Psy ft. Snoop Dogg – Hangover

Will our flaming ambivalence finally push this flop past 80 million views? Stay tuned…

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[5.22]Madeleine Lee: You know when you’re so drunk that every song is only the hook part, and every time a new hook comes on there’s some wasted bros yelling in your ear about “THIS FUCKING SONG,” and eventually you can’t even make out the individual words? Now what if it was really just the same song playing the whole night? (Points awarded for the parts where the trap beat turns into samulnori, and for making a way better SNL Korea digital short than anything SNL Korea itself has been able to come up with; both of these things are more clever than this song deserves.)
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Alfred Soto: Treating the 2012 sensation as sound effect/Rodney Dangerfield made sense, for what is Snoop these days but a sound effect/Rodney Dangerfield? Like many of his recent attempts at chart pop he’s barely trying to recruit decent programmers. A hangover, after all, is only possible after a night of partying; this is barely an afternoon of Sociables and beer.
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Iain Mew: The painful triumph of Psy-as-meme over Psy, the guy who made a great song. Despite sharing writers with “Gentleman”, listening to Psy in “Hangover” is like watching Spain and their new World Cup striker Diego Costa struggling to fit him into an unfamiliar team that doesn’t suit his play style at all. The few moments where the game is changed to suit him — the long balls to the man up front, the bits where Psy is freed to rap in Korean — just show how out-of-sorts he is for the rest of it. The whole team is doomed to failure.
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Anthony Easton: I love how willing Snoop is to work with almost anyone, to do almost anything — he’s almost like Willie Nelson in that capacity. Also, his voice has expanded and been made strange by time and experience. This is so overstuffed, so excessive, that it doesn’t matter what they say, as that’s just another texture — which is most likely for the best, because the lyrics are kind of dumb. (It also makes me wonder if Psy is a viral genius and not just a one-hit-wonder.)
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Megan Harrington: Is this a backdoor pilot for a sitcom starring Snoop Dogg and Psy as two unlikely best friends/drinking buddies partying hard in globetrotting style? Yes? Season pass me, please.
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Brad Shoup: Now that he’s on OK Go’s publishing schedule, his songs are getting better, too. The subject’s broad, but not Psy’s image. This time, the joke’s on saxophone and “Dance (Ass)” and probably LMFAO. Snoop mostly keeps in his lane: he’s been too cool to try for a while now, but it works for his sung bits. There are about three songs here, but that’s the one I want more of.
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Jer Fairall: Less a song than a series of production tics too erratic for any one of them to ever grow tiresome, its sheer weirdness gives it a momentum that even manages to rouse Snoop into rare state of semi-wakefulness. If Psy ends up as a supporting player on his own track, the obnoxious-in-numerous-ways “catch a lady by the toe” bit suggests that he deserves to be.
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Scott Mildenhall: As it turns out, yes, the moment has passed. That’s no excuse for such a desperate attempt at an earworm hook though. Maybe if it was 2005 Jamster would be banging out the “hangoverhangoverhangover” ringtone, but as the centrepiece to a song it’s never going to ingratiate itself, unlike its forebears. The bloke from the MoneySuperMarket adverts meanwhile adds little but his presence.
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Patrick St. Michel: Psy is going to be branded as a funny, meme-spawning, one-hit wonder for the rest of his career, and dude’s smart enough to run with that via his shameless, bad-beer-endorsing videos. Yet Psy’s always had a mean streak going for him too — his smart-ass side was all over “Gangnam Style,” just ultimately pushed to the side once he became a surprise YouTube sensation. What’s surprising about “Hangover” is how it isn’t out to please anyone, but flexes aggressively; Psy practically taunting the listeners clicking over from their Facebook feeds to see what the horse guy is up to. Many have noted how one wouldn’t want to hear this when they were actually hungover, which is a great observation if it weren’t obvious that’s what Psy’s going for — the whirring in the verses, the darty horn-mimicking sound, those gloriously wasted manipulated vocals that are both fun and disorienting. Snoop Dogg’s inclusion is most significant on the video side of things, and here he’s just a drop of smoothness (and English) to the otherwise in-your-face proceedings. My favorite image from the video is Psy, sitting on a motorcycle, pretending that a beer bottle is a gun aimed at the viewer. Sums up why I like this confounding, twisty track.
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