Rap seems to go through a cycle regarding booty songs. Sir Mix-a-Lot first immortalized the rump as muse with “Baby Got Back,” but it would be years before the ass-boom hit full-force: “Back that Azz Up,” “Wobble Wobble,” “She Got a Donk” and “Shake It Fast” were all released in the span of a few years, with increasing degrees of insanity. Booty was taken seriously, and it was right in your face. Literally. When you’re a hopelessly awkward 16-year-old boy, BET’s Rap City is the next best thing to scrambled Playboy Channel.
This tune continues that tradition. I initially had no idea who Tre Songz was; I found this video searching YouTube for Nicki Minaj because LOOK AT HER BUTT. The song is technically about getting absolutely blasted on Hennessey — actual lyric: “We drunk, so let me be your alcohol hero” — but that’s so lazy that it barely qualifies as a double entendre. And if you think the video doesn’t consist mostly of Tre sitting in a neon-lit room while handcuffed dancers present themselves to him like mandrills, then you have absurdly high expectations for a song called “Bottoms Up.”
It’s catchy, though, and the inclusion of Nicki Minaj automatically increases the artistic merit of any song tenfold, and she can get away with being as ridiculous as she wants. Which, here, includes wearing a blond bob-style wig and corset, spitting rapid-fire rhymes about Anna Nicole Smith, Haiti and buying a Mercedes with her boobs. I totally believe her, and my cardio has never been better.
Jessie J, “Domino”
I’m glad I didn’t know this song by its actual title until just recently. Otherwise, I’d have thought it was a cover of the Van Morrison song from His Band and the Street Choir, and no amount of Jessie in a leopard-print bra could have saved her from my wheezy, impotent wrath.
But it’s not, and I love it. Jessie J, in both style and substance, harkens slightly back to the kind of absurdist-bubblegum late ’90s girl-pop embodied in artists like Robyn and, to an extent, the Spice Girls. I mentioned the leopard-print bra, but Jessie J is the kind of girl who not only matches her lipstick to it, but bedazzles a dollar store cap with plastic gold to round out the look. She spends half the video in a paisley bodysuit, and owns it. The song itself is pop-by-numbers, with a sparse, handclappy arrangement for the verses, before the chorus breaks out some full major chords and synthesizers. It’s perfect for a beach montage in a Nair commercial, and I mean that in the best way possible.
Mest, “Cadillac”
High school was a weird time for me, both music and fashion-wise. Some of my friends still wore those oversized, button-up shirts with more blue flames and tribal crap than a frat boy’s upper body. I shopped at Hot Topic and always made sure to leave only a minimal amount of bared skin between my shorts and socks. My tan lines looked like a hazing ritual.
Also, Blink 182 was huge then, so I listened to them. They got, and still get, a bad rap, but as far as pop-ready skate punk is concerned, you can’t do much better this side of NOFX. Their unholy offshoot spawn, though, are another story. Of them, Mest is the worst story.
A Mest album is what you buy when Good Charlotte gets too hardcore. They love wearing Dickies with Airwalks, and the only reason they spike their hair is because they don’t understand Freud. Hard rhymes are par for the course in songwriting, but the first three lines of this song end with the word “night:” “It’s Friday night/What’s going on tonight?/I’ll see her later on tonight.” So little thought went into that lyric, you could barely power a penlight off the brain that conceived it.
But the video… oh man, the video. They’re riding around in a 1970s Caddie with a bunch of too-hot-to-be-punk punk girls, while a werewolf in a tracksuit breakdances in a porta-potty. The song is stupid, and the band is even dumber: they don’t even bother to perform on a stage while they’re on the beach, so you know they’re getting sand in all kinds of uncomfortable places. But bikinis, Cadillacs, werewolves — it’s like these little Spencer’s Gifts petri dish mishaps figured out how to Inception my dreams.You Might Also Like:
In Which I Have Clearly Lost My Mind
I have a funny relationship with music. It used to be my job to write about it, and I got into that career — or, let’s be honest, fell into it — because I am truly fascinated and enamored with the monolithic gamut of artistic expression inherent in it. Its evolution has become a thing of warp-speed beauty; a few years ago, I describe The Mars Volta as “Led Zeppelin on all the acid” to a friend of mine.
Nowadays, you can’t swing a dead mud shark without hitting a band that splices psychedelic wankery with heavy prog-blues. If you could, I’d stop getting so many dry-cleaning bills from Diagonal. It’s all too predictable, though, what happens when your passion becomes your job: disenchantment. Within a year, I started getting annoyed when PR reps would send me free music. I was getting good stuff — Coheed and Cambria FedEx-ed me free tickets once — but when your paycheck hinges on critique, you begin to view everything from a very clinical standpoint.
Or, like me, you begin sequestering yourself into the most conservative niches of scene politics. You’re a fan of the way Clutch seamlessly melds Southern rock groove with bark-y hardcore doom? Of course you are. But you can’t be a fan of Every Time I Die. You just can’t. I’m not sure why, but it basically boils down to screw those guys.
Getting out of that career was good for me, as I’ve learned to open up and appreciate all kinds of music again. But my relationship with it is still tricky. Sometimes a song comes along that both the lizard and human parts of my brain tell me to hate, but my heart forces me to love. These are some of those songs.
One Direction, “What Makes You Beautiful”
One Direction is what happens when you get the behind-the-scenes look you never asked for. Each of the five members individually auditioned for “Britain’s Got Talent,” only for Simon Cowell to suggest they form a group. Then he laid an egg with a dollar sign on it, and this “band” is what popped out. On paper, they are everything you hate about boy bands: there’s the Cute One, the Bad Boy (you can tell because he’s got medium-gauge ear piercings) and the Not-Cute-But-Still-Kinda-Because-I’m-In-This-Band guy. They’re smarmy, and more vanilla than a going-out-of-business ice cream parlor.
But good lord, is this song infectious. I’m not sure if it’s the opening, Grease-aping guitar lick, the flawless, saccharine harmonies, or the fact that Bad Boy isn’t strong-armed into a rap break, but I love it. I even watched the video last night to try and force myself into jadedness, but it backfired: they’re pretty much frolicking in the surf, fully clothed, and just generally having way more fun than is fair. If you have to hate them, just remember that when the sea salt dries on their khakis, their inner thighs are gonna chafe like a motherf***er.
Tre Songz featuring Nicki Minaj, “Bottoms Up”
Rap seems to go through a cycle regarding booty songs. Sir Mix-a-Lot first immortalized the rump as muse with “Baby Got Back,” but it would be years before the ass-boom hit full-force: “Back that Azz Up,” “Wobble Wobble,” “She Got a Donk” and “Shake It Fast” were all released in the span of a few years, with increasing degrees of insanity. Booty was taken seriously, and it was right in your face. Literally. When you’re a hopelessly awkward 16-year-old boy, BET’s Rap City is the next best thing to scrambled Playboy Channel.
This tune continues that tradition. I initially had no idea who Tre Songz was; I found this video searching YouTube for Nicki Minaj because LOOK AT HER BUTT. The song is technically about getting absolutely blasted on Hennessey — actual lyric: “We drunk, so let me be your alcohol hero” — but that’s so lazy that it barely qualifies as a double entendre. And if you think the video doesn’t consist mostly of Tre sitting in a neon-lit room while handcuffed dancers present themselves to him like mandrills, then you have absurdly high expectations for a song called “Bottoms Up.”
It’s catchy, though, and the inclusion of Nicki Minaj automatically increases the artistic merit of any song tenfold, and she can get away with being as ridiculous as she wants. Which, here, includes wearing a blond bob-style wig and corset, spitting rapid-fire rhymes about Anna Nicole Smith, Haiti and buying a Mercedes with her boobs. I totally believe her, and my cardio has never been better.
Jessie J, “Domino”
I’m glad I didn’t know this song by its actual title until just recently. Otherwise, I’d have thought it was a cover of the Van Morrison song from His Band and the Street Choir, and no amount of Jessie in a leopard-print bra could have saved her from my wheezy, impotent wrath.
But it’s not, and I love it. Jessie J, in both style and substance, harkens slightly back to the kind of absurdist-bubblegum late ’90s girl-pop embodied in artists like Robyn and, to an extent, the Spice Girls. I mentioned the leopard-print bra, but Jessie J is the kind of girl who not only matches her lipstick to it, but bedazzles a dollar store cap with plastic gold to round out the look. She spends half the video in a paisley bodysuit, and owns it. The song itself is pop-by-numbers, with a sparse, handclappy arrangement for the verses, before the chorus breaks out some full major chords and synthesizers. It’s perfect for a beach montage in a Nair commercial, and I mean that in the best way possible.
Mest, “Cadillac”
High school was a weird time for me, both music and fashion-wise. Some of my friends still wore those oversized, button-up shirts with more blue flames and tribal crap than a frat boy’s upper body. I shopped at Hot Topic and always made sure to leave only a minimal amount of bared skin between my shorts and socks. My tan lines looked like a hazing ritual.
Also, Blink 182 was huge then, so I listened to them. They got, and still get, a bad rap, but as far as pop-ready skate punk is concerned, you can’t do much better this side of NOFX. Their unholy offshoot spawn, though, are another story. Of them, Mest is the worst story.
A Mest album is what you buy when Good Charlotte gets too hardcore. They love wearing Dickies with Airwalks, and the only reason they spike their hair is because they don’t understand Freud. Hard rhymes are par for the course in songwriting, but the first three lines of this song end with the word “night:” “It’s Friday night/What’s going on tonight?/I’ll see her later on tonight.” So little thought went into that lyric, you could barely power a penlight off the brain that conceived it.
But the video… oh man, the video. They’re riding around in a 1970s Caddie with a bunch of too-hot-to-be-punk punk girls, while a werewolf in a tracksuit breakdances in a porta-potty. The song is stupid, and the band is even dumber: they don’t even bother to perform on a stage while they’re on the beach, so you know they’re getting sand in all kinds of uncomfortable places. But bikinis, Cadillacs, werewolves — it’s like these little Spencer’s Gifts petri dish mishaps figured out how to Inception my dreams.You Might Also Like:
Rap seems to go through a cycle regarding booty songs. Sir Mix-a-Lot first immortalized the rump as muse with “Baby Got Back,” but it would be years before the ass-boom hit full-force: “Back that Azz Up,” “Wobble Wobble,” “She Got a Donk” and “Shake It Fast” were all released in the span of a few years, with increasing degrees of insanity. Booty was taken seriously, and it was right in your face. Literally. When you’re a hopelessly awkward 16-year-old boy, BET’s Rap City is the next best thing to scrambled Playboy Channel.
This tune continues that tradition. I initially had no idea who Tre Songz was; I found this video searching YouTube for Nicki Minaj because LOOK AT HER BUTT. The song is technically about getting absolutely blasted on Hennessey — actual lyric: “We drunk, so let me be your alcohol hero” — but that’s so lazy that it barely qualifies as a double entendre. And if you think the video doesn’t consist mostly of Tre sitting in a neon-lit room while handcuffed dancers present themselves to him like mandrills, then you have absurdly high expectations for a song called “Bottoms Up.”
It’s catchy, though, and the inclusion of Nicki Minaj automatically increases the artistic merit of any song tenfold, and she can get away with being as ridiculous as she wants. Which, here, includes wearing a blond bob-style wig and corset, spitting rapid-fire rhymes about Anna Nicole Smith, Haiti and buying a Mercedes with her boobs. I totally believe her, and my cardio has never been better.
Jessie J, “Domino”
I’m glad I didn’t know this song by its actual title until just recently. Otherwise, I’d have thought it was a cover of the Van Morrison song from His Band and the Street Choir, and no amount of Jessie in a leopard-print bra could have saved her from my wheezy, impotent wrath.
But it’s not, and I love it. Jessie J, in both style and substance, harkens slightly back to the kind of absurdist-bubblegum late ’90s girl-pop embodied in artists like Robyn and, to an extent, the Spice Girls. I mentioned the leopard-print bra, but Jessie J is the kind of girl who not only matches her lipstick to it, but bedazzles a dollar store cap with plastic gold to round out the look. She spends half the video in a paisley bodysuit, and owns it. The song itself is pop-by-numbers, with a sparse, handclappy arrangement for the verses, before the chorus breaks out some full major chords and synthesizers. It’s perfect for a beach montage in a Nair commercial, and I mean that in the best way possible.
Mest, “Cadillac”
High school was a weird time for me, both music and fashion-wise. Some of my friends still wore those oversized, button-up shirts with more blue flames and tribal crap than a frat boy’s upper body. I shopped at Hot Topic and always made sure to leave only a minimal amount of bared skin between my shorts and socks. My tan lines looked like a hazing ritual.
Also, Blink 182 was huge then, so I listened to them. They got, and still get, a bad rap, but as far as pop-ready skate punk is concerned, you can’t do much better this side of NOFX. Their unholy offshoot spawn, though, are another story. Of them, Mest is the worst story.
A Mest album is what you buy when Good Charlotte gets too hardcore. They love wearing Dickies with Airwalks, and the only reason they spike their hair is because they don’t understand Freud. Hard rhymes are par for the course in songwriting, but the first three lines of this song end with the word “night:” “It’s Friday night/What’s going on tonight?/I’ll see her later on tonight.” So little thought went into that lyric, you could barely power a penlight off the brain that conceived it.
But the video… oh man, the video. They’re riding around in a 1970s Caddie with a bunch of too-hot-to-be-punk punk girls, while a werewolf in a tracksuit breakdances in a porta-potty. The song is stupid, and the band is even dumber: they don’t even bother to perform on a stage while they’re on the beach, so you know they’re getting sand in all kinds of uncomfortable places. But bikinis, Cadillacs, werewolves — it’s like these little Spencer’s Gifts petri dish mishaps figured out how to Inception my dreams.You Might Also Like:
Posted in Ruffin' It