Date: July 11, 2009
Weeks: 14
The Black Eyed Peas are an interesting group. Sometimes their music is sloppy, obnoxious, audio chaos. Other times it seems like they've calculated the precise resonance frequency of pop music and carefully crafted it into a focused dance delivery system. Fortunately, we're dealing the the latter today.
This song was everywhere when it was new, and it's easy to see why. It's an energetic romp that builds tension and anticipation and then releases all the pent-up energy into a huge, enthusiastic burst of energy. I know I keep using the word "energy," but I can't help it. It's really the song's most endearing feature.
There's a lot to nitpick about the music, though. There are some strings sounds early on that would have sounded better if they were real, rather than simulated. There's too much obvious Auto-Tune going on in the voices. But none of those are really problems.
What is a problem is that the song spends too much time in its anticipation build-up phase. I don't mind the first 90 seconds is spent building to the explosion of the chorus. I think that's about perfect, actually. The problem I have is that after only 1 minute of that chorus, the song goes back to the build-up phase for another full minute-plus of building anticipation all over again. Literally half the song's running time is spent waiting for the other half to start up, and that's a balance that doesn't quite work for me. I've enjoyed songs that spent much much longer building up to a big but short payoff, but that's an interesting choice. And I don't have anything against songs that do a brief breakdown in the bridge, because that keeps the song interesting. But the build-ups in this song stop being interesting and just make me impatient for the good part.
The lyrics are a mixed bag. I'm not going to complain about their simplicity, because that's kind of point. In fact, the lyrics sort of redeem all the time spent building up. Since the primary lyric is "Tonight's gonna be a good night," it's obvious that all the anticipation is probably intentional. That doesn't entirely redeem it, but it goes a long way. Before I was really paying attention to this song, I mostly just knew it as the song where they shout "Mazel Tov" for no reason, so that's a successful lyrical choice, at least as far as getting attention. The part where they list days of the week is pretty lazy. But then you add that to lyrics like "Let's do it and do it and do it do it do it," and I just don't have the heart to tear apart this big, dumb, friendly song.
My verdict: Like it. It's big, dumb, easy fun.
No comments:
Post a Comment