Nothing says holiday cheer like T-Wayne…
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[6.50]
Jonathan Bogart: I love how pissed-off T-Pain sounds; with the Auto-Tune, it sounds a bit like that old childhood lark of speaking directly into an oscillating fan. The two of them seem to have switched personas; here Wayne’s the one being laid-back and sly, while Pain goes hard and paranoid. Not that either is a new look for either of them, of course; but after preparing myself for another stripper ode it was a pleasant surprise.
[7]
Andy Hutchins: Stealing a lot of the repetition repetition in the hook hook tricks from Drake and disregarding typical decibel levels works for T-Pain. Demure, Barcalounger-based lines from Wayne (“I think all these niggas sound like me, that’s a compliment!”) work a lot better than the overly aggro vein he was mining closer to the middle of the year. And the anxious strings give a new and more urgent tweak to the world-dominating Lugerian snares. Turn it up.
[9]
Jonathan Bradley: The string figure lends a certain baroqueness to proceedings, but T-Pain’s Auto-Growled bluster is too sinister to be convincing. Wouldn’t he rather buy me a drank? Weezy’s autopilot functions better than it has most of the year, but even his cleverest punchline here (“These hoes are all alike — they put the ho in homonym”) pales next to the sublime dumbness of previous 2011 accomplishments like “I’m a made nigga; I should dust something” or “Get it? Leave ’em dead in the living room.” No one sounds bad here, but no one’s really trying either.
[6]
Iain Mew: “I go so hard they call me go so hard”. That is magnificently stupid. Over the dramatic strings and straight after dropping the barked chorus and gun sounds, it completely punctures the tough mood, which makes it even better as a punchline. Nothing else made me grin in the same way, but I guess it works.
[6]
Alex Ostroff: The intro attempts to play on my nostalgia for “The Thong Song” and its magnificent “Eleanor Rigby” flip and then sprinkles some operatic grandeur on top. T-Pain’s verses are unimpressive, but Wayne supplies us with some brilliant/stupid/brilliant moments: “I go so hard they call me go so hard,” rhyming “mom ‘n ’em” with “homonym,” and a “do it big #hippopotamus” hashtag. This might approach Lil B levels of based genius, but I honestly can’t tell if Wayne is concertedly not giving a fuck or is no longer capable of doing so.
[5]
Edward Okulicz: I’m going to apply Occam’s razor here and say Lil Wayne sounds bored and laid back to the point of comatose because he is bored, and it’s not an act, or clever. More’s the pity, because that arresting string loop and T-Pain’s explosive onomatopoeia make for something impressive and impactful. Wayne’s verse is mere interlude.
[6]