More like Hot Girl… huh, that’s already the title

[Video]
[1.42]Nortey Dowuona: White rappers whining about women being hoes is the most tiresome type of white rap, and Blackbear is just a white rapper who sings 70% of the time and since I used to really to be into that mediocre crap as a teenager, I know young teenage me would still hate because of the stupid guitar strums and dull ass rapping. And now that I’ve fully explained why I hate this song, here is a random Token song you could listen to as my fellow writers cut the Bear up.
[0]

Ashley Bardhan: Okay, I know I’m not the demographic for this song because I’m not a fifteen-year-old living on Long Island anymore. If Christopher Columbus was alive right now and made music, it would sound like this.
[1]

Joshua Lu: Blackbear probably thinks “Hot Girl Bummer” is a hot girl stunner, but compared to “Hot Girl Summer,” it just feels a lot hot girl dumber.
[1]

Jacob Sujin Kuppermann: Please retroactively add 1 point to every Juice WRLD song I’ve ever blurbed. This is a parade of terrible sounds and ideas, not loud or obnoxious enough to ever become fun and not chill enough to fade away. Blackbear has made the most impressive monument to being unrepentantly, pettily awful since “Jordan Belfort.” I sometimes wonder if pop music writers (myself especially included) performatively pan songs like this, overstating their badness for dramatic effect. In this case, though, I cannot overstate my lack of enjoyment.
[0]

Hannah Jocelyn: “I’m pullin’ up wit’ a emo chick that’s broken” is enough to negate anything I like about this song. There are things to like! The production, from Kanye West associate Andrew Goldstein and Blackbear himself, is suitably aggressive for a song this bratty, and the taunting melody is suitably juvenile. (The “fuuuuck you” run at the beginning also earned a laugh.) Then the “emo chick” crosses a line, somewhat bad at any age but particularly disgusting for a 28-year old to sing. The narrator of “Hot Girl Bummer” is clearly an exaggerated character, but the uncomfortable image of Mr. Bear pulling up to a college party with someone ten years his junior is hard to shake. I’m indifferent towards the rest of the song, but on lines like that and “they can’t fit me in a Trojan,” the subtextual sleaze is hard to shake.
[0]

Katherine St Asaph: “Hot Girl Bummer” is an awful song. The lyrics are reprehensible. The earworm delivering the lyrics is reprehensible for being so effective. The song’s existence is reprehensible, if only because it’s well on its way to Baauering the actual “Hot Girl Summer,” no matter how much the artist claims otherwise. (“I just saw a meme on social media!” is the “they weren’t a cultural fit!” of the music world, a plausibly deniable excuse for idea jacking.) But if you ignore the words — which Blackbear’s timbre and vocal production helpfully make easy, except when they don’t, which of course coincides with the most obnoxious lines — the production is great: verses sludgy and dark, chorus a great pop-punk hook dying to rip off its twee flower crown of a synth twinkle and its surrounding dudely context. In other words, dying for “some emo chick” to steal it for her answer song.
[5]

Kylo Nocom: Nobody should entertain Adam22 emulating the Weeknd. I’d be convinced Blackbear had no idea about what Hot Girl Summer was (“I guess I don’t listen to enough rap because I didn’t know too much about it,” did he even Google it?) if his co-opting of Birkin bags as an image didn’t seem like an overt reference to “Act Up.” Elsewhere, his manipulative bullshit is as disgusting as his vocal manipulation is fascinating. Pass the hook and production onto one of the Twenty One Pilots geeks and I can guarantee their product would at least be passably honest.
[3]

Alfred Soto: I’m tempted to accept “Hot Girl Bummer” as a pisstake, and if Eminem or a nü-metal artist or something had released it in, say, 2001 he would’ve had a different culture. As it is, “Hot Girl Bummer” has a couple nimble rhymes and beats; the rest is crap.
[3]

Alex Clifton: Blackbear is the kind of guy who annotates his own song on Genius and has the nerve to point out “one more line, I’m superhuman” is a double entendre because it could refer to extending the verse… or to drugs. He also is nearing thirty and thinks that yelling “fuck you, and you, and you” repeatedly makes him edgy because it’s his “relationship with society in a way.” I feel bad for every girl who has met him at a party.
[0]

Ian Mathers: The sound of aimless, pointless self-loathing rebounding on itself and spraying all over the place. Catchy enough I’m sure I’ll hear it everywhere, being muttered along to equally by people who aren’t thinking about what he’s saying and people who are and could use someone who actually gives a shit.
[1]

Natasha Genet Avery: Blackbear penned “Hot Girl Bummer” as a reaction to social media shallowness, but what’s more shallow and opportunistic than neglecting to do five minutes of research to understand what you’re even reacting to? What made Megan Thee Stallion’s 2019 #hotgirlsummer work is that it had clear tenets that resonated with people in a news cycle that objectively sucked. “Hot Girl Bummer,” which throws incoherent Instagram captions over a discarded Post Malone backing track, falls apart because there’s no point of view behind it–other than the light misogyny of instinctively resisting something that makes women happy. A reluctant +2 for the ear-wormy melisma of Blackbear’s initial “fu-uu-uck you.”
[2]

Will Adams: Eamon didn’t die for this.
[1]