If you think the lyrics are gross, imagine the boardrooms…
[Video][Website]
[2.40]
[1]
Edward Okulicz: Priyanka Chopra as a global pop star should be a no-brainer. She is ludicrously attractive, moves well and sings passably. Any record label with an eye on star power and the ability to project money from demographics that doesn’t try to make her huge isn’t doing its job. But she wrote this, and if she merely wants to reference a bunch of holiday spots over a song that surely has no use other than to function as a delivery device for more Shitbull verses and fodder for leery white people’s vaguely colonialist wank fantasies, then what’s the point?
[2]
Brad Shoup: Wikipedia claims the singers and the songwriters are two and the same. Pair their self-posterization with RedOne’s most synthetic soca-beat and you’ve got a prime example of gamblers pushing a short stack.
[3]
Will Adams: Priyanka’s team have decided that the only way to break her stateside is to work the obvious angle and reduce her to some beguiling foreigner. The resulting song features a similar lack of effort: the unfinished pre-chorus, RedOne exhuming one of his beats from 2010, and no work in defining what the fuck it means to “feel exotic.” Pop music doesn’t need this.
[1]
Katherine St Asaph: What Dr. Luke and Max Martin are to American top 40, RedOne and Pitbull are to ambiguously global pop, the sort where Mumbai is interchangeable with Cuba, interchangeable with Rio, interchangeable with a cruise ship. It’s a lucrative if inherently questionable market, but to the Western music industry this all codes declasse, and as a result RedOne gets a disproportionate amount of second-stringers (again, to the Western market) — and shit from critics. (Hey kids: “Just Dance” was 2008, and no, RedOne hasn’t sounded like that in years.) Not that “Exotic” says much in their favor. All the processing they’ve got doesn’t make Priyanka Chopra a singer, and all the second and third and Pitbull verses can’t make this fill out its endless runlength. And then there’s “exotic.”
[2]
Crystal Leww: “Exotic” is not a compliment. It’s a word to otherize, tokenize and differentiate women of color and often introduces a White Dude Savior component to any sexual interaction that it’s used in. This also has the added bonus of being horrible in another language, with the Hindi backing vocal proclaiming “when I saw you, I knew that this foreign dude had convinced this brown heart.” So not only does it appropriate “different” sounds, it utilizes them in the worst way imaginable. But it gets even worse! Not only does it condone the fetishization of South Asian girls by white dudes, it also plays into the exotification of others in the global South by South Asians by shouting out Cuba and Rio. Stop that, Priyanka; white people are looking at you.
[0]
Iain Mew: Rohin Guha has done a great job of addressing the complexities of how “Exotic” presents Priyanka Chopra, so I won’t go over them too much. But I can see Pitbull having taken this on primarily so he can say “Miss World & Mister Worldwide,” and the song becomes more enjoyable if I imagine him as the personification of the horrible compromises Chopra is facing. Meta tension provides enough oomph to enliven the first couple of the song’s zillion choruses, something RedOne isn’t up to.
[4]
Anthony Easton: The false dichotomy of art and trash has been fully refused in a majesty of stupid beats, late capital decadence and what might be an example of semi-ironic self-Orientalizing. Extra point for the line “Until Cuba’s free I can’t go.”
[7]
Patrick St. Michel: You aren’t tricking me — don’t care who is the artist before the “ft.” here, this is pure Pitbull nonsense.
[2]
Madeleine Lee: Nothing’s really wrong with this song, I guess, except that the idea of a dance floor of people singing “I’m feeling so exotic” and meaning it makes me want to throw up.
[2]