The Singles Jukebox

n.b. Price must be paid in toonies…

[Video]
[4.29]

Ryo Miyauchi: The only thing that distinguishes a bounty from a net worth in “Price on My Head” is a mention of paranoia. But anxieties hang on the periphery as a cheap accessory to dress Nav and the Weeknd as some outlaw insomniacs without any worthwhile exploration of the actual threats on their life. The lack of believable biographic details I can excuse, but their lazy acting as pop-gangsters isn’t worth sitting through.
[4]

Taylor Alatorre: Performative paranoia doesn’t get any more captivating when you sing about it in an even higher register than usual. And as much as I want to give Nav recognition for coming up as a “brown kid in the Southside Rex,” his rapping remains stuck in the hazy zone between “serviceable” and “hopelessly generic.”
[4]

Jacob Sujin Kuppermann: The only way to get me to enjoy a Nav song is to pretty much entirely remove him from the equation, as it turns out.
[6]

Will Rivitz: Take Mr. Can We Call Him A One-Trick Pony If His One Trick Isn’t Any Good off this track and it ends up excellent; Abel Tesfaye’s Angelica-Schuyler-in-“Satisfied” delivery of “I heard these niggas want to take my life” is genuinely chilling, as is the flip to Auto-Tune in the chorus that fully deserves the otherwise trite “ethereal” descriptor. As it is, Nav plays the children’s-chorus counterpart to The Weeknd’s world-class one, using two definitions of “giving top” so carelessly and randomly that I’m not sure whether he’s trying to be clever or just didn’t edit properly.
[6]

Alfred Soto: At last — The Weeknd bifurcates his boring-ass Madonna-whore complex so that he doesn’t bear the awful burden. This bifurcation results in nothing more than inert rapping and a trap beat so lethargic that I thought I was listening to the oven timer going off.
[2]

Will Adams: Not so sure about the male version of “Monopoly.”
[4]

Iris Xie: Nav and The Weeknd have this really weird “good angel/bad angel” mood going on like they are almost merging into a single entity. The last time I saw something like this was Dua Lipa with St. Vincent at the Grammys, or the fact that Dua Lipa looks just like that one character in Parks and Recreation that is also oddly intense. But other than the hook of “price on my head,” I really can’t remember anything about it, except that I like Nav far more than The Weeknd here, because he has an almost boyish frankness on this track. But this is strangely middling: the atmosphere is stark and doesn’t really do much else.
[4]