The Singles Jukebox

TLC sample + Chris Brown. Or is it TLC sample vs Chris Brown?

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[5.00]Micha Cavaseno: Last go-around for Zendaya, she was making decent strides by Disney starlet standards into the world of pop, attempting RnBass before it was as commercially viable and working around reasonably relevant dance-pop. In a move that makes more sense symbolically (given her initial proposal as potential Aaliyah avatar for that DISASTROUS Wendy Williams-produced error of cinema), she’s announced that she’s going to work with Timbaland for her second LP. 2016 Timbaland. Ooooh boy. But despite all that cynicism, she’s decided to do a fairly reasonable introduction to step into the more commercial spheres. “Something New” is a post-Brackins take on TLC provided by the inexplicable duo of Babyface and Chrishan (best known to TSJers for his work on Adrian Marcel’s humid “2 AM” or Little Mix’s northern-soul tinged “Wings), and features Chris Brown AKA The Trojan Voice. For some reason, Zendaya still gets songs that she delivers in an odd way, and I simply don’t know if she’s writing for herself badly or if she has misguided taste in songwriters. Either way, despite the great strides she’s made, it still doesn’t feel like Zendaya’s reached the point where she comes off as a star proper.
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Alfred Soto: Damn hard to discredit a performer whose interpolation of TLC’s “Creep” stacks logs in her hearth. By themselves the fires don’t spark, and Chris Brown is a bucket of ice.
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Jessica Doyle: So let’s talk about songs in dialogue with each other, enriching each other: Janet Jackson’s “Someone to Call My Lover,” for example. Which works immediately, because the Jackson/Jam/Lewis team didn’t use “Ventura Highway” as window dressing but engaged with it, so that Jackson’s initial “Back on the road again / Feelin’ kinda lonely and” echoes the first song’s “Chewin’ on a piece of grass, walkin’ down the road” and Jackson’s air of hopefulness in the face of rueful experience seems of a piece with America’s wilful insistence on independence. “Someone to Call My Lover” is more beautiful for its nonchalant setting of a black woman’s emotional journey in the burned-out California sixties post-folk of three shaggy-haired white men. I bring this up to make the comparison. “Creep” is a great song, a rich song: a song about egret foreshadowed, adultery, resignation. To use the “Creep” horn to buttress Zendaya’s plea for sexual experimentation, and to throw Chris Brown into the mix doesn’t enrich “Something New”: it makes it sleaze.
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Daisy Le Merrer: You can’t go very wrong with that sample, and this is perfectly serviceable. I also like the not so subtle implication that Chris Brown is a creep.
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Cassy Gress: Whereas “Creep” was a laid back jam about justifying infidelity, this has lyrical content more along the lines of “Red Light Special.” Those two songs achieve their goals, but merging the two in this way makes it sound like Zendaya is bored and looking for something to make the night not a complete waste.  Chris Brown gets only about 20 seconds of this, but it’s the “Creep”-iest part of the song, with Zendaya’s “This ain’t forever, baby / just tonight” coming in a close second.  The disadvantage of not just making the backing track but also parts of the melody sound exactly like a older, more famous song is that it will lead to direct comparisons between your song and the original, and your song may not be superior.
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Thomas Inskeep: This is how you repurpose/interpolate a classic ’90s jam for maximum ’10s impact: the trumpet lick (always the most distinctive part) from TLC’s “Creep” becomes the frame around which “Something New” is built. Chris Brown re-uses some lyrics in his bridge, too. That said, though, the biggest key here is Zendaya, who sings assertively and sexily over an ode to spicing things up in the boudoir. (Also: that slap bass popping in and out!) For once, a would-be sexy song about sex that’s actually sexy.
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Brad Shoup: Maybe Brown’s deepened timbre is new. I haven’t been paying enough attention. Plunged piano chords try to wrestle “Creep” — TLC’s best single — into the realm of the dreamy. It doesn’t work.
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Katherine St Asaph: A minute of silken R&B glory, as buoyant as its sample. Then that same minute over and over again. And Chris Brown, whose voice now has the consistency of purée
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