Happy New Year! And like we always do at this time, we’re welcoming 2020 with the BBC’s Sound Of selection…
[Video]
[4.50]
Thomas Inskeep: Everything about this shouldn’t work, from the perspective of my ears: I dislike YUNGBLUD’s emo-kid black lipsticked aesthetic, he dances around like he had too many Five Hour Energys, and for fucking fuck’s sake this features guest vocals from Dan Reynolds of Imagine Dragons. But yet. The drums, big and stupid, grab me in spite of myself. YUNGBLUD’s delivery has the right energy, in this instance, for this song. (Even though I could do without his fast talking-qua-rapping.) And the emo teen in me — more than 30 years in the past but never really far away — gets what he’s singing (“I’m the original loser”). Funny when you expect to hate something and are proven wrong.
[7]
Will Rivitz: Well, it’s a mess, and at the very least anything that desanitizes Imagine Dragons’ hospital-grade impersonality automatically scores points. I’m not convinced the duo ever truly meshes: I once saw someone describe the adequate but wooden “Kiss and Make Up” as less a true duet than an awkwardly-written fanfiction come to life, and that basically holds true for “Original Me,” except the lyrics sound like they were also awkwardly written by the same fic writer instead of an experienced team of pop lyricists finishing their day’s work. It doesn’t help that at least a third of this song is fully inexplicable — YUNGBLUD doing his best Kero Kero Bonito midway through the second verse, Dan Reynolds channeling DMX fronting a hardcore outfit on his ad-libs during YUNGBLUD’s rap verse, Dan Reynolds doing ad-libs, YUNGBLUD rapping — and it doesn’t help that said inexplicable third mostly serves to mask that this song’s message has been stale since grunge was cool. Still, I can’t find it in me to hate it, partly because I would have been an immense YUNGBLUD stan if he’d been around ten years ago and this song, much like every virtually identical track from Linkin Park and Flyleaf, would still be hanging around my running playlists today, and partly because much is forgivable when a synth bass that could level cities undergirds it all.
[5]
Jacob Sujin Kuppermann: This kind of owns in the way early Linkin Park does when it’s just the two of them yelling over blown out power chords. But all of the trappings around them — whether it’s YUNGBLUD’s weird double-time rap bit or the quiet parts, where the song loses all momentum — serve as reminders of how tired and empty YUNGBLUD’s schtick is, all sputtering attempts at edginess that trip themselves up at every pass.
[2]
Katherine St Asaph: I went into this with more goodwill than it perhaps deserves, thanks to the past week of exhausting Discourse about Dan Reynolds’s Imagine Dragons crowding rock radio and signaling apocalypse, by people who’ve forgotten the crap that’s always crowded rock radio. When so primed to be liked, “Original Me” is surprisingly(?) likeable. It’s a ginormous electro-emo juggernaut like last year’s Illenium/Jon Bellion collaboration complete with all the things the kids who liked that like: nu-metal yelps, a double-time rapped bit to prove original losers can be showoffs too, low-volume outro to vibe to. But somewhere along the track, you realize it reminds you of two things. One is a Sleigh Bells track toned down 200 percent more than necessary, compensated for by yarling 400 percent louder than desired. The other is “Thunder.”
[5]
Ian Mathers: I didn’t previously think of (sigh) YUNGBLUD as being particularly stylistically related to Imagine Dragons, but putting the two side by side actually shows they’re just the same very bland core with different scene signifiers pasted on top. It winds up showing two things at once: how surprisingly widespread and unsurprisingly pernicious Imagine Dragons’ influence is, and how compared to some of their offspring they’re almost listenable.
[1]
Joshua Minsoo Kim: The structuring of the first verse is smart: YUNGBLUD sounds fine, but then Reynolds comes in with his ever-robust yelling to flesh out the anger. When YUNGBLUD comes back, everything snaps into place: the pair represent two generations of angst — the whiny teen and the stone-hearted father. They play off each other, first as bald-faced one-upmanship, then as iron-sharpens-iron synchronicity. They babble about being losers; I’m just here for the choreographed roughhousing.
[6]
Brad Shoup: Dan Reynolds has a great bark, I’ve always thought: like a dad falling back to the last line of authority. Punt the Dragons back a couple decades — you’re welcome — and maybe they’d cross to pop from the same starting point as the Offspring. Here, though, he’s just along for the “Ride”. YUNGBLUD’s tweaks to the template are modest, but still grating: talkbox buried in the mix, aggressive midrange shudder, the undramatic start-stopping included as a nod to his guest. When they’re both hollering, it’s fun. When they’re trading verses on how life’s not that bad, it’s baffling.
[5]
Alfred Soto: Using the lingua franca of metal to bark, “I’m the original LO-SER!” is as old as Jimmy Carter, and that these young people get some oomph from this approach speaks to its effectiveness. A few of us don’t want us appropriating the language and approach of the powerful, though.
[5]