Doublesexcrab is a Pokémon, right?

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[4.36]

Edward Okulicz: An absurd song without the merest shred of consciousness of its absurdity. Cheryl must have absolutely no sense of humour whatsoever.
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Anthony Easton: I love this — the sublime fall of the first line, how she sings rock star, how the voice is so unstable, how the sadness almost reaches Rihanna level blankness, the utter colonization of “Drop It Like It’s Hot,” the feminist subject position of kissing stilettos, and her rich voice — rich like money, rich like both kinds of cream.
[9]

Sabina Tang: I could draw a line between the raps of Kitty Pryde (recently featured), Lana Del Rey (who wrote this track), and various K-pop entertainers (of whom Hyuna is merely the most prominent), all of which — spaced-out, murmured, or coyly drawled — are unabashedly feminine, in a way that feels orthogonal to hip-hop’s value system altogether; but one Jukebox aside isn’t enough space to make the argument (I’ve isolated gender presentation from race, for one thing). Suffice it to note that Cheryl Cole’s spoken word and whooshing instrumental sound alternately like Lana sped up by 20 beats per minute, or 4Minute slowed down by the same. 
[7]

Iain Mew: It’s fascinating to hear a song which delivers all of Lana Del Rey’s idiosyncrasies as a writer, almost to the point of parody, but stripped of her matching idiosyncrasies as a singer. Cheryl has a bit of fun with the material, especially on the spoken word bits where her accent comes through more. For the most part, though, singing this with low-key seriousness like any other song she’s been given makes the material sound awkward and not believable in a way that Lana Del Rey’s own all-over-the-place approach goes some way to cover up on similar songs like “Off to The Races”.
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Patrick St. Michel: I guess Cheryl Cole really wants to inspire some thinkpieces in 2013, and she called up Lana Del Rey to write her a song that could grab the appropriate attention. Unfortunately, she got a boring hip-hop tune with lyrics that are even more groan-worthy (“I know you’re sick boy/I want to get the flu”). You can’t even loop any of it into something sorta entertaining! 
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Kat Stevens: There are many enjoyable mental vignettes conjured up by this song: 1) Cheryl trying to nudge the petrol pump meter up to a round number at her local Texaco 2) Cheryl trying to make the thermometer stick out of her mouth at a jaunty angle, resulting in her looking like Kenneth Williams 3) Cheryl shopping in Fresh’n’Wild for an organically-sourced ‘local rock star’ 4) Cheryl finding out about the whole ‘double sex crab’ thing 5) Ciara’s eyes widening as she realises the true extent of how lucky she was to escape getting lumped with this track so obviously meant for her.
[5]

Pete Baran: I must admit I didn’t think Cheryl Tweedycole would be the first mainstream artist to start playing with slinky Dawn Richard-style beats, and she makes a pretty good fist of it here. It is all rather a crude port though. I am not sure her voice suits the low slung backing. In a world where most tracks feature someone or other, it’s good to see Cheryl trying to do all the heavy lifting here, but perhaps this is a track that might have benefited from a guest rap or even some backing vocals (the chorus “show ’em what you got girl” seems odd as her own response to a line). There is also a more fundamental problem with a Geordie lass using the word “ghetto” as a replacement for “wrong side of the tracks.” All that said, I will wrangle with my issues why I don’t think Cheryl should use the word “ghetto” whilst enjoying a rather nifty and slinky pop song. Perhaps it is all of this inner tension that makes me like it so much.   
[8]

Brad Shoup: I don’t know what she’s on with “come on over ghetto baby,” so the doorbell melodic steps seem particularly evil right now. The horn/cymbal hits and upward whine are Just Blazy, like a ponderous take on Joe Budden’s “Pump It Up”. Chorus aside, though, it’s a slog.
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Jer Fairall: The singer acquieces to the mix of strained seriousness and bored affectation that the Lana Del Rey writing credit demands, but other than the possibility of shooting for high camp, it isn’t like the text leaves very much in the way of wiggle room. Less forgivable, once we accept that everyone involved was determined to go down this particular dead-end road, is the graceless, muddled crash of the music, so out of step with the attempted irony of the track that it all feels like the work of at least three different parties who failed to consult with each other before just stapling the whole mess together and hoping for the best.
[2]

Katherine St Asaph: Poor Cheryl Cole. She has so many enablers, a small nation’s worth, yet not one of them told her that in light of certain past scandals it’s probably a bad idea to record a song called “Ghetto Baby” with the line “clocking chicks left and right just to get to you,” or to tell said (sigh) “ghetto baby” to bow down and kiss her imperial stilettos, or to stick elsewhere in the chorus hilarities like “Brooklyn move my soul like this” and suspiciously inflected “drop it like it’s hot, girl” spoken-word lines that code not as gritty but embarrassing, like maybe Lesley Arfin wrote them. (Close; it’s actually Lana Del Rey, which explains everything.) It’s a step up from “E.T.,” its coincidental BPM-alike — but only because no one implies rape.
[1]

Will Adams: It’s obvious that Lana Del Rey wrote this, and not just because of the Texaco namedrop in the second line. It’s the tension between control and its absence; the verse that begins low and restrained, then finishes high and unchained, only to explode into the chorus. I especially like how the its bombast is undercut by the playground chant melody of “come on over, ghetto baby.” Cheryl can’t quite sell the whole thing (even though it’s under three minutes), but she does enough to keep me hooked. However, I’m left wondering whether Cheryl’s version would be vastly improved if it had the same freestyle instrumental that the demo has. My guess is yes.
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Daniel Montesinos-Donaghy: Our Cheryl’s spoken delivery of “I’m running temperatures thinking of your love boo” is fascinating to listen to — the way she half-slurs “temperatures” in an affected Englimerican accent against a sparkle-dazzle attack of the beat is unbelievably awkward. It’s an identity crisis occurring live in the booth, so of course identity-chameleon Lana Del Rey had a hand in writing this. Beyond her expected nods at American iconography (the word “trick” is an iconic example of contemporary US pop culture, as much if not more than Texaco), Del Rey crafts a class-divide story as old as time immemorial. Familiar tales need a real pizzazz to overcome their hokeyness, but Cole can’t pull any from her vocal performance beyond her bizarre spoken-word moments. I may never recover from hearing her drawl “show me what you got girl” in her best Atlantan drawl, an attempt at seduction without a libidinous bone in its body.
[3]

Alfred Soto: The cross-generational and cross-gender dialogue between Cheryl and Snoop show two discrete musical approaches to lust: on “Drop It LIke It’s Hot” the male rapper relies on beats, snaps, and tongue clucking to abet his self-assurance while the female R&B singer’s presence is inseparable from the au courant synth swirls and post-jungle beat. Minimalism versus maximalism, sure, and Cheryl manipulates her falsetto as smoothly as Mr. Ghetto Baby does moving up to her lips; but in this narrative of class and race starting the tune in a lower register as she recounts spotting the lower middle class black man pumping gas at the Texaco anchors the performance with a chilling confidence. She doesn’t need to revel in her slumming: she tells us she’s slumming, and the rest is our problem.
[6]

Zach Lyon: So, hey, why? Why did this happen? Why did Lana Del Rey write a song called “Ghetto Baby” and why is Cheryl Cole singing it? This question might keep me up for years. Why are pop artists and songwriters and music video directors always so obsessed with spearheading the minstrelsy revival? Because I know it isn’t straight ignorance. It’s always built around the word “artistry”, even if no one wants to put it like that, but really, it’s just so easy for creatives to fall in love with the aesthetic of a taboo, isn’t it? And no, there’s really no difference between this piece of caricatured “urban” faux-erotica and the original video for Taco’s “Puttin’ On the Ritz” or Florence’s superfun journey through semiotics last year. Not sure if Nelly’s “Parking Lot” (“Show me all your thuggery”) even escapes this trend. They’re all variations on the same classic stereotypes, all cultural tourism through updated “exotic” locales, all obsession with the worst parts of the pre-war West and the worst parts of the post-war West, and it’s all so boring. Because it’s supposed to be the hook; what else is going on in this muddy armpit of a song? There’s nothing even close to “pleasant” here, it’s just a big marquee pointing to LDR’s sexualized character study that she could still only define with the words “ghetto” and “baby”. How the hell do all these mid-level writers not see how boring it is to drill into these tropes, over and over again; that it isn’t compelling, it isn’t original, that a thousand other boring people wrote the same thing this week and they weren’t any less irritating about it? Last week I was at The Strand in Manhattan (a big deal, apparently), and I spent a good ten minutes in the short stories section wondering if there’s any decent reason an author named Trinie Dalton would choose to name her collection “Baby Geisha.” Indeed… no, it’s an imagined travelogue of sexual tourism through “exotic” locales never seen. Here’s its soundtrack.
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