Pit’s long-awaited (if only by Marc Anthony) single with Marc Anthony!
[Video][Website]
[4.50]
Jonathan Bradley: So that’s what Johnny Drama is up to these days.
[5]
Brad Shoup: Time to check in with pop’s reigning albino side-talker. I dunno what others think of Pitbull’s beige croak, but when he’s on the radio I find it hard to switch away; furthermore, while the ‘blank-is-the-new-blank’ conceit ought to be stale by now, I can’t recall offhand its use in any other song. Wish he’d stocked the whole tune with it, instead of writing a bridge about touching some dude’s penis in a dark club. Marc Anthony (the new Nick Lachey) gets pitchy on the chorus, while RedOne (the new Stargate) drenches the thing in his omnipresent disco-pop. All totaled, Voli got its money’s worth.
[5]
Jonathan Bogart: For a while I was working on a half-assed idea about the ways Christian music is influencing modern pop based almost entirely on the line “let it rain over me,” which because of its ambiguous antecedents (let what rain over you?), could mean almost anything, and the phrase is very familiar in worship music to mean God’s grace, love, mercy, etc. But I decided I was out on too far of a limb there, and settled on just loving the song for Anthony’s power-chorus and Pitbull’s inventive use of the “x is the new n” construction.
[8]
Edward Okulicz: Marc Anthony looks like a sex criminal in the video and sounds like he’s on the verge of a complete nervous breakdown. Pit sounds like he can get love but can’t breathe. Like most generic club bangers with a pinch of charisma and an overbearing RedOne chorus full of RedNoise™, would be improved by a Ne-Yo chorus. Ay-yay-yay.
[3]
Alfred Soto: Marc Anthony, a putz who got lucky with pseudo-Latin filigrees and a truly reptilian coldbloodedness, isn’t fooling anyone with this attempt to join his bro Enrique on the dance floor. At least Enrique has “Escape” to his credit. At least Pitbull can speak Pitbullshit in Spanish, which I can translate and is inferior to Mellow Man Ace’s in his great 1990 novelty hit “Mentirosa” (the title signals that he’s aware it’s a hustle). The ominous synth rumbling in the last third is the sound of young fools “experimenting” in the studio because they can.
[2]
Andy Hutchins: Pitbull, Marc Anthony, and RedOne team for the summer’s (?) most generic single that always makes me think Anthony’s got a pretty strange fetish.
[3]
Katherine St Asaph: RedOne sounds big and boring, Marc Anthony sounds adequate if you’re generous, and Pitbull sounds like what you either ignore or love. Never that I can remember has a track defied commentary so well.
[5]
Josh Langhoff: So many good lines! Not in this particular Pitbull song, mind you, but in Mikael Wood’s wonderfully droll Pitbull article in June 17th’s Billboard. He really takes you behind the sausage. “‘We wanted somebody to embody our brand who’s one of a kind — who’s a real pioneer,’ Dr. Pepper director of multicultural marketing Olivia Vela says,” right before Wood lists Pit’s other partnerships with Kodak, Zumba, Sheets Energy Strips (??), and “Voli, a line of low-calorie vodkas” prominently name-checked in “Rain Over Me”. Says one DJ of Pit, “This guy is printing money.” But lest you get too cynical about the music, Pit’s manager assures you, “This was never about calling up RedOne and scheduling an appointment to hook into the RedOne sound.” Yeah — that’s why RedOne’s track for “Rain Over Me” sounds so LATIN. On the other hand, it’s sort of impressive that this inevitable smash, featured on The Today Show, is the bilingual tale of a diet-vodka pitchman who has a threesome with his buddy, recently separated and desperate, and some anonymous but classy broad. It’s the kind of surreal scuzz Warren Zevon might’ve gotten away with. How far we’ve come.
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