A proper comeback this time…
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[6.22]
Daniel Montesinos-Donaghy: Dawn Richard didn’t become the King Theoden of battlepop just so she could give Tyga a publishing cheque for rapping against the beat about “Smurf faces.” But if she’s going to hold up her solo career for misguided MTV nostalgia, this isn’t that bad a look. “Lemonade” is the product of Making the Band taking on a beat by Ben Baller music supervisors The Stereotypes, making it a meeting of the reality show minds; it also samples Clipse’s “Grindin,” which is one of the best songs E-V-E-R. Danity Kane make a comeback with a single you could imagine being spun by DJ Carisma. Meanwhile, Pharrell’s era of optimistic stardom runs on alongside ratchet music. “Lemonade” takes advantage of current musical trends, but there’s a sly tip of the cap to how 2002 Pharrell’s sparse brutality inspires the song’s similarly sparse Mustardisms. So Richard has moved away from fantasy writer to music historian? That’s a literary shift that I can live with.
[7]
Alfred Soto: A decent simulation of Danity Kane, with a googly-sounding, aqueous production not worlds apart from Dawn Richard’s own albums.
[6]
Thomas Inskeep: Remember when Danity Kane were Puffy’s take on the Pussycat Dolls? Yeah, they’re not even that good now, and that’s even though they’re coming with a sample from J-Kwon’s towering ’04 club banger “Tipsy.” No more songs about “haters,” please. And while we’re at it, no more songs with Tyga on them.
[3]
Josh Langhoff: Good to hear DK heeding Proverbs 25:21-22, surely the sassiest and/or passive-aggressivest proverb: “If [your hater] is thirsty, give him [lemonade] to drink. In doing so, you will heap burning coals on his head.” Alternately, you could smother him in synth percussion that keeps popping around like a damn whack-a-mole so your hater just sort of flails about and oh my word that kick drum. Also nice to hear Tyga developing a personality, mostly through sheer not going away. “Time and chance happen to them all.” (Ecclesiastes 9:11)
[8]
Brad Shoup: The metaphor’s fantastic, implying this death-spiral of sourness. Hate the blown-out Mustardy riff? Cynical about the tiny snatch of Iggy-adjacent rapping, or the brief interlude of pretty, meek harmonies? Wondering if there was actually a Tyga feature? Here’s a straw.
[7]
Katherine St Asaph: Tastes like Crystal Light.
[4]
Will Adams: The scarfing bassline knows when to step aside for the lusher moments, and Danity Kane are game for the ride. But I prefer my lemonade to be sweet, not sour, which is probably why I can’t connect fully with a song that treats club outings as a fuck-the-haters exercise.
[6]
Anthony Easton: Is it more rockist of me to be upset that this is not the true Danity Kane, or that this might be one of my favourite Tyga beats of recent memory?
[7]
Mark Sinker: There’s a scene in Coppola’s Bram Stoker’s Dracula where the girl-vamps in Drac’s crib — bats with baby faces in the violent violet night — arrive slinkily polyform to do Keanu, heads bodies legs creepy-sexily fused for extra hmmmm. Except OK it’s a terrible film and the scene goes all perfunctory-symbolic on us: we’re sortakinda meant to be repping for Reeves and virgin wifey back home (which, hard work) and the scene curdles. The geometry here’s not so different — DK as fluid unit on the prowl, mock-vamping the never-seen haters, songlines languidly twined, furling and unfurling, rippling and settling and rippling some more. The image is a half-formed joke — why so sour? if have lemons, hi! we’re lemonade! — but its delivery is neatly topsyturvied, because as kerbside vendors they’re also the car-carried passersby, and the section that melts into soft self-involved glide perfectly catches warm late night city riding, top down as they say, the party in there with them as they roll on past. And Tyga as Drac — because he’s in the car too, with poor old Keanu the muggle stood sad and wooden in their dust — yearns a lot less than more ancient demons might, and doesn’t seem to mind he’s mostly being swept along here, and not doing much of the sweeping.
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