The Singles Jukebox

And finally, Wayne closes out 2024 in the only way possible. Stay tuned for our readers’ picks, and thanks so much for hanging with us this year. Your presence is dear to our heart. (Fart)

[Video]
[4.38]

Wayne Weizhen Zhang: Collateral damage in the Nicki v. Megan wars, this was always going to be somewhat too-on-the-nose and unfunny, but in the aftermath it’s been completely forgotten. 
[5]

Aaron Bergstrom: The funniest parenthetical of the year and surprisingly little else to recommend it. 
[3]

Tim de Reuse: I’d only heard excerpts of this before — the bits and pieces that went TikTok viral. The whole is, somehow, strictly less than its parts.
[0]

Jacob Sujin Kuppermann: My tolerance for Ice Spice is a lot higher than I thought it was. This reduces her down to the dumbest possible iteration of her appeal — a half-baked scat joke — and it still charms me to an extent I am not entirely comfortable expressing. If it were any more complicated I’d hate it, but here, at minimum viable Ice Spice, I reach a certain nirvana.
[6]

Jackie Powell: Ice Spice’s most successful songs and features have all included a catchy riff, beat or sample that crosses into the most prominent pop cultural touch points. I think about the opening high-pitched “grrah”s that recur on her hit “Deli,” which became popular on TikTok. I think about the iconic sample from Aqua’s “Barbie Girl” that she and Nicki Minaj used to help fuel their song “Barbie World,” which was played over the credits of Barbie last year. The bass riff and beats that sound like crickets on “Princess Diana” stuck in my head while reporting on WNBA games this summer. But there is nothing of that caliber on “Think U the Shit (Fart).” The concept of this song is amusing, as it’s essentially a Latto diss track, and I appreciate Ice Spice’s wit in creating a song based on one of the internet’s most recognized memes. But musically, it’s inferior to her previous offerings. The synth horn that opens the song is a motif that slows Spice’s flow. At her best, she glides with pace alongside the rhythm of the music accompanying her, but this track lags, coming across as tired rather than wired. 
[4]

Nortey Dowuona: The synths are weak and flimsily put together, but RIOTUSA, Synthetic and Venny do a good job on the bouncy, yet clumsy drum programming. As for Ice Spice, the stylin is better with the opener. 
[4]

Leah Isobel: Where Ice Spice songs were once coolly ebullient, “Think U the Shit (Fart)” comes across as workmanlike, more concerned with maintaining the Ice Spice persona than in expanding that persona in meaningful ways. It’s not the worst sin, but it doesn’t quite justify itself, either.
[5]

Taylor Alatorre: My self-induced auditory hallucination of Casey Kasem pronouncing the name of this song, including the word “parentheses,” on American Top 40 > the actual song
[3]

Jonathan Bradley: As a gag title, it belongs in the pantheon alongside “Goop on Ya Grinch.” Absurdly, Ice Spice almost succeeds at turning the joke into a song: as poop lyrics go, it’s certainly among her cleverest, even if that superlative deserves a great big “in the land of the blind…” caveat. I could maintain some dignity and point to the irritable little squiggle that forms this beat’s hook, or the coyly dexterous way Ice Spice bolts her flow to a four-four club rhythm that nearly transforms into a house beat once the handclaps come in. Or I could underline the way she takes the title’s impudence and folds it into the brazen, bratty condescension of a succession of rhymes that matches a sneered “mammy,” with “can’t stand me,” “panties,” and “hard-knock life; no Annie.” (She then extends her interests to cartoons: Dragon Ball and Snow White co-exist in in one couplet.) But I can’t front. The point of “Think U the Shit (Fart)” is that it features a parenthetical fart. That’s funny.
[7]

Will Adams: The joke is funny, and no amount of stans outraged that Pitchfork would deign to give Y2K a positive score could convince me otherwise. But that’s all there is to this song, in which Ice Spice delivers serviceable lines with negligible energy. Remember how steely and focused she sounded on “Princess Diana”? (Damn.)
[4]

Dave Moore: Here I sit, broken-hearted. 
[3]

Ian Mathers: It’s truly all downhill from “you not even the fart,” which genuinely made me laugh.
[6]

Katherine St. Asaph: Your negative blurbs are, all together, scarcely worth a FART-HING.
[7]