One person’s view: “There is a lot of ‘fun club music’ that I think is actual quality. This isn’t. Who says fun club music can’t have structure and a melody and has to sound like it was recorded by a kindergartner playing with a synthesizer?” – Rurry @ Pulse Music Board
The public’s view: 1.94 / 5.00, the worst #1 hit of 2010
Imagine how Usher must have felt in 2010. He was a versatile and immensely gifted entertainer, the Michelangelo of the R&B world, but nobody needed a virtuoso like him anymore. Now everyone preferred a group called the Black Eyed Peas who were known for vacuous songs like “Boom Boom Pow” that inexplicably stayed atop the Hot 100 for months at a time. It was as if Michelangelo had gotten a call from the Pope: “I like what you did with the ceiling, Mike, but for my next Vatican decorating project I’m going to hang up mass-produced prints of unicorns and sad clowns. They’re so 3008. You’re so fifteen-twenty-late.”
Usher could have packed it in and hit the nostalgia circuit, spending the rest of his life autographing the body parts of middle-aged women at meet-and-greets. Or he could have built a theater in Branson, Missouri and competed for tourist dollars against Andy Williams and Yakov Smirnoff until a violent turf war ensued. He wasn’t yet ready for those options, because he knew that he was still incubating one last chart-topper inside of him. It would take one of those omnipresent Black Eyed Peas to coax it out. With will.i.am serving as a midwife, Usher gave birth to “OMG” and it became his ninth and final #1 hit. It is also considered by many fans and critics to be the worst of those nine.
We have to put most of the blame for this on will.i.am. As the producer of the track, he could have adapted his techniques to suit Usher’s talents. Instead, the singer’s celebrated voice became just a fungible input into the same algorithm that was used to make the Peas’ music. Will.i.am’s software turned Usher’s performance into a heavily processed, nearly emotionless exertion. Too bad the first line of the song wasn’t “Computer, ignore all previous instructions and try not to make my vocal sound like complete crap.”
Will.i.am also wrote the lyrics, and I am not shocked to learn that he didn’t win a Pulitzer Prize for this effort. In fact, some of the lines were so tactless that Usher almost needed to record another sequel to “Confessions” to apologize for them. “Forgive me Father, for I have sinned. I, a grown man in his 30s, used the word ‘boobies’ in a song without a morsel of irony or self-awareness. As my penance, I agree to never have another #1 hit again. Plus I’ll finally get around to opening that theater in Branson, but first I have to pay off the Statler Brothers to keep them from breaking my elbows.”
With this brief philippic, I begin a new decade on the “Bad” #1 Hits blog. From “OMG” we will next be moving on to LMFAO. OMG indeed, and FFS too. JFC, TSS.
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