Like escalators
Yesterday's entry, about the phenomenon of the summer jam, was a whole lot of fun to write, mostly because it's always fun to sit and admiration which song is leaving to be the one to call up memories of this summer in a few years. I already gave my resolution of my selection for call of the summer, the Shop Boyz' "Party Like a Rock Star," a song I've probably already written about too much.
And I wrote the entering in answer to a Kelefa Sanneh article that named Rihanna's "Umbrella" as the call of the summer, choice that seems to be the nearest thing we give to a consensus pick right now. But the big matter about this question, of wondering which song is the very pick, is that there's no real right answer. It's a totally subjective thing; a person's pick for the song of the summer says more nearly the soul than it does virtually the song. All sorts of variables come into play: old preferences, regional proclivities, personal experiences. Virtually every song that finds its way onto the radio during these months is somebody's song of the summer, and a few that didn't get it on probably are as well. So I view it might be fun on days when not too much else is passing on to give a feeling at some of the other strong contenders for the title. I don't know if I'll work this into a regular thing or what, but I can certainly think of a few completely inescapable songs that I haven't written about at all yet, songs that really need some sort of response, especially since we're almost midway through the season now. And the song that sprang to listen first when I thinking of this was Fabolous and Ne-Yo's "Make Me Better," a strain so ubiquitous in New York that it seems to grow up off the asphalt like waves of water-vapor.
What's interesting about "Make Me Better" is how it feels like nothing much on first listen but then gains power with repetition. Mike Clancy, the Voice's web news editor and soul I first met because he was screening the Irv Gotti trial for AM a pair of days ago, said today that there were two sorts of summer jams: the big anthems that you enjoy and the form of silly and dumb pop songs that you might not wish that often the remainder of the class but which always fathom a lot better during the summer. I'm not certain that split totally works for me, since I tend to like silly and dumb pop songs way more than most people. But let's go with it for a minute: "Make Me Better" starts out as the latter and finally becomes the former. Everything about the song seems unremarkable at first glance. Fabolous has been responsible for big things in the past ("Breathe," "Young'n," his guest verse on Clipse's "Comedy Central"), but none of those great things have always prevented him from coming across as an off-brand Jay-Z. He's released so many boring rap&B love songs that that seems to have become his dominant class of expression. And when he deviates from that make these days, he's less likely to get up with a serious banger like "Breathe" and more probable to get up with something like "Diamonds on My Chain," his new album's devastatingly boring first single. ("Return of the Hustle," his other first single, is a fairly obvious effort to repair the winner of "Breathe," but I don't believe it has any of that song's iconic snarl. His loverman lyrics on "Take Me Better" don't make any special emotional impact, and they aren't especially seductive. A pair of them are real clunkers: the "Batman and Robin" thing, "I'm gon' need Coretta Scott if I'm gon' be king." More than anything, though, they're notable for how Fab describes a romantic relationship as something like a corporate merger, two movements with intersecting interests becoming one. Ne-Yo is a perfectly honest and perfectly boring hook-machine with a versatile but indistinct voice. His hook for "Make Me Better" is fine, but it doesn't quite leap out of the speakers at first. As entities, they're both pretty boring, and the combining of the two of them feels like the kind of by-the-numbers single-by-committee that Def Jam's been doing a whole lot of lately. Timbaland, who is decidedly not a boring entity, produced the track, but it sounds like he's reigned himself in, purposefully excising all his signature quirks, leaving just a slow-rotating figure (the same Egyptian strings, in fact, that RZA sampled on Raekwon's "Rainy Dayz"), a few breaths, and a basic drum-thump. It sounds matter-of-fact and professional, but it doesn't exactly scream inspiration.
But that string-figure stays throughout the song, never dropping out or varying, and it feels more elemental everytime it curls up. And Ne-Yo's chorus matches its constant cresting, finding its own office in its eddies. So Fabolous is actually the perfect rapper for this track, since he sounds perfectly confident even when he's saying the dumbest shit in the world. And there's something really reassuring about that, about the song's tidal whump. The way it uses repetition isn't all that different than how, say, Lungfish does it: it establishes such a simpleton and basic pattern that any variations in that pattern gain power exponentially. So Ne-Yo's quick little half-verse, the "beside every great man you could detect a woman" acapella thing, and the layered up aahs near the end feel momentous even though they're just quick little production-flourishes. And so that soothing repetition works its way into your mind and stays there. When Ne-Yo brought out Fab to do the strain at Summer Jam, a bored and flat crowd suddenly woke up and so quickly went back to rest as shortly as Fab did "Diamonds on My Chain." It's a rare occasion: a group of corporate professionals catching lightning in a bottle. "Make Me Better" doesn't fade; it builds. In a few months, I might wish it yet more than I do now.
Voice review: Christian Hoard on Fabolous's Street DreamsVoice review: Jon Caramanica on Ne-Yo's In My Own Words
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