Eminem Featuring Gwen Stefani
“Kings Never Die”
#80
This is getting sad. To witness these former stars immerse themselves in bottomless banality in the same way as their boomer predecessors (and the stars of the swing era before them) is to realize that in pop music, as in life, there are some fates that can’t be escaped. No matter how up to date you try to be, it takes only a single unnoticed tick of the clock to render you irrelevant, and another to make you an embarrassment. It isn’t true, as some claim, that Eminem has lost his sense of the beat, but he’s remained loyal to parsing a sluggish heavy-metal rhythm that no one under 40 connects with anymore. As for Gwen Stefani, she’s never sounded more anonymous. She will, though.
Tori Kelly
“Should’ve Been Us”
#90
There are musical and lyrical touches here that show real promise (specifically the background vocals and the line about it being impossible to hide in a crowd when she has high heels on), but for the most part this is ordinary and then some, and the good parts aren’t enough to carry it.
Maddie & Tae
“Fly”
#92
I took this for another bland personal uplift song at first, but repeated listening revealed hints of something deeper and darker. The only way I know of that you can “learn to fly on the way down” is by having your soul leave your body—in other words, by dying. This would seem to be confirmed by the music: not just the drop in pitch on the last line of the chorus (an obvious, ancient, but still effective gimmick), but by the presence, at the end of the middle eight, of a kick drum thump that sounds a lot like a body hitting the ground. Maybe I’m reading too much into the lyric, and that thump may be somebody’s idea of a joke, but country is full of death and resurrection songs (though rarely this subtle), and this may be another one. Which would make it even smarter than “Girl In a Country Song”, though not necessarily better.
Cam
“Burning House”
#94
The music is lovely, if too singer-songwriterish for my taste, the first verse stunning, and Cam deserves all the attention she gets. The metaphors, though, are not only unoriginal but decidedly mixed. This could just as easily have been called “Sleepwalking”, and after that first verse the songwriters (Cam and her producers) seem to have rushed through the rest without a clear idea of where the song should go. The sound effects are a mistake, too—more like a warm, romantic campfire than a burning house. A good record all the same.