Can hip-hop’s hottest label survive defictionalization?
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[4.00]
Alfred Soto: That’s it — a Derulo/Brown wannabe?
[3]
Katherine St Asaph: I don’t watch Empire, so there’s probably context I’m missing, but all I hear is Timbo scraps and the message of “All About That Bass.”
[3]
Micha Cavaseno: If this song wasn’t in this bogus show, nobody’d care. This is sub-Derulo territory, such an obvious imitation of the idea of “what’s going on.” Personally I want to throw Timbaland a Frisbee with the words “GET A NEW GHOST-PRODUCER” hidden at the bottom so he stops trying to lie and pretend he’s been holding it down the last few years. I could care less about the performance, because it’s not a real song, just a placeholder, so the actor is getting paid even if he turns in a more mediocre and lifeless performance. But you can tell that he’s there just because he’s supposed to be, like how a show “about music” is always so eager to make the music the 4th or 5th priority.
[1]
Crystal Leww: Empire is a great show that should have been set in the first half of the aughts when the show’s main music producer Timbaland still sounded fresh. “You’re So Beautiful” is one of the songs that Timbo didn’t help write, but it still sounds unmistakably like something he put his hands on, just a little bit too into his musical style and just a little bit dated. Jussie Smollett sounds very much in the vein of someone like Justin Timberlake, leaning heavily into showy tricks like falsetto and letting the beatboxing do the heavy lifting on the hooks. It comes off like an actor doing pop music, which is I guess, exactly what Empire and 20/20 Experience are, especially when produced by Timbaland. It’s fine, but it just comes off as better suited to a stylized show nostalgic for the near-past rather than an accurate representation of what the music industry sounds like and sells in the present. But then again, I guess more than one of Justin Timberlake’s cornball tracks from 20/20 did get big, too, so who even knows?
[5]
Thomas Inskeep: Jussie Smollett = star singer. Yazz = mediocre rapper. Empire is a true phenom, and Timbaland has done a good (not great) job shepherding the music for the series, but this is far from its strongest track. The music here is just meh, and too much of the track is given over to Yazz’s half-baked rhymes.
[3]
Anthony Easton: The Kanye reference is the only thing that makes this new; the show’s understanding of hip-hop always seems to be a decade or so out of date. The music is smart, works the plot, and is integrative in ways that Nashville‘s music isn’t really: it works as pop music, but I don’t know if it works as chart music. The charts and the singles are in the middle of a fascinating tussle; I wonder what happens when we exit the singles era, and the skill/popularity/social cachet of work like Empire makes me think that perhaps we already have, or that this is the first salvo. The most interesting work is then the negotiation between two empires that are falling apart.
[9]
Brad Shoup: This version is like corporate sunshine: a focus-grouped daydream. With Hakeem’s priapic verse subbing for Jamal’s more, uh, personal declaration, though, things get a lot paler.
[4]
Edward Okulicz: The chorus, if it wants to be celebratory for the singer or revelatory for the listener, is a bit of a failure, but as a generic bit of post-“What Makes You Beautiful” pop that doesn’t neg its female listeners too much, is not awful on its own. Kind of frisky like Timberlake, but lighter and more concise. The problem is Yazz’s raps, which are flatly delivered in a way that bore rather than engage, and whose words are, frankly, inept junk. Oh and there’s too much Yazz, and the rest isn’t good enough to mitigate.
[4]