Remember – it’s OK to say someone looks like a fat Terence Trent D’Arby if that’s how they actually look…
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[4.57]
Martin Skidmore: I like the sound, but Waka strikes me as pretty hopeless, much as his tough tones are sort of impressive.
[4]
Iain Mew: Doomy backing drops in and out behind a wide variety of nonsense phrases. It doesn’t really build to anything, but the stop/start is an enjoyable enough trick to bear repeating, and there’s fun in the physicality of some of the mouth noises produced (“plow plow plOW!”).
[6]
Al Shipley: On some level I welcome the return of the kind of crunk fight music that dominated southern rap a few years ago but has been in relatively short supply lately. I just wish it wasn’t coming from a guy who on his best days can muster a decent Bone Crusher bellow and a producer who found a way to make Shawty Redd’s synth horns and stuttering hi-hats sound cheaper and less exciting.
[2]
John Seroff: Remember when folks were all up in arms over the death of hip hop in 2006? “Hard in the Paint” is an attempt to teach you how good you had it, and education is BIG, brah. Waka sounds a bit like Lil Scrappy in recovery from dental surgery, the beat “goes hard” which I guess means it doesn’t go much of anywhere and the bridge is FLOCKA WAKA FLOCKA FLOCKA WAKA WAKA FLOCKA WAKA FLOCKA WAKA FLOCKA. It’s never a good sign when a parody of a song is all but indistinguishable from the original. Ugly, silly and likely gonna be a helluvalot more indefensible in five years than D4L is now.
[3]
Renato Pagnani: A banger of the first degree (WAKA!), “Hard in da Paint” works because (FLOCKA!) has enough of a personality not to get lost in (B-B-B-B-BAAAAOW!) Lex Luger’s menacing back alley of synths (YUH! YUH!) which sound sort of like a funhouse version of high-school band horns, all mutated (REAL TALK!) and slithery. Also kind of ridiculous, which never hurts. WAKA WAKA WAKA FLOCKA!
[8]
Alex Ostroff: Gucci’s weed-carrier turns in a fairly standard Brick Squad cut for 2010. It’s dominated by a towering and dark Lex Luger production that may as well be sampled from a Frankenstein film, but Waka himself is fairly perfunctory.
[6]
Chuck Eddy: Only slightly more compelling than watching da paint dry.
[3]