The last time we covered her we neglected to mention the Kardashians discovered her, so yeah, there’s that too…
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[4.83]
Crystal Leww: Right as it’s finally getting coverage and recognition, the rnbass movement is slowly but surely slowing down. DJ Mustard has moved on to trap remixes of random stuff, and while producers like Nic Nac still carry the torch, the stuff by Tyga and Chris Brown don’t quite capture to breezy club quality of tracks from last year. Don’t get me wrong — I will ride for this sound until the very end, but you can see the way this stuff charts or how tracks are being covered by blogs or the sheer volume of absolute and utter shit that is trying to capitalize on its icy yet flirty sound. Still, we’re getting good one-offs like this little gem from Pia Mia. Like all good rnbass, it’s elevated above the fold by who delivers the lines. Pia Mia’s practically whispered “I’m in lust with you / I just wanna fuck with you” is delivered like a secret to no one, like everyone in the club has seen y’all flirting all night. The G-Eazy remix is really good, too, if only because because “You and I are gonna happen / that’s just inevitability” is a douchebag line that feels so good.
[8]
Alfred Soto: Looking askance at the minor chord piano keys getting plunked in that intro, Pia Mia drops repetitions (“don’t stop don’t stop”) and solecisms like “I’m in lust with you” like Tinashe was a dream her producers want to forget.
[4]
Anthony Easton: You know, the Kardashians have an eye for talent and some really smart networking connections. This is pretty much the sound of now, and intended as a kind of entrée to radio, though the word fuck is much less shocking than it has been. It’s seamless — I admire how ruthless it is in its efficiency, and how it kind of floats away even after several listens.
[5]
Micha Cavaseno: A run through some particularly slapdash attempts at “ratcheting” over a delightfully grayscale Nic-Nac thudder that sounds like the time I heard a description of ketamine leaving people literally face down in the floor in a club. This is a skeleton of a good club banger, but bones alone does not a meal make.
[4]
Mo Kim: You say you want to fuck with me but you sound like you’re about to pass out on the couch.
[4]
Katherine St Asaph: I don’t consider myself a prude; the accusation of prudishness (used most recently by Robert Christgau, defending his memoir’s exhumation of his sperm) as an argument instant-win button is perhaps my biggest peeve. So why, faced with singles as blunt as “Fuck With You,” do I note nothing but a certain deadness, to near-moral degree? At first I thought maybe it was the song — pop bleeds new sounds dead faster than ever, and rnbass is already starting to bore me; “I’m in lust with you” is just an awkward phrase, to read and to sing. But no, it’s the same deadness from songs of as variable quality as “Take Me Home,” “Talking Body,” “Love Burning Alive,” “Drop That Kitty,” even “2 On.” The key’s in the premise — if he really wants-to-toooo, then why hasn’t he? It butts up against the real-world lustscape at its most despair-inducing: the sexual revolution’s merely replaced “girls want love, guys want sex” with “girls want sex, guys want conquest”; they cultivate wants in women like botanists, then smugly half-ass the harvest, as winning was enough. Pia Mia sings the autotuned crap out of “Fuck With You” and the track gleams with mechanical confidence, but under it all is the sense it’ll amount to naught; as in so much music, the women feel so much while their male-counterpart songs (in all genres) are indifferent or worse. The dynamic is demoralizing enough in real life; for me to put up with it in music, the song had damn well better be transcendent.
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