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Ah... now there's the Autotune. I do remember a time when Autotune was a tool used to nudge a slightly flat note into place in an otherwise great vocal take-- you didn't want the singer to go back and do it again if the performance was really, really good... but you just needed to tweak that one sour note. When Cher turned all Autotune's knobs to 11 on Believe, the robotic, atrifacty sound was added to the book as a record selling effect, and it was already a cliché about three days later. And there it remains.
Now that everyone's adapted to hearing obvious Autotune effects on the radio, it's opened the floodgates for... well... people who can't sing. Not at all. They can basically just talk into a mic and have Autotune make a melody out of it later. I'm still sort of torn between thinking it's sort of cool from a composer's standpoint and thinking it's the nastiest sort of false prophet fakery, making stars out of singers who can't sing (and often don't write their own songs, either).
Basically, I have no idea if Chris Brown can sing. This is my very first time hearing him, and the only think I know about Chris Brown is that he beats up girls.
Okay-- that might be too flip. The only thing I know about Chris Brown plead guilty to physically assaulting Rihanna... another star I don't know. I do know photos of her bruised and beaten face are online, and I know that Oprah themed a show around this abuse, and Chris Brown called it “a slap in the face.” Oprah had the gall to call the beating “a problem,” so I can see why Brown would be offended. Poor guy.
This is a long and roundabout way of saying: I have no way of knowing if Chris Brown is good at anything. His voice is autotuned into oblivion, so there's no way to know if he's singing, or if he phoned in a scant three lines and had a computer write a song around it. And since I know only one thing about Brown (he hits women), a song about how he needs to shake off a no-good bitch who always made him feel small doesn't really make me want to like him or his song.
The song itself is so paper thin it feels like it might blow away-- Brown has a few lines in the beginning (she “ain't nothin but a vulture, always hoping for the worst, waiting for me to fuck up”), but he sings maybe eight bars total in the song. The rest is just a couple samples and loops of his voice in between the song's guest stars-- it's like a movie where the star hardly ever left his trailer, so it's mostly footage of the back of a stunt double's head.
And I think the guest stars sound clunky. I may not have a PhD. in flow, but I know what works and what feels off-rhythm and forced; both rapped verses by Tyga and Kevin McCall have a stunning lack of groove. Past that, the one and only thing I know about Chris Brown (back to the domestic abuse thing again) makes the guest rappers' lines like “like Tina did Ike in the limo, it finally hit me” rankle... not only are we evoking Ike & Tina, we're making Ike the victim. Classy.
Like I said, this is my first time hearing Chris Brown, but it's such a lazy song, one where he does very little, my immediate reaction is to consider him a hack. But... maybe I'm missing something.
Add the lyrical content and the context of a woman's bloodied face, and he's a hack with terrible taste.
Stay with the song, walk away, or run like hell:
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