The Singles Jukebox

Not sure this is what the Vengaboys had in mind…

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[4.43]Patrick St. Michel: Sad-sack rumination on being a one-hit wonder and the hollow aftermath of it all… made popular via a remix by some Nordic producers. Man, how more downtrodden can this get?
[4]

Katherine St Asaph: I can’t hate this, or write any of the snarky critickiness I now regret even for Mike Posner, because this is a song about being 27 and washed-up in an industry where that’s entirely possible, and I relate heavily to that. I relate to a Mike Posner song, and now I’m going to take a train, find the nearest tub of pre-mixed cement on the Duke campus (for that extra je ne sais quoi), plunge my head inside and live out the rest of my hours in shame.
[5]

Alfred Soto: Now this you gotta hear: a Paul Simon talk-sing vocal and Simon-esque attempt at recording cocktail party chatter. Sign me up, right? Except it’s supposed to be a dance track, and who cares about dangling conversations, especially when it’s a beat Bieber would wrinkle his nose at?
[4]

Micha Cavaseno: Oh man… Leave it to Mike Posner to suddenly demonstrate just how professional and downright charming Bieber’s attempts at working EDM have been. His vocal tone is even worse when it’s getting DJ Snake’d into irritants, and the weird fake accenting he’s laying on (I’m not even touching the mispronouncing of Ibiza), nor the odd sermonizing tone that sounds like he’s been listening to a lot of Laurel Canyon music. It’s the rare case where craftsmanship is marred just by how irritatingly hokey the performer is. Ya couldn’t have sold this to someone, man?
[3]

Brad Shoup: How much thought went into the delivery of the title? You know Posner was hanging around cratekeepers who live to pronounce the island’s name in the ponciest way possible. If he went full tourist, he might’ve sounded ridiculous to casual dance fans, and the heads might still be chuckling. But this way! It’s just a choice detail for his amply annotated redemption song. (Look at him! Bearing his shame like he ate crayons.) like He would have you believe that his mistake was in holding pop success too lightly, but I’d suggest it came a lot earlier than that, perhaps the first time he imagined a Dukie frat boy could sling hooks for rappers. His voice — a phlegmy coo, at the careful volume of a long-distance boyfriend hoping his dormmates don’t overhear — is as thin as Paris Hilton’s, only with fewer jams. (He’s got one contender for immortality — not her fault — although Juicy J’s version is the only one on Spotify.) Turns out the rap game Michael Scott had a crazy soon expiration date. And here he is, jetting from the Balearics to the tropics, elongating his os and flashing some vibrato like those 2 Chainz features never happened. (Gone, like so many ignorant sneakers.) I hate the cultural narrative of redemption. I hate the jiu-jitsu that takes our fears and desire for transcendence and with it, crafts an aura of invincibility around attractive people who sing tunes. I hate that we think of careers as narratives — or, even if they are, as narratives we can grasp. (The vocal tweaking on the chorus might as well be me gawking on Twitter.) But most of all, I hate that I haven’t been to Ibiza yet.
[5]

Cassy Gress: I re-listened to “Cooler Than Me” to see if he’s always been doing that vowel thing, but if it’s there, it’s faint. “Ohhhhl I know are sad sohngs.” I think there’s genuine sincerity behind this, somewhere, a real desire to tell the kids “don’t do what I did,” but it’s covered up with sap and vocal squeaking, and it makes it harder to buy. The beat is better than the vocal; someone should recycle it for something else.
[5]

Scott Mildenhall: If it wasn’t for the fact that Ed Sheeran did something rather similar last year, this could easily be mistaken for the result of a malfunctioning algorithm. Yes, you could do a near straight-up cover of “Games People Play”, but a glass of Tropicana at the Posner pity party makes it go down so much better; it’s what the world was waiting for. His attempts at pathos sometimes hit — particularly if you remember Cher Lloyd — but from the opening couplet onward, the bathos wins. This song is quite absurd.
[5]