Adele–Rolling In The Deep

Released 29th November 2010
Billboard: #13
UK: #2

“Do you let your heart lead the way, or do you usually let your head make the decisions for you? Have you encountered situations whereby your mind told you one thing but your heart said otherwise?”
(extracted from http://www.great-inspirational-quotes.com/heart-quotes.html)

For me, I find that my brain and heart will both respond to a song. If they both approve of it, such as B.o.B’s Airplanes or Kanye’s All of the Lights – or if they both disapprove of it (there are way too many examples to list here), then it’s pretty straightforward; the former case will score well while the latter, poorly. However, there are situations where the head says one thing and the heart another. In most ‘dispute’ cases, the head says it’s bad or unimpressive while the heart loves it – Bruno Mars’ Grenade and Drake’s Forever are two I can think of – and these usually end up quite decent, too. Today’s song, however, is a special case. I, honestly, don’t really like this song.

In terms of vocal ability, Adele is certainly by no means lacking as she powerfully knocks through the notes of the chorus along with that backing choir – though sometimes I’m not sure I like my songs with that much power slammed into each syllable. My head can appreciate this – my heart is turned off. I’m made to recall Cee-Lo’s Fuck You but as far as I’m concerned, this is controlled power which on a head level works very, very neatly for me; I found the latter song clunky and essentially, a mess (and much worse than Rolling in the Deep). (Notice ‘neat’ is something I’d be more likely to think about cognitively than feel emotively?) It’s good but gets grating quickly.

It probably is appropriate in conveying the rage one might experience at the (opportunity as well as emotional) costs of a breakup, but I’ve got to ask myself whether this is the kind of thing I can possibly enjoy listening to frequently.  Maybe I’m more of a passive person, but breakup songs of quiet resolve and tempered anger (Heartless), or those of sadness (Jay Sean Lights Off) seem to work better.

Perhaps a comparison to Bruno Mars’ Grenade may be appropriate – these songs are both about questionable ways of dealing with break-ups. Grenade is certainly ludicrous; Rolling in the Deep’s method is questionable, but not as nonsensical – it’s left ambiguous (I’ll lay your ship bare…). It’s okay.

I think it’s the production that kills things for me though – the backing chorus is too extensive. Someone once described Willow Smith’s Whip My Hair as a “noisy” song – and it was much worse than this, but unfortunately I’d find Rolling in the Deep having a bit too much unnecessary noise in the chorus.

I don’t know. This is a hard song for me to like – I find it gets grating quickly. I can appreciate the power in her voice, BUT I cannot listen to this without getting annoyed.

OVERALL RATING = 5.5 / 10
I can see that there is power in Adele’s voice, but somehow I find the production a bit of a letdown here, and it seems to mess things up. Technically she is strong, the concept of the song is fine, but… the execution of the song somehow pisses me off.

Chris Brown ft. Busta Rhymes and Lil Wayne–Look At Me Now

Released February 01, 2011.
Billboard: #11
UK Charts: –

Posse raps can be interesting, as you get to hear a little slice of each individual’s style. For example, on the remix of Brown’s Deuces, from hearing their voice I could pick out Drake, TI, Kanye and Andre3000 easily without needing to see the list of featured artists. When I first saw the concept on paper – Chris Brown ft. Lil Wayne and Busta Rhymes, I figured it’d be an R&B track, possibly with some extended rap features. I was wrong.

However, I had heard him do a rap section (feature, actually) on Chipmunk’s Champion, in addition to his semi-shouting part on Yeah 3X; now I think about it actually quite a number of R&B singers are doing semi-crossovers (Trey Songz put his own take on Look At Me Now, and Ne-Yo opens One In A Million with some rapping). So I wasn’t too surprised…

Unlike Forever where all four of them had their strengths going for them, the aforementioned Deuces remix where all could be contenders, or perhaps even the depressingly weak yet somewhat egalitarian (bad) nature of Bedrock, this is one of the most one-sided ones I have ever seen, to put it bluntly.

#1 CHRIS BROWN

I don’t see how you can hate from outside of the club
You can’t even get in
Hahaha, leggo

Heh, the lyrics are obnoxious, as is the laugh. Anyway, that was just some random intro bit, so we should get down to the real content of his verse. I

Yellow model chick, yellow bottle sippin’
Yellow Lamborghini, yellow top missin’

Okay… This reminds me of Wiz Khalifa’s song about a car as well (Black And Yellow). Though my critical mind thinks Black And Yellow is bad as a song, I find it pretty catchy as harmless entertainment. The sheer ridiculousness of some parts of the song made it more humorous than anything – which may be a good thing.

That shit look like a toupee
I get what you get in 10 years, in two days

If I earned $10000 a month, I would get approximately $1.2 million in 10 years, not including bonuses. Let’s take the bonus as 1 month so that’s $1,320,000 in 10 years. In 2 days would mean that you earn… $241 million a year. True, that’s not impossible, but I believe that kind of level was surpassed only by Oprah for 2010. Even the top earning popstar, Beyonce clocked in at $87M, a little over one third of that. Pretty ambitious there, eh?

Ladies love me; I’m on my Cool J
If you get what I get, what would you say?
She wax it all off, Mr. Miyagi

No issues, no comments here.

And them suicide doors, hari-kari

LAZY rhyming. The term for suicide is hari kiri… Well, I guess it isn’t too bad that he gets his words on timing most of the time. 3.0 / 10

HOOK – CHRIS BROWN

Look at me now, look at me now
Oh, I’m getting paper
Look at me now, oh, look at me now
Yeah, fresher than a muff(??)

I can’t seem to hear the dirty word that this is supposed to end with. Anyway, could you sing something? At least I sort of liked his oversinging on Champion… He’s a singer first, a dancer up there as well, and a rapper maybe 20th. 4.0 / 10

#2 CHRIS BROWN

Lil nigga, bigger than gorilla
Cause I’m killing every nigga that can try to be on my shit
Better cuff your chick if you with her, I can get her
And she accidentally slip and fall on my dick

Heh, how incredulous (accidentally? It shouldn’t be exposed at all!). He’s trying a bunch of 16th note syllables here, and it’s at least kinda nice to listen to.

Oops, I said on my dick
I ain’t really mean to say on my dick
But since we talking about my dick
All of you haters say hi to it

Suck it, huh? As again, I somehow feel he’s not really trying at least in terms of lyric-writing here.

I’m done.

Well, I hope that was some fun experimentation, but please return to a main singing role in your songs. It wasn’t really terrible, but you can do much better. 4.0 / 10

#3 BUSTA RHYMES

Ayo Breezy, let me show you how to keep the dice rolling when you’re doing that thing over there homie

Yeah. He only did it for around four bars or so. Let’s do this!

Let’s GO!

I’m pumped. That sounds somewhat like Tinie Tempah’s signature before he starts his songs, though…

Cause I feel like I’m running
And I’m feeling like I gotta get away, get away, get away…

This is what I mean by fast. I remember in Forever that Eminem one-upped the others in terms of speed, rapping:

He’s wondering if he should spit this slow
Fuck no! Go for broke,
His cup just runneth over, oh no

You sure about this…? Forever was 158 BPM with a small bunch of 16th triplets. For the most part he’s just doing 8th notes at 158 BPM which a simple calculation would show to be 158 x 2 / 60,or around 5.27 syllables per second. Look At Me Now is only 146, but Busta goes mainly on the sixteenths. In other words, that is (146 x 4 / 60) or 9.73 syllables per second. Following the rappers on Forever would make for a somewhat hard song on DDR; but, Look At Me Now could easily be a boss song that would make Forever look like peanuts.

I’m not going to bother going through the lyrics. It’s fairly standard fare about pushing for the top in spite of haters, rebutting them, etc. Normally, songs that succeed for me do so on the intellectual level a la All of the Lights which I just wrote about; yet this is an example of serious technical proficiency. Good job. It’s the main part of the song which I can put on repeat. Heh looks like it’d be worth it for me to check out more of the guy’s work. This could be pop-slanted though relative to the rest of his work – somehow, like Raekwon’s verse on Runaway Love with Kanye West and Justin Bieber I get this feeling. Nevertheless, he’s very good. 8.0 / 10

Sheesh. This means the expectations are going to be VERY, VERY high for the next person up…

#4 LIL WAYNE

Man, fuck these bitch ass niggas, how y’all doin’?
I’m Lil Tunechi, I’m a nuisance, I go stupid, I go dumb like the Three Stooges
I don’t eat sushi, I’m the shit, no, I’m pollution, no substitution
Got a bitch that play in movies in my jacuzzi, pussy juicy

A porn star. I get it.

Seriously, most of this is also just standard fare about rising to the top and rebutting haters, so I don’t see much point in going through the lines. I’ll just point out the more interesting or uncertain bits.

You niggas ain’t eatin’, fuck it, tell a waiter
Marley said shoot ‘em, and I said okay
If you wanted bullshit then I’m like olé

Don’t quite get this bit. Who is Marley? I’ve heard it’s Wayne’s bodyguard, but still… isn’t this inappropriate especially given that he was just incarcerated for weapon possession?!

I don’t care what you say, so don’t even speak
Your girlfriend a freak like Cirque du Soleil

Ah ha! Like this. She must be a mad contortionist, probably. Nice one there.

Ciroc and Sprite on a private flight, bitch I been tight since Guiding Light

I learned that it (Guiding Light)’s apparently the longest running television drama (from 1975), and someone on rapgenius also commented that it could be a double entendre for God and Light. Nevertheless, going by this idea I don’t see a need for such reading anyway, since Guiding Light in and of itself, without changing the words, could also be an allusion to God, who was around since the beginning of time.

He isn’t bad. However, it’s hard to clear the bar that Busta set in his verse, and from what I see, Wayne doesn’t do it. Nevertheless, this is credibly okay. 5.5 / 10

And of course, the winner for me is Busta, hands down. Lil Wayne is good, but I think it’d be better if he throws in more of those interesting, witty couplets, or at least those that would make me smile amusedly. Brown should stick to singing, really.

OVERALL SCORE = 6.0 / 10
This is a rather unusual case where some elements of the song are excellent and others seem inherently flawed. I settled on a 6, as the hook while not good isn’t terrible, and the featured artists do their job more than satisfactorily (Lil Wayne), if not excellently (Busta). It’s pretty catchy, but probably could have been more cohesive if Brown used a more traditional pattern (e.g. Brown sings or raps v1, and sings the hook rather than just goes Look at me now, Look at me now. Wayne fires v2 and Busta does the bridge or vice versa). Nevertheless, I do respect Busta’s technical proficiency. I’d listen to the song for that part, really.

Kanye West ft. Rihanna et al–All of the Lights

Billboard: #31 (and charting)
UK: #46
Released January 18, 2011.

‘Lights’. This word reminds me of a lot of other fairly recent releases – of course, Jay Sean’s Hit the Lights and Lights Off, Ellie Goulding’s Bright Lights, Katy B’s Lights On, which was a pretty decent but nothing-special dance affair for me, Coldplay’s Christmas Lights, and (older) West has done Flashing Lights too…

The music video is terrible, in my opinion. The black and white intro, probably of the daughter mentioned in Kanye’s verses looks vaguely compelling, and then we are treated… or tortured… with an explosive light-show of Rihanna singing some lyrics rendered in bright lights. (The visual above is also from the song. The CD cover isn’t out yet.) We have a few scenes that some have commented are reminiscent of Enter the Void, Kanye standing on a few police cars during the chorus, an overexposed Rihanna and Kid Cudi singing away from the camera.

It’s an all-star cast, supposedly, so long that I can’t even remember who exactly features on it, but basically only Rihanna, Kid Cudi, and Fergie get noticeable parts (and Elton John has the piano playing bridge). I don’t really like Fergie (Big Girls Don’t Cry = decent, but some stuff was terrible… My Humps and The Time with the BEP, for two), but I do like Kanye, Rihanna, and Cudi so this looks like a strong combination on paper.

The chorus is very addictive for some reason. The drums follow a non-standard but interesting rhythm, and it’s actually quite uplifting, I must say. We have a set of several kinds of lights – cop lights, flash lights, spotlights, strobe lights, street lights and several kinds of lives which are frequent stereotypes taken on by popstars.

It’s rather creepy that Rihanna is supplying the hook, and the verses of the song discuss domestic violence. That infamous incident happened in the past, and we shouldn’t be dwelling on it, I think, but unfortunately and perhaps even inevitably such associations are difficult to banish. Not to mention Love the Way You Lie. Interpretations of Kanye’s daughter as music do exist and are somewhat justifiable, but I find that pushing it a little far, mainly because of the lines about the ghetto university in the second verse.

(Verse 1): To my surprise, a nigga replacing me
I had to take him to that ghetto university

Bump him off, basically. In terms of music, to outperform the others that might have replaced him after a hiatus (especially in the case of rap – 808s & Heartbreak while in my opinion an excellent album doesn’t count). Verse 1 goes well with this interpretation – almost too well, in fact. However, I can’t quite grasp the following pair of lines with the interpretation of the daughter as music.

(Verse 2): She need a daddy, baby please
Can’t let her grow up in that ghetto university

Kanye’s character has been somewhat precocious at times, but still. Seriously, is it reasonable to believe that the music industry depends on one individual, and furthermore will not advance without that one individual? True, it may not have advanced in a certain way without an individual, but to say that it would continue to grow up in that ghetto university is a very, very daring statement. So I’ll take the more literal interpretation, that he’s taking on the character of a (celebrity) child abuser.

From verse 1 to verse 2, there’s a break. The way I see how going up the stairs suddenly led to the restraining order, and the line Her mother, brother, grandmother hate me in that order may have been a second case of domestic violence? The daughter doesn’t seem to have a daddy now as suggested by the ending lines of verse 2, so what exactly happened then? But anyway, his intentions are good now; he wants to make life better for his daughter. That’s nice to know.

It’s more straightforward and simple this way, but the overall message is still uplifting. With regard to the hook, there’s a certain tinge of anger with which he lists cop lights etc. which could suggest that he isn’t a fan of his past and what he saw. Perhaps he was a popstar indeed, but lost control of his family life – the fact that he raps Fast life, drug life, thug life, rock life, every night (no family quality time!) could be an explanation for this. Despite the lights and lives looking appealing, he may want to escape from them.

Considered on another level, he may be highlighting some of the lights that people seek – cop lights, flash lights, spotlights, strobe lights, street lights. Some of these (spotlights, strobe lights, flash lights from paparazzi) are commonly associated with pop stardom, perhaps even a part of it. But are these lights really what we should be going for? Consider he had Flashing Lights, which was a comment about a lady going too far with a flamboyant, partying lifestyle while he picked something quieter (order the hors d’oeuvres, view of the water/Straight from a page of your favourite author). Not to mention Lost in the World where he goes Run from the lights, run from the night, run for your life. Furthermore when featured on Forever, he had They pull their cameras out, and god damn they snap. It seems lights are a negative image – or even motif – in West’s lyrics for the drawbacks of stardom.

Kid Cudi comes on…

Getting mine, baby, got to let these niggas know
Getting right, eh, you should go and get your own (x2)

What is he trying to get? Clearly, it’s something with a sense of right – a frame of mind for right living, perhaps? Not the lights, in any case, and he’s trying to express perhaps that people should go and get their own forms of lights or lives that are right, and not just chase after the popular lights and lives because they have drawbacks that may not be immediately apparent.

I don’t really like the timbre of Fergie’s rapping voice. The repetition of mind, line and time got very annoying quickly. It’s clearly about a drug issue, yes, and repetition may be used to place emphasis on the number of times, but I think it sounds terrible. She’s probably better off singing songs where she doesn’t belt (or worse, scream as in Boom Boom Pow) too much, as far as I’m concerned.

Anyway, I think from the verses we’ve pieced together more than enough to unravel the hook in the song. It’s important to see all of the lights, not just the lights that may be more apparent to us, and it’s up to us to chase for the right lights (which would be different for different people) as we live our lives. Go after the right lights, push hard, and do your best. Bring others up with you if you can.

I would actually compare this song with Lupe Fiasco’s The Show Goes On and Tinie Tempah’s Invincible (review). All three recently-released songs are uplifting pieces about pushing through difficult circumstances for success. Invincible in my opinion is the weakest of the three; while it’s certainly technically competent, I think all of the 3 songs are technically good and thus its (seemingly, hopefully) largely straightforward and even saccharine approach limits its effectiveness. The Show Goes On also takes a more straightforward approach, though I think it has a good hook and I find it flows together very well – it’d be an example of getting most of the basics nailed down well for a pop-rap song. All of the Lights in my opinion doesn’t flow as smoothly as The Show Goes On, but the lyrics are well constructed and it’s intellectually solid. The Show Goes On is more appealing in a simple way, Invincible is a very comfortable song, but All of the Lights has greater depth to it. Nevertheless, I think all three are actually quite good songs (at least for the most part), but All of the Lights is the winner.

(Invincible: 6, actually 6.5, after listening a few more times since the review – it’s lyrically plain but definitely more than technically competent and the breakdown is good stuff. The Show Goes On is around a 7 to 7.5, it’s a solid song that I find very catchy and uplifting, with good use of sampling, but not too much more. For this:)

MUSIC VIDEO SCORE = 1.0 / 10, but
OVERALL SCORE = 8.0 / 10
I am more than satisfied. The cold Runaway went down very well with me, as he was able to convey convincingly the supposed depth of pain that his character was supposed to carry. All of the Lights seems to be somewhat on the other side. Kanye expresses the stresses of celebrity life, but also conveys a desire to improve oneself and break through said stresses, for oneself and for others. It’s a slightly more subtle yet uplifting, positive and powerful song. I’m not so much of a fan of Fergie’s part, though, and while the lyrics are insightful I find the instrumentation and melody merely ‘eh’ to decent, which keeps the song at around an 8 for me. Still, apart from Through the Wire and Heartless I think this is one of the best among his releases.