Bruno Mars - Just the Way You Are

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How they managed to cram five writers into the credits is anyone's guess
(but I'll bet they went through a lot of Crayons)

Bruno Mars
Just the Way You Are
Ass Kissing
#33 (HiMid)
Peter Hernandez
Philip Lawrence
Ari Levine
Khalil Walton
Khari Cain
The Smeezingtons
Needlz

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This whole project was conceived because I was going to rectify my ignorance of popular music, not for me to be a hateful dick, but the last song to cross my desk that wasn't a shriekingly awful piece of cynical fluff was Ke$ha. In February. And that was cynical commercial fluff, too; it just wasn't awful.

I never thought I'd be nostalgic for Ke$ha.

Bruno Mars still kind of bugs me, and this song is still a Run!, but it has three things going for it: it's not as bad as “Marry You (Just Say YeahYeah Yeah Yeah Yeah),” it doesn't feature Chris Brown, and it's not a cover of a Billy Joel song.

I can't even begin to communicate how glad I am that this isn't Bruno Mars covering a Billy Joel's 80s hit “Just the Way You Are.” He looks the type, archly glancing from behind his piano with his little hat... I'm sure he's played "Only the Good Die Young" at a piano bar at least once. But this is not that. It's only a small reprieve, though, as this is the next in the seemingly unbreakable string of Run!s that are dominating this blog.

Oh her eyes, her eyes
Make the stars look
like they're not shining
Her hair, her hair
Falls perfectly
without her trying
She's so beautiful
and I tell her every day

The problem I have with Mars is most likely what makes him popular in the first place: mawkishly sap in the lyrics over simple pop chords. “Just the Way You Are” has the kind of childish lack of romance that could have been recorded by New Kids on the Block. This is what a little kid thinks of love when their first kiss is still years away. It's the kind of thing that should be sequestered on the Disney Channel until it reaches the legal drinking age, but High School Musical broke the gates open and these songs are allowed to wander around unchaperoned.

I'm willing to bet the only reason this song doesn't have the same fan base as The Ready Set is the picture on the poster. I wonder if that hampers its sales. “Bruno! Great song! Um, Bob from marketing here-- can we make you look like a fourteen year old boy with a girl's haircut? We could really sell this to the tweens.”

Since this is Bruno's second appearance here, I've got a limited set of songs to draw from... but since I'd heard the previous song, I somehow felt like I'd already heard this one: I heard that falsetto coming at 2:38 before he hit it. It's basically the same part as the “Just say I do” falsetto bridge in “Marry You.” I was never going to call Bruno Mars original, but it seems like he's written one song, has a producer modify it slightly, and is releasing it as a handful of singles.

RUN!

Stay with the song, walk away, or run like hell:

Fabolous - You Be Killin Em

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Don't you dummies ever understand anything?

Fabolous
You Be Killin Em
Ass Kissing
#66 (LoMid)
Feb 24, 2011
John Jackson
Ryan Leslie
Ryan Leslie

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Music like this makes me break out my Old Man Voice. “That stuff ain't a bit of good. Don't you dummies ever understand anything?” I feel like the outtakes on a DRI album.

Unlike the blast I just leveled at Jessie J for laziness and hypocrisy, Fabolous is just sort of bad. You know, in a general way. Maybe this song's going for a retro-feel, but every piece of this song feels like it has between 10 and 30 years of dust on it. Synth bass from the 80s, break loop from the 90s... it doesn't really inspire any kind of retro nostalgia in me (if that's even the point), it just sounds tired.

Or, more accurately, this song sounds like a C lister from years back-- this song could have been a minor hit when I was a kid (when that crazy rap music on the mTv was still kind of novel). I remember those videos well-- the companies didn't know their new find was a bad rapper, they just thought he had a look they could sell, and so this goofily awful song is shoehorned into a video. This is the kind of song that sounds like it was pulled out of a cut out bin. On a cassingle.

Just watching my cutiepie get beautified
Make me want better jewels, a newer ride
Louis Vuitton shoes, she got too much pride
Her feet are killing her, I call it shoe-icide

I can handle repetitive or uninteresting music if the vocal is awesome... but, as you can guess by the spelling of his name, Fabolous is not a great wordsmith. His flow is kind of sluggish and lags behind the beat (I hate that) and he “sings” the chorus (there is a kind of melody there) so painfully flat I can't believe he thought it was a good idea. Then again, he just coined the term “shoe-icide,” so what Fabolous considers a good idea will always be a mystery.

He might be a foot fetishist, too, because his worship of the shoes as backed up by a mention of “well trimmed toes,” which must mean the girl's pedicure... otherwise... well... is amputation becoming fashionable? Trimming a toe or two for sandal season?

Singing the chorus is almost as annoying as the words in the chorus themselves. I know colloquialism and slang are the norm in hiphop, but there is no way to make the phrase “you be killin em” not sound moronic... and saying it over and over (and over and over) just draws attention to the fact that your average 8-year-old can communicate more intelligently than this guy.

RUN!

Stay with the song, walk away, or run like hell:

Drake - Fancy

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Would it be petty to start conjugating his doing verbs for him?

Drake
Fancy
Ass Kissing
#99 (LoMid)
Nov 18, 2010
MusicRemedy

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My first time hearing this song, I thought I was in for an interesting, down-tempo bridge at the 2:45 mark... but the song never returns to its starting point. Like Hitchcock's Vertigo (or Mulholand Dr, or Full Metal Jacket), “Fancy” shifts gears at it's half-way point and never looks back. The music shifts to more ambient beats and synths that would sound at home on the Richard D. James Album.

Halfway through, this song gets pretty good. 

It's a relief, too, because the first half is almost unbearably annoying. I know hip hop's origins lie in loops (and later, samples), but the synth loop sounds like a kid's failed attempt with My First Sampler™-- it's unpleasant rhythmically, timbrally, and harmonically, and it never... fucking... stops.

Combine that with the chorus that goes on about four times as long as it should: the endless repetition of “Oh, you fancy, huh?” is the least catchy refrain to cross my path in a while, and though there's a brief reprieve when it changes, it's not enough, because they're going to repeat the whole thing over again.

While the Ass Kissing category was for anyone getting sycophantic for any group, every example so far has been guys sucking up to womankind... but “Fancy” is actually the most respectful and complimentary of the bunch: it's all about successful women with brains as well as beauty, the women who don't need you to buy drinks for them, drive nicer cars than the boys, and college graduates with good jobs that might be able to loan a little money to their loser boyfriends. Ironically, the huh of the “Oh, you Fancy, huh?” sounds arrogant and dismissive to me.

I can't say I really dislike this song... I just think it starts badly. It opens with a refrain that bugs me and lousy music, but I think the second half is pretty decent and the song as a whole seems to genuinely respect women. A mixed bag, I guess. Since it splits in the middle, with separate call-outs to Los Angeles and New York girls at the half way point, I wonder if this isn't some exquisite corpse project between east and west coast artists... but I don't see myself spending a lot of time figuring out who, and with what allegiances, worked on which verse.

Last, the “she was fine, like a ticket on the dash” is the silliest pun I've hit so far. I'm not sure if I hate it or love it.
 

Walk

Stay with the song, walk away, or run like hell:

Blake Shelton - Who Are You When I'm Not Looking

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And now, the worst rhyme ever sung...

Blake Shelton
Who Are You When I'm Not Looking
Ass Kissing
#99 (Low)
Nov 11, 2010
Earl Bud Lee
John Wiggins
Scott Hendricks

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When the song starts, I get the immediate impression that Blake Shelton is the countriest dude to come down the pipe so far. The music's not rollicking at all, but it's mopey in a somewhat traditional, cryin' in yer beer way, with weepy pedal steel backing up a pretty straight forward guitar.

Then he sings.

And then I pick myself up off the floor and back the song up, because I missed most of it laughing so hard. For bad rhymes, Taio Cruz has nothing on this guy. He can rhyme “plans” with “dance” all he wants, as long as he's a buffer between me and this chorus:

My oh my, you're so good lookin'
Hold yourself together like a pair of book ends
But I've not tasted all your cookin'
Who are you when I'm not lookin?

I know he rhymes “lookin” with “lookin,” and that usually bugs me. “Lookin” and “cookin” rhyme, sure, but let's go right to line 2, where the laughter starts and just won't stop. What rhymes with “lookin?” I dunno... how about “book ends,” which not only do not rhyme, but also do not hold themselves together, if anyone wants to give Mr. Shelton a refresher course in irony.

Rhyming aside, that refrain is so badly composed, so nonsensical, and so fucking corny... I can't believe he sings it twice in the first 90 seconds of a three minute song. Yes, I get it: the cookin' in question is a metaphor for all the different facets of the woman in the song, but it's a really, really bad metaphor. It's a metaphor that could have been avoided if he didn't feel the need to open with “My oh my, you're so good lookin,” which is lame in its own right.

The rest of the song is basically sucking up to womankind, the best way Blake Shelton knows how: it's got bubble baths, painted nails, and phone calls to mom. It's definitely a song about the Ways of a Woman written by a man, but he's doing his best to show interest and play to the crowd. “You ladies like chocolate, right? Lemme hear it!”

For as bad as this song is, it made me laugh (and laughter is a good thing), and it does have the basic, bedrock quality of not sounding like someone raped country music in a Pro Tools session and handed it to a London producer. Faint praise, sure, but better than no praise at all.

Walk

Stay with the song, walk away, or run like hell:

T.I. - Got Your Back

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T.I.
Got Your Back
Ass Kissing
#99 (Low)
Oct 28, 2010
DJBooth

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He'll go to church with you
and then visit your mom

Huh. T.I's a kiss-ass. Who woulda thought?

“Got Your Back” is somewhere between that groveling stand-up guy who proclaims “women are smarter than men” to his audience to win approval and the easy sketch comedy bit about the perfect boyfriend who loves to hang out with the lady's mother, watch Oprah, and take dance lessons together.

Maybe T.I's making up for Wiz Khalifa's casual misogyny, but I don't know if he needs to be stroking the female ego this hard-- he comes across as the hero in his own romance novel. Maybe he should re-think his promotional photos and go with something a little more book-cover Fabio... because, seriously: “We front row at fashion shows as well as sunday morning service.” He left out the part where he makes her breakfast in bed and does the dishes after.

Like the other songs this week, no one's using stock beats-- musically, this is a more thoughtful piece than something that raids the europop handbook-- but that lead synth sounds like the Casio my little sister had when she was 8. So: points for actually doing something with the music... points off for it not sounding very good.

One thing that stands out over the course of this song is T.I's skill with rhythm and rhyme: this guy is clever and unconventional, stacking rhymes within and throughout lines, having the rhythmic payoff hit a beat later than you'd expect; it's my first time listening to him, but it's pretty easy to tell that this guy has some chops.

It's a little sad that this song is so damned cheesy, though. It's hard to listen to anyone pander this shamelessly.

Walk

Stay with the song, walk away, or run like hell:

Genre: Ass Kissing

Occasionally, an artist will kiss ass.  Ass Kissing songs pander to, suck up to, and otherwise belittle themselves before a group or issue they desperately hope to win the favor of.  This happens every time an artist writes a song about the style in which they write (such as metalheads writing metal songs about how great metal is to win the favor of the metalheads who listen to metal), but also includes any song that sucks up to a particular group.