One person’s view: “I just can’t take this song seriously and I don’t think it’s sexy. It’s just uncomfortable most of the time.” – HungryLuma27 @ Rate Your Music
The public’s view: 2.08 / 5.00, the worst #1 hit of 2004 & 2005
Night-clubbing has been one of the most common motifs for rap singles over the past two decades. These hits have little in common with the disco nightclub records of the 1970s or the countless country songs about patronizing honky-tonk bars. Most of the modern hip-hop songs about clubbing focus on conspicuous consumption rather than on performing impressive dance moves or having fun with friends. These tracks describe performers arriving at the nightclub in luxury vehicles while wearing the finest clothes and jewelry. If the club happens to have strippers, or women who look like they should be strippers, they are showered with $100 bills and confetti made from Honus Wagner baseball cards. At some point during the evening, a bottle of Hennessy is poured into someone’s mouth. The majority of it spills onto the floor, and the janitor is pelted with precious gems and pieces of King Tut’s mummy while he cleans it up.
We can credit 50 Cent’s “In da Club” as the first truly massive hit about this style of clubbing. The timing was perfect for that song in 2003 after trillions of dollars of wealth had just vanished in the stock market and thousands of companies had gone bankrupt. Nightclub visits in 2003 usually entailed smuggling in cans of Old Milwaukee under a coat because nobody could afford to tip the bartender. No one could have more than two beers anyway, because there was always a job interview early the next morning for a position that probably didn’t even exist. In the midst of the economic ruin we were treated to 50 Cent’s rap about driving his Benz to a bar and sipping champagne and Bacardi while offering Ecstasy to the ladies he meets. Listening to “In da Club” was aspirational, like reading a story about another person accomplishing a great feat. The prospect of dropping $800 on a night out was as realistic as climbing Mt. Everest or finding a job that paid as much as your last one, but 50 Cent allowed everyone to dream.
50 Cent imparts a business-like tone to his rap on “In da Club”. For him, clubbing is not an amusing pastime like it is to lesser individuals. It is what he does, and he is good at it. He goes clubbing so that he will be seen going clubbing, which puffs up his marketability so that he can earn more money to invest in more clubbing. Given that “In da Club” was Billboard’s biggest hit of 2003, it was only logical that 50 Cent should make a sex song with this same type of dispassionate attitude. The result is “Candy Shop”.
In “Candy Shop”, 50 Cent recites a list of sexual boasts with an enthusiasm level more suited to narrating an audiobook about estate planning. He is accompanied by the similarly emotion-free Olivia, who was obviously instructed not to do anything that might outshine the track’s lead performer. I can’t say that the song is completely without excitement, however. As each of the duo finishes their respective lines on the chorus, they say “whoa” as if something mildly stimulating has just occurred. There’s also one fairly clever candy pun: “I’ll melt in your mouth, girl, not in your hand.” It’s too bad that the same line was already used 15 years earlier by another rapper, Candyman, in a hit record that pretty much everyone had already heard.
And that helps point us to the biggest problem with “Candy Shop”. By 2005, we were well accustomed to erotic raps that were delivered either more explicitly or more effectively. Even 50 Cent had given us something better along these lines: his Lil’ Kim collaboration “Magic Stick”. Listening to “Candy Shop” after “Magic Stick” is as thrilling as watching the bowdlerized basic cable version of an R-rated movie after you’ve already seen it uncut in the theater. One of the official edits of “Candy Shop” is even milder, censoring harmless words like “nympho” and “thongs”. Who is this intended for? Did 50 Cent’s label think that Radio Disney would play this version, under the assumption that the song is really about M&Ms?
“Candy Shop” incorporates the Middle Eastern-style synthesizer riff that was briefly a big music industry fad. There’s nothing really wrong with that, but it does make the song sound dated. Whenever you hear a pop or hip-hop track with that type of arrangement, you can be fairly certain that it was released in the mid-2000s. It’s like if you find someone buried in your lawn when you’re putting in a new swimming pool, and the corpse is wearing a white leisure suit. You don’t need to do a carbon-14 test to determine that the person probably died between November 1977 and July 1978.
The best thing about “Candy Shop” is that it eliminated the need for there to be any more rap hits comparing parts of the human anatomy to types of candy. Yep, everybody in 2005 could breathe a big sigh of relief that 50 Cent had worn out this concept and no such song would ever reach #1 again. Never, ever, ever.
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