Sweden, Morocco, London, the Caribbean, and it still just sounds like Pitbull?
[Video][Michaela Drapes: Oh, the cacophonous bluster of global pop. It’s all I can do to patiently grit my teeth and wait for this RedOne-produced, overly-loud mess to come to an end so I never, ever have to listen to it again.
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Erick Bieritz: RedOne’s humorless crusade to foist his dancefloor headaches onto all of the world’s musics continues unabated, this time through apparent proxies in the improbably named DJ Niceness and Mastah L. KMC can sound very good on a proper soca track but here is just sort of flattened under the Europop steamroller. Huge dance tracks are best suited to anonymous MCs whose personalities won’t gum up the works, which is probably why David Guetta’s partnership with the appropriately bland Flo Rida produced probably the best big dumb effort in this big dumb genre.
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Katherine St Asaph: This is actually a long-lost, remastered recording from the Gilded Era. It started Prohibition.
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Brad Shoup: One wonders how KMC got those last two letters. Perhaps he won them in a pool game. In some circles, this may pass as a globetrotting hit; those same circles may consider Chipotle to be excellent Mexican fare. Another oppressive, hectoring bludgeon from the exasperatingly uneven RedOne.
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Edward Okulicz: I’m not sure if this is the same thing as the Loudness Wars all over again, but it seems to me that everything RedOne is even vaguely associated with is so unbearably deafening. This takes the hectoring volume attack of his recent work with Gaga, appropriates a caricature of the Caribbean sound and the result is ear-bleeding levels of pain.
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Jonathan Bogart: RedOne can slather his hot, sticky furnace-blast synths over anything, can’t he? At a certain point it may be best just to acknowledge that this sound is just another tool in the vocabulary of global pop, and to figure out how the people he’s furnace-blasting are coping. Dancehall may be the best way to deal: the riddims are already used to the heat, and KMC has enough attitude to spare.
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