Too foolish to make us happy…
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[2.57]
Wayne Weizhen Zhang: Aitch, leave Ashanti alone!!!
[1]
Ady Thapliyal: Tina Fey’s new show Girls5eva centers around a Y2K girl group whose career is unexpectedly revived after a Gen Z rapper samples their biggest hit. The rapper, after hearing a snippet of their original track, says, “I was a baby in ’99, but I like it. It’s old school — makes me think of my mom’s boobies.” I can’t say if Aitch was thinking along the same lines, but the title might hold a clue.
[3]
Jeffrey Brister: Makes no impression, like an extremely faded photocopy of a photocopy. My brain drifts back to high school in the early ’00s, smashing Ashanti’s voice together with Sean Paul’s and making a better song in my imagination than this could ever be.
[3]
Scott Mildenhall: If this were the scene from an ITV2 sitcom that it feels like — with a would-be Jay from The Inbetweeners clone daydreaming about being a rap star — it would at least be brief. Within the low-bar expectations of such a show, you could even get away with a hodgepodge of genre cliches delivered without dexterity; after all, the guy isn’t supposed to be good. But Aitch is supposed to be good. Certainly, he is better than this — he just doesn’t have to be.
[3]
Alfred Soto: “Baby” tells me that the pandemic has exhausted producers as much as everyone else, except they don’t have to eat.
[3]
Oliver Maier: Not only does Aitch not deserve this sample to begin with, it doesn’t even mesh with the beat very well. Just a mess.
[1]
Katherine St Asaph: A single seemingly designed to make people comment “core memory unlocked” on TikTok. But playing Ashanti directly would do the same.
[4]