Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to the Michaelangelo Matos School of Accents…
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[4.88]
Michaelangelo Matos: Pffffffftttt: comeback! Good one! Oh wait, sorry. I mean: Nice one, matey! On one! Cheerio! Or whatever the pillheads in British/Euro-clubs without a care in the world say to each other when they’re dancing to piffle like this. That seems to be the guiding principle here, and why not? Anything for a fresh start, right? Live your life, absolutely. Just watch where you throw those chairs.
[1]
Anthony Easton: There is a brilliant article in this weeks New York Magazine, about how people sort of hated Chris Brown when he was all begging forgiveness for beating the shit out of Rhianna, but loving him when he gave up on feeling bad, and started being an asshole again. Sort of the R. Kelly thing.
[6]
Asher Steinberg: Pop is in a really affirming mood nowadays. In the past half-year, we’ve had singles from Katy Perry, Ke$ha, Pink, Lady Gaga, and now Chris Brown on the joys of being one’s (often gay) self. Unfortunately, previous installments in the cycle of self-empowerment tunes have ranged from condescending, to condescending-er, to perfectly okay, but less interested in affirming the listener’s identity than in celebrating the singer’s own freedom to wear tons of glitter. Now, Chris has come out with the most sincere and uplifting inspirational ditty of them all, built around the charming if treacly conceit that, wherever Chris goes, all he sees are beautiful people. Of course, one can’t help but think of one particular beautiful person whom Chris temporarily rendered not so beautiful, which perhaps explains his fervent insistence that the beauty “deep inside you” is all that counts. But as self-serving and full of it as the song may actually be, Chris does the song a huge favor by disappearing into layers of autotune, making it perfectly possible to pretend that this isn’t a Chris Brown song at all.
[8]
Katherine St Asaph: TEAM: OK, boss, this’ll totally sell him. See, we redesigned the packaging to get rid of all that aggressive branding and move the old name off to the corner there. Everything’s glazed in more autotune to go down easy, and the track’s been pressed into fun new shapes! We even got Benny Benassi — don’t worry, he’s legit — to give us a nice blurb for the back of the box. You won’t believe it’s got Chris Brown! BOSS: Huh. So you won’t… shame its sell-by date says 2009.
[3]
Hazel Robinson: After having spent the last few months vaguely convinced that “Yeah x3” was a Katy Perry song due to its resemblance to “California Girls”, I ended up listening to the whole Chris Brown album the other day and growing completely maddened that someone it feels so impossible to endorse has been given such fucking brilliant songs. Then again, I like metal so this sort of dissonance isn’t unusual and perhaps that’s what lets me brush it aside where it feels like I probably shouldn’t. Either that or the fact that most of the album takes pains to reduce Brown’s actual involvement with each song to a cursory minimum that feels more like a producer’s vanity album than a popstar’s. Still, the brooding, clambering basslines of this, building into Benny Benassi’s euphoric home territory and the take your sexy time line makes my skin crawl a little bit. Part of me wonders if it would if “Changed Man” hadn’t been such a total travesty that anything after feels like at best a bad act but I really don’t want Chris Brown to be up against me in a club, it turns out. And I think perhaps I like the song because of that — it’s almost certainly a leap of faith too far to assume that it’s intentionally gothic but the compulsion is in the revulsion here, certainly.
[7]
Martin Skidmore: Pumping Benassi electrohouse, with what sound almost like steel drums, with Chris Brown droning over the top. I think he’s a dull singer (I am trying to put aside the fact that he’s a loathsome cunt, but it may bias me), and the deadened tones really do nothing for the otherwise bright and uplifting club sounds.
[6]
Alfred Soto: I like the sexual ambiguity of the title — it scrubs some of the dullness off the post-Guetta backdrop. But all the Auto-Tune that a felon can buy doesn’t give the vocals the charisma crucial to making this sort of squishy universalism soar.
[3]
Jer Fairall: Might’ve functioned as a perfectly serviceable, comfortably nondescript Pride anthem were it not for the massive inconvenience of “Born This Way.” Oh, and that whole Rihanna thing.
[5]