“Pottymouth pop,” and yet, listener for listener, Skrillex is probably responsible for the most swearing on the BBC Sound of 2012 poll…
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[7.33]
Katherine St Asaph: There are five things you should know about Stooshe. Their name may or may not have two capital S’s (here, I follow the “eschew obnoxious and unnecessary capitalization” rule.) They’re a girl group. They’re on the BBC Sound of 2012 list. Their bio compares them to Salt-n-Pepa, and their bio compares them to Odd Future. You could extrapolate “Betty Woz Gone” from that alone, but listening is quicker: it’s a deceptively pleasant morsel of midtempo R&B track spiced up by adlibs, with Kit-Kat slogans and the Fresh Prince of Bel-Air theme smushed in like walnuts and steeped in possibly-problematic themes like rubbing alcohol. The first two are immensely likable; the last depends on your tolerance for not-exactly-empathetic, or rather not empathetic at all, portraits of downtrodden women. That’s your call; it just better be the same tolerance you have for Ed Sheeran.
[7]
Brad Shoup: This brings the chaos. A few hard-luck vignettes would seem to be the point — with all those ad-libs an unfortunate reaction, perhaps, to the pull of the R&B-piano-and-BLACKstreet groove — until the Fresh Prince parody replaces invented tragedy once and for all with goony fun. The face-pulling, the vocal filters, the word gizone: it’s so obnoxious and never dull. For those poor souls who’ve longed for the piss to be taken out of “Waterfalls,” we finally agree on something.
[8]
Edward Okulicz: Yes, yes, yes! The BBC Sound of 2011 was a near-universal disaster of awful music that neither deserved or needed exposure, and that’s not just Jessie J. “Betty Woz Gone” has more sparkle, more sass and more hooks than last year’s list put together. Their asides, their enjambment of obnoxious but endearing uses of “not” everywhere, and the roughness and colour to their anecdote are all indicators of personality and charm — and on top of that, the chorus goes off.
[9]
Iain Mew: I like the rickety piano, and they deploy some of their swearing and drugs references in inventive and amusing ways — the whole “I was going to say fucked up but I just fucked up” thing, and particularly breaking the rhyme scheme to switch in “crack” (for what, I’m not quite sure.) In between, though, I don’t really care too much about the story and find the overload of ad-libs and obnoxiousness just a bit too much. I don’t know why I find this accent easier to take from Nicki Minaj than from actual Brits.
[5]
Anthony Easton: The chorus on this is monster, and the storytelling — rangy call and response, genuine narrative — reminds me of so much that I love, from the Shangri-Las onward. Once it gets to the East End London roughing up of the Fresh Prince, it exceeds its own cleverness.
[8]
Jonathan Bogart: The raucous noisemaking and pass-the-mic conversation was all getting a bit wearisome before they interpolated the theme to Fresh Prince of Bel-Air, and all was forgiven.
[7]