Don’t worry. We’re almost certainly not going to turn into VH1…
[Video][Website]
[6.00]
Alfred Soto: Encouraged by a weeklong bask in his old records — the warm ventilator exhaust fumes of Angels With Dirty Faces finally smelled great after fifteen years — I dove into his latest collaboration with a rapping and singing muse. The discreet bits of chinoiserie, the effortlessness electrogroove — he lays them out like a surgeon does his instruments after being coaxed from retirement. But Martina Topley-Bird was superficially superficial. Nneka reads her script with the intensity of an actress told to project intensity.
[6]
Anthony Easton: I was talking to a Jukeboxer the other day, about the new Beyoncé, and how all the crit dropped Fela, and I just didn’t hear him at all in this, and confusion reigned. He said, wisely, that Fela has become a metonym for Africa, or if they were at least a little bit smart, Nigeria. Nigeria is in the middle of a major and exciting musical revival, one that abstracts Afrobeat’s recolonizing African American music for the motherland and making it cross-cultural, in ways Fanon wouldn’t imagine, so we have P-Square making Gbedu for Akon’s label in ways that remind us of Fela’s infamous Detroit gigs in the ’80s, but smoother, smarter, and (perhaps slightly less political) or you have something like this. Nneka, the Nigerian-German singer, who has done really fascinating work on her own, plays with, and refutes Tricky’s tired aesthetic, and also refuses the expectation of what Nigerian music needs to sound like. There is power to how she says “introduce me to your industry,” in its refusal of being a subject.
[7]
Brad Shoup: Right at the part where the brass knocks twice, I thought I knew what I had: a mirror-universe Rudimental track. The bass, a two-pronged attack here, has a similar surge. But the horns are discarded in favor of melodica on the refrain. Nneka’s squinched vocal approach was giving me flashbacks, but there’s an urgency that is matter-of-fact, not stylized.
[7]
Edward Okulicz: It’s stark and ear-catching, and technically without a fault, but unlike the earthquake the song wants to be, I don’t feel any aftershock.
[6]
Daniel Montesinos-Donaghy: At the start of the second verse to “Nothing Matters”, guest vocalist Nneka lets her voice unfurl, occupying the role of a jazzy chanteuse done wrong by stupid men: “In my mind, I have killed you long ago.” Smokey speakeasy piano follows her as she lets the syllables in “ago” hang in the air then waft away. It’s an evocative moment, a good idea in a song that dabbles with plenty ideas — Igbo language raps, ostinato bass, spacious xx-style guitar — but lacks the imagination and guts to follow through on any of them.
[4]
Jer Fairall: At its best when Nneka’s intense, thoughtful rap bobs along with the brooding, sumptuous twitch of the music, itself shaded with an ominous piano and anxious horn blasts. The chorus seems designed to reference Madonna’s very similar “Nothing Really Matters” for no apparent purpose though, and the result is a track that hangs off of a generic lyrical sentiment rather than becoming the truly stimulating thing that it is oh so close to being.
[6]