Cheryl Cole–Fight For This Love

Released October 16, 2009.
Billboard: –
UK Charts: #1.

Personally, I’ve found the quality of Cheryl Cole’s singles to be rather variable – I enjoyed this song and Parachute, while some like the recently released The Flood are decent, but sleepers, and I did not enjoy Promise This at all. Fight For This Love is the 1st single for Ms. Cole (well, outside of her releases under the British girl group Girls Aloud), and is a pretty relaxed song, honestly.

It’s a light dance track; 123 BPM is just a little bit slower than the 130-ish level which I find a good pace. The minor key used is a little bit more interesting than what we normally have. While vocally she’s not too impressive, she isn’t bad either (the song, well, doesn’t have any exceptionally high notes) and I must say her delivery is good. She sounds confident and quite solid on her notes. The reserved, conservative drumlines and occasional piano hits work very well in tandem with her voice on this.

Most of it’s just pretty decent, though I like the instrumentation in the prechorus (Anything that’s worth having/Sure enough worth fighting for…) and especially the bridge (I don’t know where we’re heading….). The breakdown is cleanly executed and seems to work well.

The video is quite amazing – the difficulty of some of those dance moves, or rather synchronising them neatly among such a large number of dancers is considerable. I’m not too much of a fan of the visuals with “Fight For This Love” and what looks like the chorus lyrics in a handwritten font, though. And I don’t get her tiger (or is it leopard) printed hoodie. The uniform looks pretty good, I must say, though!

Lyrically, it’s about a troublesome relationship, though unlike many songs about such relationships which involve spitting in the other party’s face on your way out (Irreplaceable, F**k You!) or breaking things down and either party leaving (I’m Gone by Jay Sean for the troublemaker leaving / Heartless by Kanye West for the victimised) she tries to take positive action to mend the relationship, agreeing to make concessions too, which isn’t a message I often see in pop music. It’s pretty sweet, actually. Not too much to comment on a micro scale, for this song.

OVERALL RATING = 6.5 / 10
Fight For This Love, Cheryl Cole’s first solo single release, is a solid example of decent to good pop music, as far as I’m concerned. The song’s basically about a struggling relationship, though her actions are probably a better reaction than the personas of the singers of >80% of the ‘broken-relationship’ songs out there.