The return of an old featured favorite…
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[6.00]
Will Adams: The vacillation between pumping the beat full-on — with church bells and sputtering snare rolls — and soloing the groaning kick drums gives “Money Baby” more dynamics than its chorus would let on. But that’s about all that’s interesting here.
[5]
Megan Harrington: “Money Baby” thrives by tethering its audience. As a particularly wretched winter restrains North America, restless minds wander, float away in a hotbox of cabin fever. Amidst the muttered insanity and between the Versace windmills of your mind emerges K Camp to remind you what’s real, what matters. Money, baby! It’s like surfacing from a deep sea dream, but I don’t know, I kind of liked it down there, nitrogen bubbles and all?
[5]
Andy Hutchins: A phone book read over this beat — which is unequivocally in the sky, flying with the fishes, and in the ocean, swimming with the pigeons, thanks to the synths that rise out of and sink back to the depths of the sea — would be a hit. K Camp uses that idea, more or less, with his list of likes, but he’s also got an appealing, helium-supported charisma that carries him. He also says “I like takin’ niggas’ hoes, but I stopped doin’ that (I could)” as his first bar, which is both bragging and a hilarious attempt to make himself sound fractionally chill. Kwony just says a bunch of things (“And I ain’t da police, so I ain’t cuffin’ her”; “bitch nigga” rhymed with “bitch, nigga”) that a) have been said better before and b) did not need to be said in the first place.
[7]
Alfred Soto: With a little drugs, which he is happy to provide, she down to fu’. Don’t worry, dear: he’s not the police, he assures us, so put on the cuffs and take more molly.
[3]
Crystal Leww: The perfect hip hop banger is the one that holds up in three settings: the headphones, the car stereo, and the club. This is so spacey and twinkly while at the same time so loud and grounded and rattling that it is absolutely perfect in all three. The production provides the cues for how to move, and K Camp and Kwony Cash stay rapping melodically to round it out.
[9]
Anthony Easton: I like how percussive, metallic, and stripped-down the music is — not quite skeletal, but a repetition of the basic elements pushed extensively forward. This is especially the case with the rattling electronics near the fade-out.
[7]
Madeleine Lee: Everything about this is so agreeable, from K Camp listing a few of his favourite things to the beat that makes you nod along, even if you’re not really paying attention to what anyone is saying by the second go-around.
[6]
Brad Shoup: A great-sounding tune, twiddling and lilting, but at the cost of any scrap of personality. He knows his scales, but I can’t imagine he can Auto-Tune his way to another hit.
[6]