There’s a lot of shots we could have done the grab on here, but this’ll do…
[Video][Website]
[6.45]
Kat Stevens: Gucci has run smack bang into a troop of Girl Scouts who are innocently skipping on hopscotch squares while lemons are falling from the ceiling. Their chirruping “Chopsticks” piano riff is the exactly opposite of Gucci’s awkward moody bassline, and the resulting confusion reduces him to muttering incoherently about piss. Poor Gucci.
[6]
Anthony Easton: I have no idea what is going on here, but this was the track that convinced me of the aesthetic importance of Gucci Mane’s vocal delivery.
[7]
Rodney J. Greene: Lemonade and yellow themed thus/ Lemonade sweet kids chorus/ Keys dainty as lemon tea, plus/ Bass drops like yellow school bus/ “Lemonade”, a Gucci fix/ Great use of his vocal ticks/ Still ain’t heard another rapper do this “Lemon” beat justice/ GUCCI!
[10]
Al Shipley: Neither Gucci Mane nor Bangladesh brought their A game the first couple times they worked together, pairing lazy guest verses with lazier “A Milli” retreads. So it’s beautiful to hear such a perfectly realized collaboration now, Gucci turning the monomania of his repetitive lyrical tropes into an asset by working every possible angle of a single theme for a whole song while Bangladesh dazzles with eerie pianos and children’s voices, and one of the greatest basslines I’ve ever heard.
[9]
Alfred Soto: With the insistent piano sample/hook pushing against his languid drawl, Gucci sounds partly enthused, but it takes more than this to persuade him to spit out those marbles.
[5]
Martin Skidmore: Much as I love Southern hip hop, this does little for me. The production is plinky, with added kids singing, and Gucci drawls it his usual way. Perhaps his rhymes will be comprehensible to some (I am very far from being a young black American), but they seem like random nonsense to me.
[3]
Doug Robertson: If life gives you lemons, you make lemonade. Similarly, if life gives you some vaguely pretty piano parts, a listless rapping style and nothing that we haven’t all heard many, many times before, you also make Lemonade. Life seems pretty keen on getting people to make things that lack fizz.
[4]
Edward Okulicz: It’s never a particularly good sign when the children on the chorus overshadow you, but that plinky piano forgives an awful lot of sins.
[7]
John Seroff: I still haven’t come around to Gucci’s spit-drenched, jumprope-rhyme flow but I’m starting to recognize him as rap’s Charlie Rose: unremarkable and vaguely irritating on his own, but palatable enough if the guests and production support him. Bangladesh supports him pretty damn well here with a bangin’, stripped-down and ultra-effective hook. “Lemonade” might as well have been custom made to win me over: piano played like a percussion instrument until the fingers start to bleed a bit, an angry pimpin’ bassline, “Lean Wit It Rock Wit It” snaps and children chorus. That said, I took the time to hunt down and listen to the instrumental. I miss the kids a lot more than I do Gucci’s juicy shouts of “S’KUSHEE!” and “BURRRR!” but still not so much that I’m likely to go back to the radio version any time soon.
[8]
Chuck Eddy: This is kind of cute. The words, the chorus, the plinky dinky beats. Also more fey and sing-songy and dancehall-inflected (those froggy “brrrr” voices popping in at odd angles) than I expected, having avoided his previous Golden Shower of Hits (as the Circle Jerks once put it). Ultimately a bit monotonous, though, and I might like it less if I could decode the slang. So don’t tell me.
[6]
Matt Cibula: Not a game-changer but likable enough, especially if you start thinking of the insanely repetitive piano part as a sample from Steve Reich’s “Music for 18 Musicians.”
[6]