Fugative - 'Bad Girl'
You don't get extra points for effort in pop. It is assumed that everyone involved - from Muse to Chipmunk to Katie Price - is trying as hard as they can, and doing the best job that they are able to do. So the only thing that counts is how good the results are. And even then, it's entirely subjective because it's about whether the listener enjoys it or not.
So someone could slave for a year and come up with something most people think is bad, while his neighbour could whack out a tune in 5 minutes on a saucepan and go straight to No.1. It's not fair, but that's showbiz.
I say all this because, well, while there's quite a lot about this record which demonstrates that young Fugative and his procuders have worked hard, there are also signs that somehow, it wasn't quite hard enough.
(.)
It's got all the right bits, don't get me wrong. As of right now, you can't really go wrong if you have a squeaky singer with a plastic larynx, a skippy song, some burbling underwatery synths and something to say about the battle of the sexes.
As a rapper, Fugative's got that slightly odd, nasal-with-accent thing that Chipmunk has - he says "two minds" as "tew mainds" - and he's not exactly Captain Gruesome either, right ladies?
Someone has decided there needs to be a song about girls who only seem respond to negative feedback. We've all met someone like that, the kind of person who'll bug you for a year if you don't reply to one email, but won't ever speak to you again if you so much as offer to make her a cup of tea. This behaviour isn't restricted to girls either. Some people don't trust relationships unless they are making all the effort.
Not that you'd get any of this kind of insight from Fugative's lyric, which seems to skip from idea to idea without really stringing itself into any kind of point, no matter how many times he repeats that "bad girl" line. Sometimes the lyrics rhyme, sometimes they don't. It's all a bit half-finished.
And that's really the problem with the whole thing. It's got all the ingredients of a good pop song, but doesn't ever really transform into one. Which may seem like a massively unfair judgement to dump on a young artist who is taking his tentative first steps into the arena of popular song, but in a world which contains such astonishments as the recent Janelle Monae, Gorillaz and Mark Ronson singles, I really can't offer something this sloppy anything more than an encouraging pat on the head.
Download: Out now
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(Fraser McAlpine)
"'Bad Girl' is a sizzling track set to crank up the heat with its slick rhymes and toxic chorus."
"His light and bright commercial R&B sound seems like the surest route to pop success these days."
"Fugative has conquered a Nordic alliance...with Scandinavia's first-class R&B writers and producers Soulshock & Karlin."
Comment number 1.
At 22nd Jul 2010, U14429597 wrote:NOOOOO! He sounds like what would happen if Chipmunk and Tinchy had a one night fling and it turned out one of them was female! HE SUCKS EGG! I prefer Bieber to this guy. Anyway, he says he's the 'pioneer of hip-pop' whatever that is... I'm pretty sure this was been done WAY before him (by the likes of his could be parents TINCHY and CHIPMUNK no less).
I.Dont.Like.It.
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Comment number 2.
At 22nd Jul 2010, OddOne wrote:"I.Dont.Like.It."
Says it all.
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