It’s “Taking An Old Hook And Reimagining It For 2014” Day! First, a guy who now gets to be in the same sentence as Bridgit Mendler…
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Patrick St. Michel: What wonderful timing: three Great-OK-Bad examples of taking an old hook and reimagining it for 2014. Future took “Push It” to “Move That Dope” but used it to create something drastically different in sound and tone than the original. Ludacris thought Aqua’s “Barbie Girl” could be turned into something new, but he at least called up Jeremih to handle it. And then here comes Trey Songz, lifting a Fugees chorus as an excuse to present the world with a lazy sex jam saved slightly by an OK DJ Mustard beat.
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Alfred Soto: I want to think that a song named after a Zola novel and boasting a Teena Marie interpolation would sound ideal on Diddy-Dirty Money’s next contemporary R&B revue. A singer this colorless deserves help.
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Megan Harrington: Trey sounds like he’s trying to sing both parts of a Drake and Rihanna duet.
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Crystal Leww: How on earth did Trey Songz manage to make a DJ Mustard beat sound boring?
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Brad Shoup: The interpolated bit is like a live wire dropped into the swamp. It’s effective murk, don’t get me wrong — watch out for the backmasked gasp that sounds like a dry heave — but Trey’s shiver is face-pulling for its own sake. Another fine example from the genre “club songs that sound like they’re being performed in an empty room”.
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Katherine St Asaph: Requiem for a Strip Club, where “keep your hands in the air if you’re spending the night” sounds so dejected I half-think he means he’s gonna fall asleep at the bar after all the girls leave.
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Anthony Easton: The softly decorative grounding beat might make this the most lilting, sweet booty song in recent memory. It kind of works.
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Scott Mildenhall: How about this for justice: Misha B’s take on “Fu-Gee-La” seems to pretty much mark the end of her pop career, sounding more each day like a shrug of the shoulders, sigh and celebration of what once was in acceptance of it becoming an isn’t. It’s a beautiful, defeatist and likely inadvertent prophecy that was fulfilled in a way that isn’t happening to this. But this — albeit serviceable, albeit palatable — is boring!
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