Got bills?
[Video]
[6.00]
[5]
Joshua Lu: With a 10 figure salary, you can probably aim for something even nicer than Goyard, no? The most interesting part of the song is when it becomes a bass boosted monologue at the end.
[4]
Tim de Reuse: An immaculate hook. The almost-resolution in the melody — the way the singsong rhythm plays off the syncopated bass — the messiness of the nasally, overlapping voices and how that contrasts with the jewelry-store classiness of the rest of the beat. It’s all very slight, but it was grown in a lab to chart.
[8]
Ian Mathers: 6 million plus views? The hook is decent except her voice is actively unpleasant; if it was even marginally more fun to listen to, I’d understand it.
[4]
Alfred Soto: “City Girls?!” I wondered in the shower. Not as witty as the women in their prime; not as crass either. Still, in these troubled times, if you got it, for god’s sake spend it.
[6]
Nortey Dowuona: The way we spend hours of our lives defending the desire to have fun, to enjoy life, to luxuriate and indulge, is time we could actually be channeling to improving the deprived, repressed society we live in. A society so terrified of any violence unless we are carrying it out, any lust unless we alone benefit, any greed unless we are delighting in it, allows for both the existence of this song and the pushback against it. We are animals, so close to the chimpanzee and gorilla and even the aye-aye that we see and feel kinship with them in a way we don’t with sharks or crocodiles, allowing ourselves the honesty of recognizing and accepting these desires would at least allow us the grace and self respect to decide when there are boundaries, blocks, restrictions, since we now know what we can delay ourselves to improve our condition. We have terraformed the entire planet to comfort, coddle and protect us, we rage when the earth refuses to adhere. We have constructed the most elaborate luxuries and weapons, we rage in fury when they are taken away or imperiled. We have spent our planet’s love, compassion and pity, now we face its merciless fury. So I ask of my fellow writers, of our readers, of you, to stop and ask yourself: is the best India Arie album Voyage to India or Testimony Vol. 2: Love & Politics? (And what are you spending that you will never get back? The answers to both are very simple.)
[8]
Taylor Alatorre: Scamming and boosting may lie outside the formal economy, but work is still work, and what I like about “Spend Dat” is that it invokes the time-worn hustle ethic without shackling itself to its mandates. The airy, lounge-ready production, which could’ve been lifted straight from a late ’90s Third Coast compilation, makes the act of scamming seem more like an aspirational mindset than a concrete set of behaviors, as if one becomes a scammer simply by adopting it as one’s label–which may just as well be true. But perhaps this is my way of evading the fact that the nursery rhyme chorus seems expertly designed to infect the speech patterns of elementary school playgrounds across the country. Can you blame the kids this time, though?
[7]