Asher Steinberg’s thoughts are in the comments box, btw…
[Video][Myspace]
[5.38]
Alfred Soto: I can’t figure this person out yet. She’s got spunk, but so did Lil Kim. Here she’s already essaying a pop crossover that wouldn’t pass muster if she were a bigger star, which she’ll presumably be.
[4]
Michaelangelo Matos: Sight unseen, I took this for some boring new R&B starlet who did a little rapping. Then I checked what I was listening to. Oddly, almost nothing about my perception of the track changed.
[3]
Martin Skidmore: She’s my act of the year, no doubt, but we could really use a single something like as great as her many show-stealing guest verses. I was generous to her last one, but this is deeply disappointing. Her voice is as conventional as she can get, she sings quite a lot of it, and the lyrics are a pretty restrained ode to a lover who winds her up – yet she sounds extremely calm and reasonable by her standards. There are great singles in her, I know it…
[5]
Katie Lewis: I prefer Nicki when she’s wearing her dissociative identity disorder on her sleeve, but for a straight up vanilla radio hit, this isn’t half bad.
[7]
Tyrone Palmer: Whereas “Your Love” was a saccharine, auto-tune-drenched ballad of devotion that had very little to offer in terms of actual rapping, this song takes the formula that made that song a hit and inverts it. Here Minaj trades fairytale for reality, and showcases a vulnerability that she hasn’t really touched on in her material thus far. The song’s chorus does verge on the sappy side, but her delivery on the verses lends emotional heft to the track (e.g. ”Tired of letting passive aggression/Control My mind, capture my soul/ Okay you’re right, now let it go!”).In stepping away from the antics and doing away with the artifice that has made her such a commodity in the first place (and one of the most interesting and exciting figures in pop music), she give us one of our first glimpses of Onika Maraj – the woman behind the colorful wigs and cartoon voices.
[7]
Pete Baran: If things like this were important, I could see this being a Christmas number one (with a few sleigh bells added – NOT THOSE SLEIGH BELLS). Sonically there is an odd link here between this and East 17’s Stay Another Day, a similarly ballsy lighter-waver. Nicki fills this track with a more contemplative rap than expected, but it’s nice to see her relaxing on her own track rather than her never ending guest slots, and it’s clean for her too (unless you excuse the thirty or so Shit’s in the song). The breakdown is an audacious moment; I can see myself grinning uncontrollably to that at a Christmas party. The breakthrough.
[9]
Al Shipley: That incessant HADDAYUUUUU haunts me now, like a siren that keeps ringing in your head long after the ambulances have taken away the bodies of the people that were in the wrong place at the wrong time when you heard that goddamn Nicki Minaj song again.
[1]
Kat Stevens: This is not the funny, strutting, larger-than-life Nicki that I have been adoring all year. She sounds exasperated, reluctantly admitting that someone else has seen through her plastic cartoon persona. The usual tricks she’d employ to dominate and control the situation aren’t working, and even if she could escape, she wouldn’t want to: she’s finally found another person who’s more than a match for her, and can’t pass up the challenge. However instead of raising the stakes, Nicki loses the battle, slowing down into anonymous mush. Sweet, palatable mush, but firmly vanilla-flavoured — the exact opposite of the beyond-batshit Roman’s Revenge.
[7]
Alex Macpherson: “Right Thru Me” isn’t particularly remarkable, but neither is it as awful as “Your Love” or the truly execrable “Check It Out”: sure, the chorus is lazily underwritten and the production way too chintzy, but there’s tension and real emotion coming through in the verses. But it’s sad that three singles deep into the Pink Friday campaign, Nicki Minaj is still coming out with generic middle school love song slush as though she daren’t put her money where her mouth is on other people’s records and actually be a singular, head-turning figure in a pop cultural landscape that could really use one. Which is to say: man, it was a relief and a half when she dropped “Roman’s Revenge” on Hallowe’en. Maybe there’s hope for this album yet.
[6]
Renato Pagnani: Nicki’s got about five singles floating around right now, and this see-what-sticks approach is a sign her label isn’t quite sure how to market her. She almost sells the wonder during the chorus, where she actually closes in on vulnerable. But it’s all oddly distant, like she could be describing her BFF instead of her BF. And actually, it very well may have nothing to do with a romantic interest — it’s that lukewarm.
[5]
Edward Okulicz: This sounds like the bedroom R&B produced by this guy four houses down from me rather than something bespoke for what you’d assume is a high-priority artist launch. Awful.
[3]
Jonathan Bogart: The song is boring, but her performance is still so magnetic she almost tricks me into thinking it’s more than a by-the-numbers slow jam.
[7]
Jer Fairall: Her problem seems to be with choruses, and “Right Through Me” saddles her with another soggy one that feels like a grab for radio play (in which case hanging it off of “how do you do that shit?” is especially ill-advised). Everything else here, though, from her urgent delivery to those lovely twinkling synth chimes, absolutely hums, which makes the anvil around the song’s neck all the more burdensome.
[6]