The Singles Jukebox

Ooh I love my shower, AHH!

[Video]
[3.50]

Kylo Nocom: The social media spectacle around Chance and The Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Big Day has been hilarious yet tragic and genuinely sad to see unfold as he loses his damn mind on Twitter about it. “Hot Shower” managed to draw a comic amount of ire from people that presumably perused the first few tracks, dipped, then told everybody “this is what Chance sounds like in 2019!” Just look at that like-dislike ratio! This track sounds dead, but not irredeemable: courtesy of a YouTube commenter, yeah, Ski Mask would tear this bare-boned beat up. We instead have to hear Chance sounding misplaced and flat-out stupid, with two verses worth of frighteningly bad lines (“I got muscles like Superman’s trainer” is the weakest boast to open up a song in a long time) and forced attempts at enthusiastic flows. Despite this, his petulance makes for a fine hook; it sucks, sure, but it sounds like that’s the point and it sticks. MadeinTYO and DaBaby provide genuinely entertaining verses and sound natural here juxtaposed with Chance’s tryhard antics, yet still feel like elements that point out the absolute ridiculousness of having to hear Chance do this in the first place.
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Alfred Soto: The disappointment coalescing around Chance’s latest confuses me. His timbre and rhymes were often maladroit at best, incommensurate with his laudable musical ambitions. Garnishing a basic beat with basic, often lobotomic rhymes, he sounds like a dude, and it suits him, the better for DaBaby, who’s often in his own songs gross but never boring, to rap rings around him. 
[6]

Oliver Maier: None of the wildly different verses on “Hot Shower” — a bargain bin Playboi Carti feature from MadeinTYO, a machine-gun performance from DaBaby and whatever the hell Chance thinks he’s doing — save its lazy, obnoxious beat from sounding lazy and obnoxious. Minus extra points for trying to convince me that Chance the Rapper of all people is postponing calls from his lawyer.
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Ian Mathers: Sounding like you’re bored and lazy when you’re rapping only works if the quality of your lines don’t also sound like you’re bored and lazy.
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Nortey Dowuona: The lumpy, rattling drums slum underneath Chance’s pretty aight Valee/Busta Rhymes impression, and DaBaby kills the worthless bead sack and fills it with grass.
[6]

Joshua Minsoo Kim: Singled out by many as the worst track on The Big Day, “Hot Shower” is actually one of the few moments on the album that Chance sounds like he’s having fun. And while it sounds more like a Serious Dude trying to approximate the action of having fun (that Chance’s erratic squawks are more annoying than usual doesn’t help), it really isn’t far off from what he sounded like on the Lil B collaboration mixtape. Chance is better when his corniness is coupled with theatricality.
[4]

Vikram Joseph: Three charmless, half-arsed performances, one sluggish, joyless beat and no discernible hooks: what a treat for us all. Chance’s verses are improbably bad, just witless free-association delivered in a grating monotone so colourless it would make a bottle of Huel seem iridescent by comparison. MadeinTYO follows suit and says precisely nothing; DaBaby then edgelords his way through a crushingly tedious series of sexual brags and a pretty despicable domestic abuse joke. From an artist who once, at least, seemed like he had vision, this is real bottom-of-the-barrel stuff.
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Joshua Lu: Chance is simultaneously too established for this corny rap to be endearingly amateur and not established enough for it to be digested unseriously enough — he’s in this uncomfortable middle stage in his career where it’s hard to sell a song as stupid as this. To his credit, Chance’s earnestness is palpable here, and his carefully wonky delivery would’ve been more enjoyable if the lyrics didn’t confuse pointless randomness with actual humor. Only DaBaby’s verse is worth the listen; if only it came closer to the beginning, so I could hit the skip button sooner. 
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