The Singles Jukebox

On tonight’s episode of Cheaters…

[Video]
[5.91]

Julian Axelrod: While everyone’s been up in arms over Ice Spice’s shit-centric lyrical fixations, Central Cee’s gotten away with rehashing the same cheating scandal on not one, not two, but three different songs — because nothing shuts down infidelity rumors like constantly bringing them up unprompted. Luckily I’m online enough to know about the love triangle drama surrounding the song, but not online enough to care. So I’m happy to turn off my moral compass and enjoy this for what it is: a cross-Atlantic celebration of mutual toxicity over a Jersey club concoction that’s busy enough to hold the frame, but somber enough to simulate human remorse. This sounds like a big-budget redux of Ice’s early curio “No Clarity” with cleaner production, clearer emotional stakes, and ironically, a less expensive vocal sample, which keeps butting in like a jilted ex demanding their side of the story be heard.
[6]

Grace Robins-Somerville: Apparently there’s some alleged love-triangle/cheating-type drama involving these two that I can’t be bothered to care about because I’m over 23 years old and have a job. It’s funny that Ice Spice is leading the crusade on the “just the tip” movement. Someone’s gotta do it, I guess.
[6]

Holly Boson: Cench was hip-hop’s most vulnerable wife guy a minute ago, sobbing in songs about his girl not wanting to cuddle after sex or not being able to understand she’s perfect at her current weight (and, of course, comparing her to his homosexual gun). The tabloid-dating scandal his team engineered for publicity might have blown up in his face, but as a cheater he’s still got that blokey bathetic Britishness, drawing attention to how his own verse is going to land him in hot water as he raps it in a Pythonesque fascination with his own medium. Poop princess Ice Spice has her success attributed to her looks too often — I think her male haters can tell the dissociated flows and ironic ahegao affectations are “fuck you” rather than “fuck me” and get scared. The beat sounds like a scratched CD of a PSX racing game put in your CD player: one of the first big hits that tries to sound like the music of Y2K and actually does.
[7]

Jacob Sujin Kuppermann: Somehow, Riot’s beat here makes a song about cheating-as-extremely-goofy-mutually-assured-destruction into a cyberspace reverie, a blissed out garble of sounds (the gunshots sound carnivalesque) and textures. Central Cee works better here as a feature than as a lead; playing comic relief to Ice Spice should be tough work, but pairing her genuine grievance with his schmendrick routine fits just right.
[8]

Katherine St. Asaph: Good propulsion, good albeit lite Jersey club, terrible life advice (but at least it’s honest about that, which puts it ahead of many songs).
[7]

Iain Mew: “If he cheating I’m doing him worse” initially reads as farce. Then Central Cee lays it all out in detail too thoughtlessly honest to even be self-serving. By the time their mutual destruction has left the song as just the word “understand” broken and echoing into space, it’s tragedy. 
[8]

Mark Sinker: This song starts well, but I’m really not growing to love Central Cee at any level; he’s just so charmless. Memo to all duelling Bad Girls: get better taste! 
[4]

Jonathan Bradley: I struggle to find a way into Ice Spice’s Y2K!, though it’s just 20 minutes long. Once an impish presence at single length, over even a short album her unvarying flow makes itself too apparent, and her terse quips revolve too much around her being a “baddie” whose man calls her “poopie.” In that context, “Did It First” stands out because Central Cee’s voice is a novel intrusion into the one-dimensionality and the beat’s Jersey club kaleidoscope of cut-up vowels provides breathing room. Alone, however, the song reflects the album’s problems in miniature: too little happening and all of it too familiar.
[5]

Nortey Dowuona: I’m doing Riot and Lily dirty/Nico did it first
[3]

Ian Mathers: This song is nowhere good enough to make up for the hour I spent watching and reading things trying to figure out why all the YouTube comments are like that. I was hoping to have enough context to comment intelligently, but instead I just got one hour closer to death.
[4]

Taylor Alatorre: The plaintively sped-up vocal sample seems to be animated by the same shrouded heartache that stalked the “Boy’s a Liar” remix, except here the masking is less overt and the lyrical front is even more coldly transactional. By cleanly separating the song’s dual emotional channels into words and music, a proper balance is attained between these polarities of hard and soft, letting the listener either hone in on or ignore the dissonance if they just want to vibe out to a sprightly anti-anti-cheating anthem. Any recorded regrets come not from Ice Spice but from Central Cee, who treats this like the stateside stardom test that it is. He regrets getting caught, Ice explicitly wants to get caught, NY drill and UK drill can swap clothes without anybody noticing: lessons in chemistry.
[7]