The Singles Jukebox

Where’s your ambition, guys?

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[7.14]

Crystal Leww: Almost the entire debut album of Rae Sremmurd is better than “Black Beatles,” and yet, when the DJ dropped this over the weekend, I sang along to every single damn word of the chorus. 
[6]

Kat Stevens: The wistful strumming complements the singing, though the rapping feels a little uninspired in places. I feel Rae and Gucci missed a trick by not wiggling their heads together at the microphone and going “Oooooh!“
[6]

Ryo Miyauchi: While the remove of Swae Lee’s voice lets the “get you a man who can do both” meme slide in like a phrase of rock-god poetry, he pins John Lennon as merely the aesthetic behind the design of his glasses. It’s a prime move from a duo whose hits pull so much on the now. And the Sremmurds treating the symbol of rock music legacy ephemeral as yesterday’s internet joke — or the latter as eternal as the former — is the real audacity behind “Black Beatles” beyond mere self-comparison to the Greatest Rock Band of All Time. Not afraid to break the rules of past tradition to set the standard of today’s cool: to me, that’s rock n’ roll as fuck.
[7]

Jonathan Bradley: What’s a black Beatle anyway? (We’ll disqualify Kanye’s answer.) What black artist would be permitted the level of universal, uncritical, pan-cultural acceptance awarded to four English interlopers who took a black artform, used it to attain incomparable fame, influence, and wealth, and then — as Elijah Wald cheekily suggested — destroyed it? Rae Sremmurd are only black Beatles in the space of a pop song, but in their dazed self-asssurance, they sound giant-sized, like their tune has been beamed from a dimension where African American Mississippian twenty-somethings could be welcomed as the same musical geniuses a quartet of wisecracking white Liverpudlians were in the 1960s. Mike WiLL Made-It’s beat, heady and cosmic, is appropriately space-age.
[8]

Alfred Soto: this duo’s music is the giddiest approximation of adolescence I’ve heard  in years: they don’t want to grow up because after an RIAA-certified  debut gave them the exposure and dough to try yoga, chinchillas, and  fuck knows what else they regard as “exotic” they’re ready to get down. I can imagine a scenario in which meeting women who do more than give  good brain crumbles their pleasure dome. For the moment, I’ll savor the  smarts that use a variant on the original, dirtier opening line for “Day Tripper” as the sharpest hook in “Black Beatles.”
[8]

Adaora Ede: “I eurostep past a hater like I’m Rondo” > The Beatles
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Madeleine Lee: The specific reference to “Day Tripper” is a good one, as a reminder that the white Beatles weren’t interested in singing about much more than drugs and girls themselves. Rae Sremmurd continue to be great at hooks and okay at memes (“get you somebody that can do both” sounds like it’s being read directly from Swae Lee’s Twitter feed), and Mike Will Made It’s beats continue to be slightly forlorn and uncomplicated in the best way, but the injection of energy Slim Jxmmi gives to the song at the end is both surprising and welcome.
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