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Monday, January 30, 2012

Song #900: "The Way You Move" by Outkast featuring Sleepy Brown

Date: Feb 14, 2004
Weeks: 1


This song may be a case study in how to ruin a good song by stretching it and padding it out until it completely wears out its welcome and gets tiresome.

This song has a great sound. Its rap verses are energetic and clear, with a nice bass line running underneath. The music in the chorus is great, with its horns and smooth singing. This would be a great 3 minute song. Unfortunately, it lasts 4 minutes. Most of that additional runtime is filled with unvarying repetition of the chorus until the song finally fades out to a close. And that's where the song wears out its welcome, breaks down, and reveals how few musical ideas it actually has. The horns, in particular, start to work my last nerve because they only have 3 musical ideas that they repeat over and over and over.

The vocals don't fare much better. There's almost no vocal style variation between the first version of the chorus and the last version of the chorus. Heck, there aren't even varying lyrics. It's "I like the way you move" over and over and over again. I mean, even if the lyrics dropped out and they did an instrumental version of the lyrics one time, that would be an improvement. This song may be underproduced, like it needed another pass through the mixing process before it got released.

My verdict: Don't like it. Doesn't live up to its potential. It starts with good ideas, but doesn't build on them, and then repeats until it irritates.

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