📝 Tiny Music Critiques 📝

Ring-A-Ling, It's B.E.P.

Ring-A-Ling by the Black Eyed Peas is a fuckin' CRAZY song. I feel like I've mentioned B.E.P. many times on various platforms, but I legitimately think they're such an interesting type of pop group. I wish Siri sounded like Fergie at 02:33; that vocal effect is so slay. It's not even a guilty pleasure for me; the production is just good. Will.i.am's production bangs, even if a lot of the lyrics are corny as fuck. They obviously drew a lot of Daft Punk influence, but I think that moving away from hip-hop and graduating to mainstream-mainstream with this shit was a pretty big gamble for them.

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It's just so weird that The Energy Never Dies (the album this song is from) was so incredibly popular. Everyone I knew from all walks of life had this shit on their iPod and/or mp3 players; everyone had a different favorite song (you know them), and they played half the songs from the album on Top 40 radio constantly. If you have any interest in the history of pop music from this millenium, you should educate yourself on this era of the Peas. This album is straight-up bizarre from front-to-back, and is definitely front-loaded. I won't say every song is super great, but I do enjoy much of its back half.

Even if I haven't convinced you to do some digging, and you've decided you don't want to wade through Wikipedia and YouTube, I highly recommend at least watching the double-feature music video for Imma Be & Rock Your Body. They were rockin' with some big budget shit here; the costumes and set design are awesome.

Starstruck, Not Starstrukk

Lady Gaga gets plenty of accolades and attention, so I'm not here to talk about her iconic style, backbreaking live performances, industry-upending music videos, religious trauma-induced club bangers, or any of that shit... I'm here to talk about Starstruck. No, not that 3oh3 song with Ke$ha from the following year, which deserves its own Tiny Music Critique™. No, dear friends, this is a far more serious and slept-on hot ticket item.

Starstruck is the ninth track on Miss Gaga's debut album, The Fame. The lyrical content is a constant riff on DJ culture and this treasure trove of turntablisms does not disappoint, featuring such classics as:

• "Put your hands on my waist, pull the fader; run it back with original flavor" 😤🎚️🔂
• "Styling out to the beat that you're freakin'; fantasize I'm the track that you're tweakin'" 🤬🎛️
• "Got your Dre headphones with the left side on; wanna scratch me back and forth" 💿🔄😩

Whoever wrote this song was sooo down bad for some cocaine-skinny, EDM festival sidestage lookin' ass metrosexual.. 😩 Don't get it twisted, though; the chorus of this song is not great by any means and honestly, it ruins an otherwise perfect track. I petition someone to remix the song without it. However, the verses alone merit this as a shoe-in admittance to the Library of Congress. I played this shit on repeat in junior high, and I still do in my 27th year, bitch!!

God's Favorite Band

👋 I am here to nominate How You Remind Me by Nickelback as the most culturally-ubiquitous song in the English-speaking sect of North America. It crosses borders, races, and social creeds; it is the handshake across the aisle in the age of extreme political polarization. It's an aural palette cleanser, and I say that respectfully. This song is twenty years old and I know 75% of grown adults still know every word.

Isn't it obvious that Nickelback is God's favorite band? I mean, holy shit, don't even get me started on the 2011 theme song for Monday Night Raw. 😩 P.S. Have you read my official Nickelback concert review?

Turn My Swag On (My Shitty iPod Headphones)

I feel like so many people shit on late 2000s and early 2010s pop music for sounding like, well, shit. Yes, songs that were mixed on Windows 7 sound like ass on your overpriced gamer headphones manufactured 15 years in the future. You might not understand the exhilarating rush of hearing Calle Ocho at hearing-damage-inducing levels from the (non-HD) radio in your hand-me-down shitbox... Jesus, you might not even think there's genius in the bombast of Turn My Swag On...

But you know what? 👵Back in our day👵 the elder Zoomers and yung Millennials had no choice but to gleefully drown out the Great Recession-induced household horrors with 128kbps .AAC quality songs that we ripped from scratched-to-hell mix CDs. Out of these monstrosities, no less. Those fuckers were glorified miniature tin cans topped off with the lowest quality rubber that Apple could source. I guess they were too busy raking in fat stacks with such new inventions as the iPhone and the iPod to include better headphones in the box with them.

I know I'm talking mad shit now, but I didn't think about any of the aforementioned things back when I was 14, laying in my bed every night listening to the local radio station. I was too busy thinking about how fucking sick it was that they were playing the new Timbaland song for the fifth time that evening, mostly because you enlisted your friends to call in and request it a shit ton of times.

Anyways, I LIVE/LAUGH/LOVED THIS SHIT and you can too! The beats can still be fire even if the 808s don't quite hit on your modern $300 speakers. If you're truly starved for sub-bass cranial vibration that only modern Atlanta trap can provide, then I'd like you to know those bitches (your $300 speakers, if you already forgot) came with some (piece of shit) software to EQ them, use it!! I'd even wager an even easier task for the evolved social pariah who flatly refuses to traverse life with grace and decorum, search the bass-boosted version on YouTube and sort by most viewed.

A Glitch in the Simulation; See Formula Below:

This just in: my newest unpopular opinion is that if you cut out all the will.i.am parts (sorry fam) from Scream & Shout and just leave the bits with Britney, Bitch, it would just be a modern Charli XCX song. Granted, you would have to add a little post-Brexit attitude in there for the full effect. But I would argue that this song kinda rips harder? This shit was ahead of its time; 2013 was not ready for a Top 40 song of this magnitude.

I mean this song definitely charted. We're talkin' 23rd place on the Billboard Year-End Hot 100, baby. You can trust me, I looked it up. But culturally, it's so valuable bro. White people were listening to Imagine Dragons in 2013; let that sink in. IMAGINE DRAGONS. Oh, and how could I forget? There's also an absolutely insane period piece trap banger remix + music video for your viewing pleasure.

A Word on Sax Solos

Dirty Work by Steely Dan would be an absolutely perfect, quintessential '70s song if it weren't for that Huey-Lewis-and-the-News-sounding-ass goofy fuckin' sax solo toward the end of it. God, I hate it. I skip it every time. Why? I blame band kids.

AIN'T GONNA ANSWER (Because I'm At The Gym Getting Massive Fucking Gains, Bro)

5 CHOPPAS (out of 5)

I love to qualify songs into hyper-specific categories. One such playlist of mine is named, "20-year-old White Boy's Gains & Grindset, skip-leg-day type-beat." You know the type: the kinda bro that truly believes destroying their body for 80 hours per week across four different retail jobs, while receiving zero benefits, is some 🧠BIG BRAIN🧠 alpha male shit. 🐺

Anyways, today's contribution is AIN'T GONNA ANSWER from NLE Choppa with a surprisingly pleasant Lil Wayne feature. I just KNOW the 20-something meatheads at my local gym 💪😤 FUCKING LOVE THIS FUCKING SONG 💪😤. They also most definitely have this shit blasting out of their AirPods while they're on their fifth attempt of trying to simultaneously deadlift an unreasonable amount of weight and take a ~big flex mirror pic~ as an homage to... Greco-Roman twinks? Not really sure.

👍 No shade to NLE though, this song goes hard even if it's kinda goofy. And honestly, even though Lil Wayne's voice has always annoyed the fuck out of me, his verse on this song is one of his best in recent years.

Fade Outs Are For Little B*tch Producers

I don't get the '60s/'70s trend of fading songs out on an extended chorus. It's a total cop out. Let me preface this by telling you that I ADORE '60s pop and '70s country music; they're both some of my favorite eras of American music. But this bullshit takes an automatic 1 star off any song for me, no matter how perfect it may be.

As an example, we'll use Eddie Rabbitt's earworm trucker anthem, Drivin' My Life Away. This song absolutely fucking bangs. The little guitar bit at the beginning, the cadence of the verses, the cheesy ass studio drums... but then, right at the end, you find yourself asking why it end on a fade out of the chorus. We all know that this song could've ended with a twangy, fuzzed-out guitar riff after the last chorus. That would've been way more memorable, but instead they took the stereotypical fade-out cop-out. It's just unacceptable behavior.