The Singles Jukebox

Who died and made you queen of mean?

[Video]
[3.36]

Kayla Beardslee: I don’t like your kingdom keys / They once belonged to me / You asked me for a place to sleep / Locked me out and threw a feast (what!?) / The world moves on, another day, another drama, drama / But not for me, not for me, all I think about is karma / And then the world moves on, but one thing’s for sure / Maybe I got mine, but you’ll all get yours!
[3]

Wayne Weizhen Zhang: The devil on Taylor Swift’s shoulder — the one who tells her to be petty and make cringe-y music — brought to life with horrifying, cartoonish realness.
[2]

Isabel Cole: Listening to this with no preparation, I thought, first, is this a villain song from a Disney Channel movie?, and then, but seriously, which: yeah. Which had me wondering if I should soften on it, since its purpose is not the purpose of actual music, but with the caveat that I’m two decades out of the target demo, I feel like it fails at its intended project, too. Jeffery has a pretty enough voice, and a few seconds in the chorus suggest that given decent material she’d be at least adequate to the task, so why lock her into a wildly unconvincing speak-singing (are we supposed to read this as rapping? Is this a Hamilton thing?) cadence in which she sounds neither angry enough to justify a heel turn nor, like, awesome enough to be fun? Most songs of this nature are not up to the goofy thrills of “Poor Unfortunate Souls,” but this isn’t even up to the rather moderate bar set by “Let It Go,” despite the benefit of a singer who hasn’t spent the past fifteen years blowing out her cords.
[3]

Alex Clifton: So the context of this is that in a Disney Channel Original Movie Sleeping Beauty’s daughter saw Belle & the Beast’s son get engaged to the Evil Queen’s daughter despite the fact that they’re all 22 and babies and really should focus on growing up and learning who they are instead of trying to get married to end a successful musical franchise, and so she… raps about it… with her best Lin-Manuel Miranda impression. It’s not as horrible as it sounds, but then again, it’s not great.  
[4]

Joshua Minsoo Kim: Talk-rapping for Hamilton fans. Stock music production with trap flourishes, all of which sounds embarrassed of its rap influence. Instrumentation that’s mixed incredibly low to draw attention to weak vocals–Jeffery really can’t sell a modicum of emotion, huh? There’s better music made by amateur YouTube Kids content creators.
[0]

Alfred Soto: This song offends me several ways. First, talk-singing this much didn’t work for Lou Reed. Second, the chintzy approach to arranging and singing reduces the song’s range to the bellyaching of a MAGA-ite. Finally, Jeffery’s short range intermediate missile of a voice is deadly when listeners are in range.
[1]

Kylo Nocom: Is there a better example of camp? Sarah Jeffery’s melodramatic half-rapping half-fairy-tale-narration is comedy gold, and that bridge of rock-riffage-as-evil-turn makes me lose my damn mind. Too bad that the production here is the worst of fake trap; the Disney Channel folks got away with basic presets in High School Musical, but here the instrumental errs too close to something expected of Sofia Carson or Ashley Tisdale doing YouTube covers. Sarah Jeffery’s choruses here are swooning basicity surrounded by moments of hilarity, which nearly ruins the effect – this is better off the less it sounds like an actual pop song. Luckily, those seconds of Jeffery just yelling near the end makes this whole thing work out, a punchline to one extended bizarre joke. My 3-year-old niece would probably think this is badass, but she’s already somehow in love with Billie Eilish, so I don’t expect her to make much out of this; Disney Channel evil is never really evil, so why take that when there’s so much weirder shit? I can’t take “Queen of Mean” seriously and I don’t know how to, really. Guess that’s the point, but it’s kind of a boring one.
[5]

Katherine St Asaph: A Disney-villain version of “Love the Way You Lie,” though not a great idea, isn’t any worse an idea than “Be Prepared” being a Disney-villain version of a fascist march song. But one wonders whether the source material — evil-evil, not campy-evil — imposed some hesitation on the performance, is part of why Jeffery’s vocal only goes about 50% of the way there. (Maybe I’ve got the wrong source material. Maybe what they had in mind was Hamilton, or Jojo’s “Leave (Get Out).”) There’s another problem: All the energy in “Love the Way You Lie” is in Rihanna’s belting and Eminem’s roaring, not the instrumental, so adding a key change to that instrumental is pretty queen-of-meaningless.
[4]

Ian Mathers: I’m glad that musicals exist for people who like them (genuinely!) and certainly if I had kids and they were into this it’d be less objectionable than some other stuff they might be playing constantly within earshot, but mostly it just makes me feel like Tommy Lee Jones trying to film a frickin’ Batman movie: I cannot sanction this buffoonery. (And that’s also fine! It’s not for me, etc.)
[4]

Katie Gill: If you try to judge a Descendants song like you would judge an actual song that you’d hear on the radio or would get a “Song of the Year” Grammy nom, then you’re missing the point of a Descendants song. You’ve got to judge this song on the same metric as you would “We’re All in This Together” or “How Far I’ll Go” this song is made for children, ages 6-12ish with the express purpose of entertaining said children and while also being simple enough that the small children can sing along to it with a hairbrush microphone in their bedroom. And when you view “Queen of Mean” in the lens of that category, it succeeds! Granted, it’s not one of the stand-out songs of the franchise and that rap is downright silly. But Sarah Jeffery does an amazing job on the chorus, there are some solid lyrics, those final few measure are top notch, and the entire Descendants franchise could be subtitled “goofyass rap numbers” so honestly, I can’t fault it too much. 
[7]

Will Adams: Despite not knowing anything about Disney’s villain alternate universe fanfic The Descendants, this is an adequate heel turn. It’s “Let It Go” by way of “Look What You Made Me Do,” perhaps. But the genre constrains it; I understand in a musical theater setting, it’s important to push the vocals to the front of the mix to catch all the plot happenings, but it sacrifices dynamics in the process. For a queen of mean, the song never grows to anything justifying its title.
[4]