Can anyone name a song with a non-embarrassing lyric about Facebook?
[Video][Website]
[4.14]
Anthony Easton: The best thing about this is how it changes from asking people not believing the words to being pleased how much people are writing about her. Electro-screed for the age of pixels instead of column inches.
[9]
Brad Shoup: So I Googled ‘Vanessa Amorosi rumours’ and all I found was her denying — but delighting in — speculation that a previous single is her coming-out statement. So I guess this song functions as public service. Trite, sludgy public service, but still. I kinda thought Lindsay Lohan and Ashlee Simpson had the last word on rumors, but apparently they didn’t squelch their vox sufficiently, or employ enough hamfisted power chords. If we could go ahead and bury this in the time capsule, that’d be great. Either the novelty-of-social-media one or the dubstep-dabble one; it doesn’t matter.
[1]
Edward Okulicz: I keep scanning the writing credits of this expecting to see my mum as one of the writers, so clumsy is Amorosi’s invocation of social media buzzwords. I don’t keep scanning the radio for the song itself. She’s a powerful singer, but she’s not going to beat Pink at this buzz-guitar-pop sort of thing with this kind of dreck which gives her nothing to do with her voice beyond sound embarrassed. It’s a shame because the chorus is pleasingly crunchy.
[4]
Katherine St Asaph: There will be a point, probably in six months or so, when squinching dubstep like Gak into pop bridges will sound tired. We are nowhere near that point. We’re also not at the point where everyone’s stopped mistaking sass for swagger in their faux-rap, where sneer-altos are trivial to find or where loopy “yeah-yeah-yeah” vocals are anything but welcome. We are at the point where referencing social media in your lyrics is worth an analog scolding by Nicholas Carr, but the song’s called “Gossip.” It promises what it delivers.
[8]
Michaela Drapes: Despite the soft filters and flattering lighting, it’s clear that Vanessa Amorosi, is, I’m afraid, just a teensy bit wizened to be singing a song about shallow online gossip. You’d think she might have outgrown that by now, perhaps, or at the very least learned to pursue more drama-free paramours. Her voice is a mighty powerful thing, but harnessed to production this amateurish, this one’s a non-starter.
[2]
Alfred Soto: This pretty normal person in every way demonstrates her normality by worrying overmuch about internet gossip and not enough about her material. With all due respect to Michael Jackson and Bananarama, songs about rumors are such a dull lot because the artists don’t come up with sounds to match the paranoia in their heads.
[3]
Jonathan Bradley: Vanessa Amorosi heard from the Herald Sun or something that a lot of the online bullying modern teenagers face in modern times happens online, so she decided she’d record an It Gets Better song about modern online things like Facebook and Twitter. Has Masterchef used it for a montage yet?
[2]