Icona Pop ft. Ty Dolla $ign – It’s My Party

Bets on who’ll be the next guest verse?

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[4.27]Katherine St Asaph: Icona Pop, thanks to a deadly combination of hype backlash, latent rockism and puzzling career choices, are fast becoming a grand one-hit cautionary tale. I was afraid of this, but I still (foolishly?) think they’ve got a career in them, and it’s not too late to reverse course. You can help! To the press: recognize that harmony-free brat pop is a genre, not a problem; recommend songs by songwriters (Patrik Berger, Hannah Robinson, Fransisca Hall); maybe give any shits about the members of Icona Pop at all, like you’d do with other up-and-comers, rather than treating them as a faceless fast-fashion pop contraption. To Icona Pop: write off the 2012 album this appears on, i.e. the statement that titling your This Is… was supposed to have made; cut it with the interchangeable rappers, or at least quit trying to pretend you’re Instagram buddies; write or commission an original hook that does not rip off another pop song, before you turn into J. R. Rotem.
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Daniel Montesinos-Donaghy: The writing was on the wall after Icona Pop’s Instagram gaffe where they claimed to be hanging out with Ty Dolla Sign and it actually was Waka Flocka Flame. Yikes. As great as the original “It’s My Party” is, Ty is given no chance to make his mark and is duly turned into Turnup/Molly Verse Depository #41692. You don’t know who he is, and for the sake of a cheap joke, Icona Pop don’t care either.
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David Sheffieck: At this point it seems like there just has to be some dark, disturbing reason why this song keeps being released as a single. A mob debt, maybe? This wasn’t a good pick when it featured Smiler, still didn’t click when it had Zebra Katz, and hasn’t gotten better with the addition of Ty Dolla $ign. If Icona Pop are gonna re-release an old single, why not delightful oral-sex ode “Downtown” or “Nights Like This,” which is still their best song to date?
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Anthony Easton: Punky, slightly junked up, tinged with ugliness and exhaustion, proves the Gore has some serious bones. The Ty Dolla verse fits within the context of the rest of the song, but with the “Indian giver” line it’s less formal ugly and more tinge-of-racism ugliness. I would have preferred a straight cover.
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Alfred Soto: A stupid and pointless cover. Iggy Azalea would sound believably petulant, not threatened with waterboarding like Icona Pop does. Besides, this is how you cover an early sixties classic.
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Patrick St. Michel: Do I want to go to Icona Pop’s sob fest, doubling as some bizarre fusion ’70s-today affair? Or to Ty Dolla $ign’s hedonistic get together, except the only person benefiting from any of the excess is Ty Dolla $ign himself? What’s on TV?
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Jer Fairall: Oh great, “We Can’t Stop” as an urtext.
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Scott Mildenhall: Judy’s wearing his ring, while Icona Pop sit crying, once again in clothes they’ve worn before. Poor Icona Pop. Some things never change; they only get worse. (The clothes metaphor is gone by this point.) Maybe Ty Dolla $ign’s invitation to show himself up is a subplot or something, but it only does the opposite of distracting from how the majority of the little this has going for it is the interpolation.
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Megan Harrington: I’m familiar with the earlier version of “It’s My Party” featuring Zebra Katz. Back then, I thought it was a weirdo pop classic marred by a lazy, phoned in verse. Now I think it’s Icona Pop that sound lazy (and a bit robotic) in comparison to Ty Dolla $ign. He’d have the next “Candy Shop” if not for the Barbie party that precedes him. This just goes to show what a difference a year makes.
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Andy Hutchins: The alien strip club where this plays on loop is a circle of hell. Or a triangle, given the explicit and incredibly subtly implied threesome references here. In any case: Good to see the Iconae have joined “Fancy”-featured Charli in destroying whatever residual goodwill remained from the first 100 spins of “I Love It.”
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Will Adams: I nearly docked a point for this being the umpteenth release of the song, but soon remembered what makes the song so fun. It’s not the featureless rap counterpoint. It’s the setting of Lesley Gore’s chorus to such an ugly, spray-painted beat. It’s the specific, absurd lyrics (“the zipper broke in the back so my crack’s hanging ouuuuut”). And mostly, it’s Icona Pop’s delivery throughout, from the literal sobbing to shouting every line with the petulance of a band who’s been struggling to follow-up their big hit. Hey, you’d cry too.
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