre: ARK Music Factory was more influential than we realized.
[0]

Brad Shoup: Look at us, having all these Meghan Trainor opinions when she’s the broadcast-TV version of larger pop concepts. She’s the go-to CD pick for a bunch of people that are gonna be just fine. Anyway, she triangulates LMFAO and Fifth Harmony here, doing all kinds of aerials over and against the sawed-off sawtooth bass. I wish she’d widened the bright soul bit, but I get that she’s still got to prove she speaks eight languages.
[6]

Crystal Leww: It’s almost admirable that Meghan Trainor has forced her way into pop music. The thirstiness is not without merit. At every turn of the way, Trainor has surrounded herself with an insanely talented set of co-writers and producers who are great at capitalizing on relevant sounds. On Thank You, she’s largely parted with the obnoxious but effective YouTube cutesy old timey stylings of Kevin Kadish and joined forces with Ricky Reed, the man responsible for all the songs you hate by Jason Derulo but sang along to anyway. Poptimists love to talk a big game about loving popular music while clutching their copies of Carl Wilson’s 33 1/3 on Let’s Talk About Love until the point when it comes time to shit on Meghan Trainor. I’m not bumping “Me Too” on the weekend either, but it’s clear that this is carefully, meticulously constructed to stay in your brain, stay on the radio, and annoy the shit out of you until you stop wearing shorts for the year. Trainor turns in the kind of performance that is desperate and grating and obnoxious and will do anything. The thirst is admirable.
[5]

Katie Gill: “All About That Bass” was Meghan Trainor doing her best 1950s doo wop. “No” was Meghan Trainor doing her best 1990s Destiny’s Child. “Me Too” is Meghan Trainor with a spoken word intonation during the chorus that reminds me of a more obnoxious attempt at 2NE1 and a lead-in that’s weirdly Sheryl Crow. It’s truly amazing how Meghan Trainor’s managed to make it this far without clamping down on a definitive style.
[2]

William John: My overriding impression is that this song is as anaemic and lacking as something like “Scream & Shout”; the braggadocio feels unearned and, more crucially, unconvincing. Marry that with a pricier, humourless version of the “Friday” video and you have a product that would be easy enough to sashay away from, were it not the fact that the industry has deigned the author to be the best of her class.
[1]

Alfred Soto: Laughing at Meghan Trainor bores me, but when a singer with a mediocre talent for social media outrage pulls a Cuban Pete accent over the dumbest of bass synth hooks I call Homeland Security.
[1]

A.J. Cohn: Half pseudo-slinky wannabe-banger (with surprising hints of Sophie), half sunny church camp sing-along (seriously, how often does God get a shout-out in self-love jams?), this solipsistic ode to the pleasures of being Meghan Trainor is easily one of this year’s most confused pop songs.
[2]

Katherine St Asaph: I care about pop music. I don’t care about celebrities. Which is how I can ignore the sweat-film of received opinion and Internet churn that every single comes pre-slathered in, and properly rate this could-be will.i.am remix of “Sophisticated Lady.” No idea what’s with the accent — given Trainor’s side job I suspect it’s a questionably over-literal demo vocal — and the lyric is off in concept and details. “I thank God every day” is less joyful than Serena Joy; “standing in the mirror” is awkward and unnecessary; age-wise you get either “I never buy my own drinks” or “nuh-uh,” not both; “that’s gold — show me some respect” is a non-sequitur that suggests girls command respect entirely due to ditching the costume jewelry; the successively more ostentatious confidence-hawking of each Meghan Trainor single is reaching Dennis Reynolds levels, and the defensive overcorrection is equaled only by the aforementioned offensives. It’s as if no one has any conception of a singer like Trainor singing material other than one-dimensional sass. But as hilarious as it is that pop nostalgia has already reached 2003 (even the 20-year cycle’s getting younger!), it doesn’t mean I can’t appreciate solid examples of the form, of which Meghan Trainor has now released two.
[7]

Lauren Gilbert: In general, it seems like any change from blue-eyed soul would likely to be full of less weird, tone-deaf cultural appropriation of African-American culture, and yet: this song exists.  The ’90s R&B sound, the out-of-place mention of bling, “dime piece” – but grafted on to a song about self-affirmation for a straight-size white girl? I am very confused.
[2]

Mo Kim: If I were you, I’d want a production team that knew how to not make vocals sound like they were recorded in a wind tunnel, a beat that wasn’t just reheated “Gimme More,” and lyrics that didn’t double as the words of a read-along kindergarten adventure (“What’s that hanging ’round my neck?” she asks, and a classroom full of apple-juice stained toddlers screams “THAT’S GOLD!” in response), but as long as you’re happy, I guess?
[1]

David Moore: Every Meghan Trainor song sounds like something from the soundtrack of a movie about a successful pop star, written by people who have important things to say about pop music even though they know, like, and respect little about it. In the movie, she finally stops dying her hair (she’s a brunette!) and, with the help of a semi-romantic new partner who is a sensitive soul and has sensitive taste in sensitive music, records an acoustic guitar ballad that is inexplicably more popular than her “popular songs,” because the people, you see, they needed to see who you really were. The movie gets a [3] but the soundtrack’s better (except for the ballad).
[5]

Cassy Gress: What the hell accent is that supposed to be on “If I was you I’d wanna be me too”, and what the fuck even is this? I watched the video, and she’s dancing in the mirror and posing and winking brushing her teeth, and I do that too sometimes, so you know, sure, love yourself and have confidence etc etc. But quickly it rolls over from “liking yourself” to snotty condescension — my hackles go straight up at anyone thanking God for making them so amazingly great — at which point any benefits of doubts I may have been providing flew out the window and I noped on out.
[0]

Scott Mildenhall: As hard as Trainor tries for sassy soundbiture, the pre-chorus and its banal self-esteem boosts still leave this sounding like something by Hi-5!. Of course, there actually already is a CBeebies programme called Me Too!, so that couldn’t have been the intention — what mostly amounts to very inclusive bragging also covets gold, and that’s something most three-year-olds don’t have. It’s curious anyway: Meghan Trainor may never have been heard if her first single wasn’t a novelty that played up to one of the reasons she may have been unlikely to be heard, and yet it’s only now that she actually sounds out of the ordinary; pleasingly so. As she happily watches Ricky Reed riffle through Jason Derulo’s bins for her, maybe this was the plan all along.
[7]

Will Adams: This Derulo-penned song aims for several references, but mostly what I get is Rebecca Black’s “My Moment.” It’s not just the awkward, day-in-the-life-plus-dance-sequences video, it’s the premature commentary on fame, a message that barely becomes coherent before being muddied with equal parts self-acceptance pap and unconvincing braggadocio. Trainor flaunts gold chains like (how she thinks) Rihanna does, gushes about free drinks like a college student who accidentally got two tickets instead of one, then shoehorns an empowering message about loving herself while laughing at everyone else who wants to be her: it’s a confused mess. Still, I had reserved some sympathy for what could just have been a happy-go-lucky song that didn’t get through to my cynical ears. And then the instrumental break with that awful, pinched “TURN DI BASS UP” hook came, and it vanished.
[1]

Anthony Easton: I could decide better if I wanted to be Meghan Trainor if I knew who Meghan Trainor was.
[3]

Rebecca A. Gowns: Every time I hear her, I just — I — flames, flames, flames, on the side of my face! Breathing! Breathless, heaving breaths…!
[1]

Andy Hutchins: Okay, yeah, we get it.
[4]