Chris Brown - Look at Me Now

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Chris Brown tries to show skill, quits after three lines, hands it over to Busta Rhymes.

Chris Brown
Look at Me Now
Bragging
#11 (High)
Feb 10, 2011
None Listed
Diplo

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After plenty of connection and hardware issues, I fire this thing up to...

Damnit! Chris Brown?  Thanks for nothing.

“I say, Miffy. Thadeus' trousers are
of last year's fashion. We shan't be
inviting him to the party.”

Everything that comes from this guy makes me like him less than the last time I dealt with him. Of course, he's not doing himself any favors by opening with “I don't see how you can hate from outside of the club. You can't even get in.” Add a laugh that successfully mixes a thirteen-year-old bully with a hyena and we've established the most smugly infuriating personality this side of Princess from the Powerpuff Girls. I know boasts are traditional in hip hop, but why does it sound like Chris Brown's boasts are mocking the nerdy pledges not cool enough to join his frat?

I suppose we have to give Brown the tiniest bit of credit, because I usually complain about the laziness of his tracks along with his toxic persona. This song, while still excruciatingly awful, is light years from Chris Brown's safe bet, manufactured plastic. Instead of cookie-cutter dance music, the sounds here come from early 60's science fiction worthy of Mystery Science Theater 3000; when the song started, I was immediately transported to a laboratory where a scientist in horn-rimmed glasses was using tape driven computers to combat giant, undersea creatures.

She accidentally fall
trip on my dick
Oops, I said
on my dick
I ain't really mean
to say on my dick
but since we talkin
bout my dick
all you haters
say hi to it.

Similarly, Brown's lazy, pop star singing (autotuned to death) has been replaced with rapping, which also comes off as lazy... until he double-times it. While that does hint at a little ambition (he's trying to do something that requires a skill! Duck!), he can barely pull it off, and after two lines, just ends up repeating the words “on my dick” because he simply can't go that fast. On his dick? On his dick.

Did Jason Mewes write this? Was Silent Bob dancing behind him in the studio for effect?

And then he just gives up and literally says “I'm done,” and lets Busta Rhymes come in and show him how make that trick work. Yup, that's right: this is the audio equivalent of watching a kid fall off his skateboard, followed an older kid taking his board and upstaging him in front of his friends.

I can't say things get measurably better after Brown decides his own song is too much for him.  Sure, Busta Rhymes has a handle on how to do a Brag track without sounding like a moron, thug, or child, but he's bookended by a useless Chris Brown and (here we go again) Lil Wayne, who doesn't seem to have a lot of love for bitches or faggots... which, again, doesn't offend me: I'm not too PC or blushing at someone being inappropriate, I just don't have time for grown men with the collective mental age of a junior high kid.

A junior high kid failing everything but Phys Ed.

RUN!

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

Lil Wayne - 6 Foot, 7 Foot

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Lil Wayne is silent, like so much of the pasta he admires

Lil Wayne
6 Foot, 7 Foot
Bragging
#11 (High)
Dec 30, 2010
Dwayne Carter
Peter Panky, Jr.
Shrondrae Crawford
Bangladesh

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Okay, that's just annoying.

Musically, this is just an endless repetition of two Harry Belafonte loops, thin and drained of all low end, just sort of chirping away. The Belafonte bedrock is assisted by low and large kick/sub/notes, and a single “ssh” sound and hand clap... set that up and just keep it going for four minutes.

Now marry that with a really monotonous freestyle from Lil Wayne... no chorus, no refrain, no nuthin-- it's just his unchanging, mid-paced flow until Cory Gunz shows up at the end. Somewhere after two minutes of Lil Wayne, he starts to sound like Chris Tucker in The Fifth Element to me (he's kinda squeaky), but I'm just beat until I'm numb by Wayne's nonstop barrage of syllables: at first, it seems like the sampled loop (“six foot, seven foot, eight foot bunch!”) would serve as a refrain, but after a little bit, Wayne just raps over that, too... and to what end? The guy just keeps blasting away over his own song's chorus to pontificate the aural qualities of lasagna.

Paper tracer, tell that paper, look I'm right behind ya
Bitch, real G's move in silence like lasagna
People say I'm borderline crazy sorta kinda
Woman of my dreams, I don't sleep so I can't find her
You n***a's are gelatin, peanuts to an elephant
I got through that sentence like a subject and a predicate

Wait, what?

Dude, think about what you're going to say before you say it. There are an amazing number of things that fail to make sense in that verse, even without the silent lasagna.

No matter how many ways I approach that, I can't find a way to make it less weird.  At its most clever (and this might be a stretch), he's insinuating that the"g" in lasagna is silent (it isn't-- that's like saying the "z"s in pizza are silent)... and that's the best possible interpretation.  Outside of that, I guess it might mean that noodles don't make noise.

When Cory Gunz takes his verse, he starts with a weird, almost flutey monotone that threatens to be more annoying than Lil Wayne, but not only does he ditch that tone after a few seconds, he also doubletimes some of his lines, giving the song some much needed varaiation in the vocal rhythm... the best flourish coming when, in the middle of rapid-fire lyrics, he says “pause” instead of pausing. It's almost like he was going so fast through the script, he read the stage directions aloud.

For as annoying as this song is, I've got to admit: it's different... so my annoyance is tempered by a grudging respect for anyone who thought this was a good idea (I never would have thought of that) and actually turned the annoying fucking thing into a hit.

How the hell did that happen? Can Lil Wayne make this sort of thing work with sheer force of will?

Walk

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

Lil Wayne - Right Above It

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Cue up your training montage

Lil Wayne
Right Above It
Bragging
#32 (HiMid)
Dec 9, 2010
Dwayne Carter, Jr.
Aubrey D. Graham
Daniel Johnson
Andrew Canton
Kane Beatz

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Wow... that's really heroic. If Rocky was going to train to a hip hop tune, this song would score the montage. The synth horns that open the song could probably make the argument all by themselves: they're pretty obviously coming out of someone's Korg Triton (Lil Wayne, I have two words for you: Miroslav Orchestra. I know you have the hard drive space), but they're endearingly cheesy. This song would probably sound amazing with real horns... but no use crying over spilled samples.

Though the horns are the first thing I noticed, the beats are the best thing about this song. Some work went into the programming on this one. The kick skitters around on the bottom of the track, and there's a lot of complexity in the hats and cymbals, all kept in check by a steady handclap. Somebody was having a lot of fun with the drums when they put this one together.

I thought it was odd that the vocals were so low in the mix-- the music sort of overwhelms the voices in most of the song. I can still make out the lyrics, but the music is way up front... odd for this type of music, but it sort of makes sense when I try to write about the lyrics and keep coming up dry. The music is punched up because the words are kinda boring.

Putting up music this epic to back a brag track begs for some audacity, but the bravado in this just seems commonplace (“I've been fly so long I fell asleep on the fucking plane”). There's money, crews, cars, and girls (“Don't like my women single, I like my chicks in twos”), but no more than anyone else's bragging...  maybe even a little less. Writing this dull makes me wonder why the song needs to exist at all, since it shares space with “Monster.”

Lackluster, but not awful... and it could be worse. The numbers got shuffled this week because #33 was being consumed by, you guessed it, Glee. That puts things in perspective.

Walk

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