This Week On Billboard: Pitbull f. Ne-Yo, Afrojack, and Nayer - Give Me Everything
This Week On Billboard is where I unabashedly critique the current no. 1 hit on Billboard.com, the major yardstick for what's "hot" in music today. In order to simplify the review for those who don't want to read the whole article, each song is given a "!" rating, in which the finest grabs five of them. It's been gone for a while, now it's back after a 22-month hiatus.
A review of this week's number one single right after Pitbull falls on top of yo' girl
Pitbull sucks as an artist. His flow is unstructured and turbulent, his voice is coarse, his punch lines are tragically unfunny, and he sings hooks like a drunken karaoke enthusiast. He does hip-hop like Kevin James does movies. Very few would associate the phrase “leading man” with Kevin James, just like very few would associate the phrase “rap star” with Pitbull. Yet in spite of their lack of skills in their respective fields, they are doing pretty well for themselves. Inconceivably, Kevin James is top billing on big budget summer blockbusters, and Pitbull is a resident on top of Billboard charts.
Their unlikely success is attributed to knowing exactly what their lane is and staying on it for as long as it’s profitable. As an everyman hero who gets the girl despite his physical shortcomings, bumbling personality, and loud sense of humor, Kevin James is a character that a huge group of people can relate to and is therefore fun to root for. His comic approach is zany, slapstick, unsubtle, and completely inoffensive, which is a brand of comedy that the majority of movie-goers are generally looking for. Pitbull is the music equivalent. He might not be Biggie on the mic, but he’ll rap on any sound that can make a booty bounce. Fortunately for him, a lion's share of the world's population love bouncing their booty.
For all his flaws as a rapper, Pitbull understands that someone needs to supply club music to club customers, and on any track he releases, he sounds like he’s fully committed on providing that service. Every archetypical non-corny-ass rapper try to record danceable rap singles to boost their record sales, and it almost always sounds like they are being coerced into doing it. They feel that (and they know that their fans feel that) recording tracks suited for the club dilutes their street cred, and therefore, ruins their authenticity (or their "keepin'-it-realness"). Like 2 Live Crew, 69 Boyz, Salt-N-Pepa, and Missy Elliott before him, Pitbull is mainly concerned with making people dance, and he’s better at that than a lot of other adroit rappers like Nas, Talib Kweli, Mos Def, etc.
Pitbull arrived as a reggaeton artist when reggaeton artists were hot commodities back in the mid-zeroes. But when the mainstream moved away from that that trend, he found a niche of rapping over Eurodance tracks that people are familiar with but don’t know the name of*. But on “Give Me Everything”, his first ever no. 1 single, he decided to employ acid house producer Afrojack to concoct an entirely new track as his accompaniment. There are numerous highlights in this production—laser synths, the four-on-the-floor piano stomp intro and its cascading riff transition, the rest and drum fill combo before the chorus—but because all the music heads realized the success the Black-Eyed Peas had on soundtracking weekend bliss, everyone wants to mimic “I Gotta Feeling” and thus, everything sounds like a counterfeit version of that. It’s funny because it was only three years ago when I was praising all of these amalgamation of hip-hop and dance music**, now I’m just plain sick of it.
Pitbull contributed the necessary amount of exuberance and sleaziness to pull off a club track like “Give Me Everything”, but he’s not skillful enough to be taken seriously as a rapper. The lines he spits out are laughable*** , and his execution is even worse, but “Give Me Everything” does succeed in spite of his presence here. Afrojack’s production may be derivative but it's also very effective. Nayer’s input may be brief, but her airiness is pivotal in creating the amplification before the chorus hits. It’s also a terrific decision that Pitbull secured Ne-Yo to sing most of the hooks for him; this melody is more fetching than anything Ne-Yo has released in years, and he elevates this to “song of the summer” prominence. But because Pitbull is the main artist here—and he will go down as the answer to the trivia question of who ended Adele’s seven-week stay on the top of Billboard Hot 100—this is his well-deserved blockbuster moment. He’s aware that his sole responsibility as a musical artist is to make people go crazy on the dance floor, and no one can say he sucks at that.
(t5!) score: !!!!
** In 2008, we heard Ne-Yo's "Closer", Chris Brown's "Forever", Wiz Khalifa's "Say Yeah", Crime Mob's "Pretty Rave Girl", Hood Headlinaz's "Rollin", featuring Jackie Chain & Jhi-Ali
*** The worst line has got to be Pitbull rhyming "kodak" with "kodak" in the intro. Same-word rhyming is only good when you are fully committed to it throughout the song, like Black Rob's "Whoa" and Cam'Ron's "Oh Boy".
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