The 2010s, what a time…
[Video]
[8.25]
Julian Axelrod: Just when I thought MNEK had been relegated to the UK pop production wilderness, he returns with his best solo effort to date: A frantically horny pitch-fucked gay fantasia that makes hooking up with a straight guy feel like a tragedy of biblical proportions. Where MNEK’s work on FLO’s “Fly Girl” nudged “Work It” into a modern context, “Reverse!!” pushes Missy Elliott and Timbaland’s futurist pop into even filthier, freakier territory.
[8]
Hannah Jocelyn: “Correct” is one of the most underrated pop songs of the last decade — is it a [10]? well, take a guess — and this is a worthy follow-up for being even more ADHD. Sure, let’s riff on the “Thong Song” beat! Let’s do a dance-pop interlude straight out of 2008! Let’s make a force femme joke (“I could turn a bad boy to a bad bitch in seconds”) on a major label! Can we please get MNEK as big as Zara Larsson? No one’s deserved the redemption arc more.
[9]
Iain Mew: This is the work of someone who has studied the art of the R&B-pop banger about a hottie at the club, and put together all their best interpretations of it — the urgent falsetto part! The clatter of orchestral hits! Better still, it runs on the thrill of working out how much power there is in the subject being another man. One who wears a baggy tracksuit, “but it’s big, you can see it from the side.” MNEK confidently teases both subject and, implicitly, audience (“Play this track in your ride/Dare you to play this track round your bredren”), and it’s all fresh and enjoyable.
[8]
Alfred Soto: I haven’t loved a MNEK jam since the Gorgon City collab long ago and far away. The orchestral stabs compensate and synth glissandos compensate for the vocal manipulations; the chorus is peekaboo about his voraciousness. I may dance to it.
[7]
Katherine St. Asaph: A free summer seminar in matching someone’s freak.
[9]
Taylor Alatorre: A bit too self-satisfied with its premise to achieve the full lift-off it wants. MNEK lets his sleight-of-hand production tricks dominate center stage, leaving genuine ecstasy to pop in whenever it can from the wings. Still, it’s a powerful thesis he advances here, supporting by multiple lines of converging evidence. I, for one, am inclined to believe it.
[7]
Tim de Reuse: The chorus is contextualized first as a brag, then as a kind of mind-altering mantra, and then as a celebration. It’s beautiful how we go from clean west-coast rap to autotune-harmony rainbows, all catalyzed by an echo of a line about watching a guy’s dick through his tracksuit. Happy pride. We’re giving your boys hypnosis fetishes.
[9]
Nortey Dowuona: “REVERSE!!” has a moment in its video where a woman sees her boyfriend enjoying a moment of joy with another man, surrendering to a gentle kiss, and responds with “what the fuck!” It’s a surprisingly revealing moment, because it twists the knife deeper. Both the chorus and refrain have already told you, over a lush, vibrant synth progression, that MNEK is so seductive he can swing any man into a pliant partner. But to see it actually happen, to see the excitement and freaky deaky joy in the moment as each of these men slowly lose their inhibitions and love and desire and delight in each other, is a terror that straight women and especially straight men have always had, since it makes clear how flimsy the labels of the straights are if one earnest, feminine masc can swipe away those deep-rooted fears and rules in a moment. At the end of the video, MNEK snaps his fingers, and the spell is undone, all the walls and fears return, the men angrily turn on each other, but the damage is done: I’ve got him figured out, this is where he wants to be right now. (And to be a lil crass, the forearms and thighs are big, not the booty. But that can be worked on.)
[9]