A house diva is a female version of a house hustler…
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Patrick St. Michel: In which Disclosure revisits a good-but-not-great song from last year, adds Mary J. Blige into the mix, and comes out with a song that should make anyone creating house music realize Blige’s services on their track would be huge.
[8]
Cédric Le Merrer: Disclosure are proving time and time again that they are the most tasteful beatmakers around, crafting songs from just the right ingredients, arranging them harmoniously, without one sound ever bringing too much attention on himself, and getting highly controlled vocal performances out of their collaborators. So the only thing jarring in this is how not out of place at all Mary J. Blige sounds as a house diva. It’s like Disclosure imported her from an alternate reality where she moved to Europe in the late 80’s. So yes, in some way, this is awesome, but I’m also starting to feel that Disclosure is a little too clean, too controlled to ever be truly great.
[8]
Abby Waysdorf: I’ve liked Disclosure over the past year without loving them, with the exception of “Latch,” and listening to this version of “F For You” I’ve finally understood why. There’s something sort of bloodless about much of their work, an approximation of ’80s synthpop or ’90s house with an Instagram filter added. Adding Mary J. Blige to “F For You” removes that filter completely. As could be expected, she commits, injecting emotion and drama into what had been a relatively polite song. The result is the bright, irresistible dancefloor banger that the original mostly just hinted at becoming. More like this, please.
[8]
Jer Fairall: I thought the song was fine the way it was, but adding Mary J. is a witty retro-twist, casting a (the?) ’90s R&B diva in the role of the house belter that genre lines dictated that she could never cross at the time, but which the current mainstream views as interchangeable. The young’uns of Disclosure see no distinctions, mixing up the various strains of their inherited nostalgia into their own reverent concoctions.
[7]
Juana Giaimo: Maybe if this had been the studio version I would have been more than excited, but I don’t see Mary J. Blige adding a lot to this already flawless song. Her femininity and her soulful voice are always welcome, but was she really necessary? Wasn’t “F for You” already an amazing single that showed what Disclosure could do only by themselves? Will they always need a guest to join them?
[6]
Scott Mildenhall: There was an ambition in “F For You”‘s original lyrics that enabled them to sound good if you want them to, despite effectively being gibberish. In contrast, the additions here are absolute standard edition House Diva Vamping Over House, and not forgetting that that’s a reliable practice even without Mary J. Blige, the interplay between the two changes something that stood apart among Settle‘s singles for its austerity into one doing so for its doubled-up fullness.
[8]
Will Adams: The best defense for a calculated move such as this collaboration is a strong end result. Granted, this update of “F for You” works off an already fantastic base, but the elevating factor here is how wisely Blige makes her mark on the track. She enters subtly by doubling the chorus vocals, but when the beat falls away, she claims the track as her own and explodes into a new verse. There’s a back-and-forth between her and the Disclosure boys, but it never feels like a battle. They remain cool and detached, she gets her own space to emote. With any luck, Blige’s contribution to “F for You” will wake people up; first, they’ll wonder why she hasn’t made a massive career of being a house vocalist; then, they’ll realize that there was evidence of her skill twelve years ago, and they will weep for all the lost years.
[8]
Mallory O’Donnell: Blige has often flitted about the outskirts of bona fide house music, albeit usually in the context of the remix. This proves a boon here, since Disclosure are more or less a couple of remixers who’ve taken extra pains to disguise their work as original music. “F for You” is an acceptable but utterly bloodless turn, a Hot Natured track peppered with Morgan Geist fills and lyrics from the Big House Rhyming Dictionary of Three-Syllable Words. Blige bellows amiably over the top, Jamie Jones rolls his eyes in the middle distance and we’re all just a little bit wiser when morning comes and the drugs still haven’t worn off.
[5]
Brad Shoup: Crayon-by-numbers house, except for Blige, who knows what it really means when one plays the fool. The spectrum ends with her and starts with Dr. Buzzard; whichever brother’s singing isn’t even on the chart. He treats the concept with carelessness, but when you can’t even put the word in the title, it’s not a surprise. No internal rhyme could redeem this puttering filler.
[4]
Jonathan Bradley: Blige unfurls the track in classic house diva fashion, though it’s disappointing how interchangeable her presence here could be; MJB hits are supposed to be all about Mary, her emotions, her life. Doesn’t help that the twiddler behind the knobs insisted on dueting with her — and sounding like he’s on loan from a Hot Chip track doing so.
[5]
Katherine St Asaph: Disclosure have cojones the collective size of England for allowing Mary J. Blige to annex the track sung by Disclosure Thing Two, rather than foisting her on, like, Ed Macfarlane. This isn’t quite as colossal as it wants to be — imagine if Mary J. Blige sang the original chorus, and this will forever come up short — but I’d hoped Settle‘s success would allow Disclosure access to vocalists out of the minor leagues, and this bodes well.
[7]
Alfred Soto: The hook is the pairing of a superstar who won’t bend or break to any arrangement with a UK star specializing in digestible, wobbly dance music. The result is a draw: the backing track is meh, while Blige is the biggest-voiced R&B voice to inhabit a meh backing track.
[6]
David Turner: Yes. Yes. British people really like this vanilla house music. But actually, to be fair, not only do British people love this stuff, because Disclosure are fucking huge everywhere it seems. “F for You” isn’t awful, but this youthful duo doesn’t do bad. And not ever stepping their foot in “bad,” the duo rarely steps their feet in “good,” “exciting,” “daring,” or “enjoyable” either. Trade-offs, I guess.
[4]
Anthony Easton: Mary J. Blige just rides the cloud here. How it expands and contracts, bringing human sounds into close contact with rarefied synths produces an organic flow of emotion, rather than a formal working through of conceptual ideas. A little too sexless to be Donna Summer, and not quite Pentecostal ecstasy, but this track deftly borrows from both.
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Daniel Montesinos-Donaghy: The Mary J. Blige back catalogue has proved an unexpected beacon for me in tough times over the past year. There is a clarity to her voice, a crystal pitch control and an emotional transparency: when she hurts, you hurt, when she triumphs, you triumph with her. We love Mary, and yet it hasn’t appeared to be the most fruitful of years — yes, there were less instances of My First MJB Collabo rapper donations but there was Black Nativity and the lingering memories from that weird Burger King commercial. MJB the artist was beginning to feel a little staid. Jumping on a near-perfect Disclosure album track is a good indication of a reboot, even if she slightly diminishes the original’s percolating usage of space. She overcomes dance diva cliches, jumping into the supple beats with a take on the maddest love. She sounds over heels, so we tumble alongside her, bamboozled and devoted.
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Crystal Leww: Back when this first came out in May, I wrote about how “F For You” is really just about Howard’s boyish view of love, his own misery from being played to look like a “fool” rather than a genuine hurt. The addition of Mary J. Blige is interesting if only because Mary J. Blige is a grown ass woman with ten albums (the Christmas album doesn’t really count) of songs about love every which way you can imagine. She wholly rejects Howard’s misery, instead allowing herself to be an active rather than a passive agent, willingly accepting the role of “fool” because her man makes her feel good. Love may turn everyone into a dumb teenager, but the grown ass woman lets us know that’s a good thing. Her warmth was always going to be more suited to these sweaty dancefloor pings than a boy’s sullen anxiety anyway.
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