The Singles Jukebox

OK, so the Best-Off has basically been a fucking disaster, but we’re not completely admitting defeat just yet. However, it’s nearly the end of January. And a lot of stuff has happened that we need to catch up on. For instance, this is top five in the US. Somehow…

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[4.20]

Chuck Eddy: Barney Rubble, laughin’ like a hyena. Barney Rubble, what a little weiner. Where’s Wilma, anybody seen her? Got a baby elephant vacuum cleaner.
[5]

Doug Robertson: Mr Flintstone? Seriously? If that counts as a cutting edge reference does that mean that if he does a song where he uses a rocket as an unsubtle metaphor for his penis he’ll refer to himself as George Jetson?
[3]

Matt Cibula: This track is drivin’ around with bald feet like Fred Flintstone. Too much forced cleverness, too little actual wit. Doesn’t piss me off though.
[4]

Alex Ostroff: Wayne and crew have perfected the art of phoning it in. Every second line in “BedRock” is a pun worse than the average dad joke, uttered with a smirk or announced with great import, as though “I keep her running back and forth – soccer team” is a line to be proud of. Nicki Minaj is the only one with a pulse, contorting her voice with palpable enjoyment, and dropping the funniest moment of the track as an afterthought (“I just be coming off the top – asbestos”). No matter; Young Money exist mostly to bide time until the chorus, where Lloyd somehow takes a joke that was already old in Donae’o’s “Head, Shoulderz, Kneez & Toez” remix and makes it drowsily catchy.
[6]

Martin Skidmore: There seem to be something like seven rappers/singers on this, for fuck’s sake. It’s all very lightweight, not helped by Lloyd’s rather childish singing of the hook, and the only verse I particularly liked was Nicki Minaj’s sharply delivered counterpoint.
[6]

Martin Kavka: After Lil Wayne’s verse, there are still four minutes left! There are some ephemeral moments of excitement — Lloyd’s “my room is the g-spot”, Drake’s quotation of Aaliyah — but what makes the song a snooze is the production. The melody line consists of five notes, and one shouldn’t be surprised to discover that there are only a finite number of ways to combine them.
[4]

David Moore: I kind of like Young Money! They’re unconscionably stupid. You should avoid operating heavy machinery while listening to them. With the exception of Nicki Minaj, Soulja Boy could run laps around every one of these schmucks. Singing. Heck, he’d finish the race before Gudda Gudda figured out which direction everyone was running in. The nail in the coffin for this one, though, is the snooze of a beat, monotonous staccato thirds, and the failure of Lloyd, the only consistent glimmer of hope, to cut through the roster’s bloat and turn the song into his own twisted little X-rated cartoon.
[5]

Al Shipley: A rap crew that does nothing but radio R&B posse cuts full of braindead half-punchlines doesn’t have much potential, but “Every Girl” proved they could at least turn out a killer single. The follow up fails everywhere that its predecessor succeeded, though, with Tyga and Gudda Gudda upstaging and out-annoying their more famous groupmates.
[2]

Anthony Miccio: Hard to believe that Drake, one of the younger guys here, is the same age Ludacris was when he released Back For The First Time. Cris’ comic yocks were more assured and inspired than those of any of these clowns, whose name can explain away only so much privileged puerility.
[4]

Michaelangelo Matos: At least Wayne fails to make a feminine-care product joke when he mentions the words “summer’s eve,” for which we can all count our blessings.
[3]