The other Bieb’s sound of 2014…
[Video][Website]
[5.80]
[6]
Alfred Soto: I suppose it’s cute to hear Bieber’s petulant chirp put through the “Boyfriend” motions, this time over 808s (early nineties revival continues apace). Tyga’s Fisher-Price rap fits the mood.
[4]
Patrick St. Michel: Could this whole R&B rebranding of Justin Bieber actually work? His Journals album is a great listen, and this collaboration with Tyga shows how his new sonic transformation could work even better. The folks behind “Wait For a Minute” turn Biebs into an extended hook, which is smart given his tendency to nearly ruin his own songs when given the chance (the still-excellent “Heartbreaker” came dangerously close to flying off the tracks thanks to the kid’s slimy pillow talk). And hey, Bieber sounds good here in an icy-sounding number. The song as a whole feels more like a sketch than anything else – Tyga just sort of shows up and fails to make much of an impact, while the Bieber parts never really develop into anything else. Still, the blueprint to a better Bieber might be somewhere here.
[5]
Josh Langhoff: Maejor Ali’s synthbass bounces like Bieber on a bed of balloons, or like the space tango version of Tribe’s “Excursions.” Tyga responds by honing his single verse for maximum associative effect. For example, he’s got me imagining an incontinent Yoda, an image I hope I’ve seared onto your brain too.
[5]
Daniel Montesinos-Donaghy: “Wait For A Minute” predates Bieber’s relative left-turn into R&B balladry, leaked in September as an odds-and-sorts track for a mixtape by his tour DJ Tay James. Slowly and surely, the song has taken on a life of its own, being eventually adopted by perennial YMCMB underling Tyga for lead single purposes. Tyga is the weakest part of the song – as is he is on every song – delivering a thankfully brief series of clunkers before vanishing. It’s astonishing how he bogarted this song for himself, as this is truly Bieber’s show – he coos each come on like he truly means it, and when you’re singing about moonlight-drenched slow dances, you need to mean it. It’s a welcome affirmation of something many forgot in a year of Brazilian sex workers, Anne Frank and paparazzo scuffles – the kid sounds like a goddamn star.
[8]
Brad Shoup: Bieber slathers these Thom Yorke-like meows under his pained vocal (which is apart from, and inferior to, his eye-to-eye vocal); under Tyga’s Pusha T impression it’s like the Neptunes’ road less traveled.
[6]
Andy Hutchins: Tyga is the best example of a single-purpose rapper there is: Put him on a nu-West Coast track in this vein, with simple snaps/claps and keys, and he sounds at home, but ask him to do anything else, and he flails. Here, he’s just bragging about his Yoda-aged money and pretending that balling like Manu Ginobili is something anyone wants to do in 2013/14, and he sounds great, maintaining an elevation of centimeters over the Maejor Ali (fka Bei Maejor)-produced track. The track’s really the draw, and it both sounds fantastic in a car at night and uses two of my favorite killer tricks of minimalist rap/R&B production: The restarts at the opening, and false feedback buzz as a signifier of upward. And Justin Bieber is gonna make a career of it as an adult, by dint of musical talent or celebrity legerdemain, but stuff like this makes it very difficult for me to think that he’ll have to resort to the latter. He’s mostly in wispy, Abel Tesfaye-ish ranges, which suit his slight voice well; the “Way! That! / The way! that!” and “Say! That! / Say! That!” bits that allow his more pubescent and plaintive tendencies as a singer to show (fun fact: Bieber’s “Baby” is pretty unquestionably his biggest hit, and as beggin’-ass as a song gets, but it tapped out at No. 5 on the Hot 100 in 2010, well before Billboard tweaked its algorithms to include streaming) (second fun fact: Tyga’s “Coconut Juice,” which sounds like it’s from a completely different planet at this point, predates “Baby by two years) would be better excised.
[7]
Crystal Leww: This is the Justin Bieber promised in 2012 with the preview of “Boyfriend” before backing off for a lighter vibe. With a beat reminiscent of “The Whisper Song”, this song is similarly delivered in hushed tones going for a slightly sinister vibe. Even when Biebs is going for the explosion in the chorus, it’s still going for a quietly sexy, private moment vibe. Bieber’s at a crossroads in his career, on the edge of maybe something great. It’s impossible not to draw parallels to Timberlake. Maybe we’ll see his “Cry Me a River” soon.Who even cares what Tyga is doing here? He’s superfluous.
[6]
Jer Fairall: Alternating between a menacing whisper and a petulant whine, “Wait For a Minute” takes shrewd advantage of grown-up Bieber’s douchey public persona; he’s comes across as a lothario of a particularly unctuous and even sinister sort. It’s compelling enough that one hopes that whatever direction his career takes next finds a way to build upon this tension. Still, this is ostensibly Tyga’s track, and he’s a bland nonentity.
[6]
Katherine St Asaph: I can’t decide whether the warmish reception for Justin Bieber’s 2013-14 singles is a welcome case of writers rallying around the music rather than the tabloid asshattery, a cynical case of editors commissioning Bieber praise as pageview contrarianism, or the worst example of critics taking a twerp 10,000 times more seriously than necessary since pre-porn Farrah Abraham. Whichever it is, Bieb and Tyga combined have enough industry connections to get on some pretty good beats. This one puts snap music through two filters: minimal dance on one half, Selena Gomez’s “Birthday” on the other. Tyga is unremarkably competent, as always; Bieber is better in low register than high screech, as always.
[5]