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youngboy-oldmind · 4 years

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ALBUM REVIEW: Revival

“It’s true, I’m a Rubik’s. A beautiful mess/At times juvenile yes. I goof and I jest/A flawed human I guess”

Detroit legend and highest-selling rapper of the decade, Eminem, releases his eighth (ninth if you count Infinite) album Revival: a project that is over hated, yet plagued with cringey lyrics, inconsistency, and an excessive runtime (77 minutes), propelling his decline and mainstream hate that’s haunted him since the late 2000s.

Overall thoughts

I say this with pain because I genuinely think this project could’ve been comparable to Jay-Z’s 4:44. Both rappers have been successful since the 90s and they both know their best is behind them. However, Jay-Z hit the mark where Eminem vastly missed. BUT, this isn’t a review of 4:44. Unfortunately, this is a review of Eminem’s controversial 2017 project: Revival.

Revival misses the mark for several reasons. First, the songs he chose for pre-release singles turned off fans from the jump. He pre-released “Walk on Water”, which captured the interest of fans who appreciate Eminem’s calmer, more introspective side. However, his second single release “Untouchable” made me hesitant to expect this album to revive Eminem’s career. This song isn’t strong enough to headline the album. At best, it’s a little annoying. And at worse, its skippable in 60 seconds. Furthermore, it was a political song, so any listeners that disagreed with his message immediately disassociated from the project.

Second, his lyricism is weak throughout the album, downright offensive at some points. Not offensive like its edgy or has shock value. Offensive like I can’t believe he made me listen to such shtty similes and metaphors. Contenders for the worst lines include but are not limited to:

“Instinctive nature to bring the anguish to the English language/ With this ink you haters get rode on (wrote on), like a piece of paper”

“I’m looking at your tight rear like a sight seer/ Your booty is heavy duty, like diarrhea”

“I just bodied the beat, so that hole must’ve been dug/Cause it just died, like food coloring does”

Along with weak metaphors, he also uses his signature play-on-words style to create painstaking lines such as

“The plan’s to bring her to my house/You’re drinking Jack and Beam, I’m thinking soon this tramp’ll lean (trampoline) so we can bounce”

“From the first time I saw you, I actually/Said to myself, ‘I gotta meet her’ (meter) like a taxi”

“I ask does she want a computer lodged in her vagina/Said my dick is an apple, she said put it inside her (in cider)”

Some of the vocal performances were painful as well. On “Chloraseptic” and “Untouchable”, he straight up lets out ridiculous drawn out yells. I have difficulty accepting that the producer of those tracks and long-time friend of Eminem, Denaun, heard him make those noises and didn’t tell him on how bad it sounds.

Third, and most importantly, Eminem’s tone is extremely inconsistent throughout the project. I wouldn’t be as critical towards the goofy songs if Eminem set and maintained one tone. He began the album with “Walk on Water”, discussing the stress of constant scrutiny and how unrealistic expectations make him doomed to fall short. This is a great topic to talk about as someone who was 18 years into his fame. But then, he begins topic ping-pong for almost an hour, switching back and forth between maturity and childishness, (with some high spots that I’ll discuss later). You cannot complain that people stress you out with high expectations, and then make songs that’s just punchlines revolving around breasts, butts, and vulgar sex.

Logic has great examples of priming your expectations and tones. He makes it clear when a project is a concept piece, like Incredible True Story or Everybody, or when he’s just having fun, like Bobby Tarantino I & II. Because Eminem keeps switching between serious songs and dumb songs, it makes everything seem disingenuous. For example, on the song “Like Home”, he basically rips Donald Trump a new one, going so far as to compare him to Hitler. But on the song “Heat” he makes a joke that he agrees with Donald Trump that women’s privates are supposed to be grabbed, which is why “they call it a snatch”. You can’t criticize the president in one song and then agree with them in the next, even if you’re joking. You can have fun songs and serious songs, but they should keep the album’s tone consistent.

Okay, I’m done criticizing, cause there are some great things about this album. “Walk on Water” was a great intro to the album. “River” is great collab between Ed Sheeran and Eminem. While the content of “Remind Me” is unremarkable, Rick Rubin delivers on the beat, creating an entertaining chorus that samples Joan Jett and the Blackhearts’ “I Love Rock n Roll”. I will give credit to “Offended”, which is ambitious to say in the least. I skipped it on first listen but it actually grew on me. And of course, the final two tracks “Castle” and “Arose” are the album’s peak.

If Eminem would’ve shaved the track list to 9 songs instead of 19, weeding out the childish/forgettable songs and making it more tonally consistent, this album would be much better. My ideal Revival album would be:

1. Walk on Water

2. Believe

3. River

4. Like Home

5. Tragic Endings

6. Nowhere Fast

7. Offended

8. Castle

9. Arose

This would bring the runtime down to 40 minutes instead of 77 minutes. At 45 years old, 8 albums into his career and 18 years in the game, Eminem doesn’t have 77 minutes’ worth of material to talk about. And it shows.

I mentioned earlier that this project is over hated. Although there are things I strongly dislike about this project, it isn’t nearly as bad as media and music reviewers describe it. Two of his previous projects, Encore and Relapse, were much worse than Revival. I think it’s an exaggeration to call Revival the worst of his career, but it is definitely indication of a decline.

Album Breakdown

“Walk on Water” ignites the album with an emotional piano ballad, Beyonce’s beautiful vocals on the chorus, and Eminem’s surprisingly self-exposing verses. He talks about the pain of having a section of hip hop disregard him, while having another section constantly hold him to a standard he feels like he’ll never reach again. It’s more melodramatic than what I expect from an Eminem song, especially the dramatic pause at the beginning of the first verse where he dramatically asks “why.........?”. Seeing Eminem express vulnerability instead of constantly acting like a god gave me hope.

But then...I heard the last 5 seconds, and I knew I was in trouble.

“Cause I’m just a man/

But as long as I got a mic I’m godlike/

So me and you are not alike/

B***h, I wrote ‘Stan’”

This transitions into “Believe”, a track that carries on the topic from the previous song but establishes that he is not self-conscious and knows he’s superior in the rap game, asking the audience if THEY believe in him. It’s disappointing to see him abandon vulnerability so quickly. It took five minutes and four seconds for Eminem to backtrack and basically say “Nah, I can reach every height. You guys just need to believe in me”. Like he’s blaming critics and fans for his decline, not his skills or style. I did not care for this shift. And speaking of shifts, we hear Eminem’s first attempt at a trap beat, which sounds off with his rapping style. He’s constantly taking odd pauses to squeeze in rhyme schemes. Not the worst song, but already starting the contradictions to the initial tone of the album.

Eminem’s second attempt at a trap beat, “Chloraseptic”, was painful. I can’t sugar coat it. Half of the time I had no clue what he was saying, and the half that I could understand had no substance. He mocks Migos’ style, using adlibs, shouts, and voice bites that make him sound old and desperate to fit in modern trap music. Over his career, Eminem’s best tracks have either a rock sample or a piano melody. But this is clear evidence that very few Eminem tracks should be trap songs.

As I mentioned earlier, “Untouchable” was released early as a single. This song was painful because I knew what he was going for. So it sucks to be distracted by the subpar delivery. The rock guitars and harmonized vocals in the chorus hit my ears too hard, making me wince and decrease the volume at the chorus. Eminem’s verses have him shouting/teasing “white boy, white boy” “black boy, black boy” which is too immature for someone of his status and stature. And there’s a line in the first verse where he says “then we wonder why we see this side of youuuuuuuuuuuu”, drawing out the last word in this painful, awful voice that definitely should’ve been scrapped. In the second half of the song, the instrumental switches from a hard rock sample to a piano melody that illustrates a sense of anxiety. Also, in the last verse, he switches perspectives and talks as a black person under systematic oppression. While I appreciate the effort, it doesn’t really translate into anything emotionally because his solutions to these problems are shallow.

He talks about police brutality and systemic racial issues. The problem is it’s all surface level. Someone with his age and experience should be able to add more to the discussion. But he comes through with messages like “We need to hire black cops and stop putting cops in neighborhoods they are unfamiliar with. This country was built on slaves. It’s unfair Kaepernick got hate for kneeling during the national anthem. Racial profiling is the cause of violence”. These are things I was able to articulate as a middle schooler. But he delivers these thoughts like he’s speaking from the woke-est perspective the world’s ever seen. When in reality, there are tweets that hold more substance. And because of this, Eminem’s yelling doesn’t feel like anger. It just feels loud and misguided.

Fortunately, we then transition to one of the stronger songs on the album, “River”. He discusses a toxic relationship filled with cheating, lies, and an abortion. Eminem has always delivered good bad-relationship songs, so I’m not surprised another one is one of the best on the album. Ed Sheeran’s singing on the chorus is dope, especially at the end when the instruments drop at the end and Sheeran’s tender vocals cap off the track. Cannot complain; its easily the best track so far.

“Remind Me” is the first goofy track on the album. Eminem is taking a break from serious topics like meeting other’s expectations, success and failure, police brutality, and a devastating relationship, to talk about a girl with “implants so big” she could hang him up on her rack, with her “big ol’ tits”. This song is only tolerable because Rick Rubin’s sample was fun to hear. Otherwise, this song is unbearable.

“Like Home” is his next political song. He takes a patriotic stance while criticizing President Trump. And that’s about it. Pretty much a diss track where he spent 8 lines setting up a Hitler punchline and then calling Americans to unite against Trump. Alicia Keys sings the chorus but its nothing heart stopping. Definitely one of the more forgettable songs simply because it wasn’t painful to listen to.

The thing about bad songs or forgettable songs is that if you string too many together, they become more difficult to tolerate. So I’m coming off the heels of the annoying “Remind Me” and forgettable “Like Home”, when I get to “Bad Husband”. Here, he’s talking about how bad he was to Kim, his ex-wife. This song seems good on paper, but two things make it bad: X Ambassadors on the chorus and X Ambassadors on the chorus. X Ambassadors and Eminem do not fit well. Their loud style doesn’t fit the quiet, soft vocals that Eminem implements. It’s also hard to take Eminem’s apology seriously. On the chorus, X Ambassadors call him a 1) lord 2) good father 3) good dad 4) great father. No genuine apology contains repeated self-appraisal. Imagine if someone hits you with their car and says “Wow, I’m such a bad driver. I’m a great manager. Great parent to my kids. I donate to the local homeless shelter. And I baby sit for free. But I’m such a bad driver.” Is that really an apology?

And to that note, I’d take being hit by a car over hearing X Ambassadors on the chorus.

“Tragic Endings” picks up the album. Skylar Grey is amazing on the chorus. The entire song sounds like a sister of “Love the Way You Lie”. This talks about a toxic relationship with someone who doesn’t encourage him. I’m not surprised he once again hits a high point with a bad relationship song. Eminem’s verses are alright, and the instrumentation carries the same tragic-ness that surrounds the content of his verses. Skylar Grey and Eminem have collaborated on multiple songs over the years and they tend to compliment each other well.

Side note: There’s a curse in this album that’s wreaking havoc. After a certain number of bad songs, my appreciation for a song comes from the fact that it doesn’t make me want to take off my headphones. I’m approaching every song with “it can’t get worse than its already gotten”.

Then it got worse... “Framed”. With an instrumental possessing a western, cowboy-saloon vibe and a chorus that creates a “cowboy please shoot me in the head and end it all, this album is torture” vibe, “Framed” is a storytelling track where Eminem is framed for a murder. Apparently, some of his gruesome lyrics are so incriminating that he could be considered a suspect for a murder. Now, I love story telling tracks. One of my favorite records of all time is The Great Adventures of Slick Rick. But Eminem is too old and passed the point of his career where associating with assault, kidnapping, or murder is entertaining and/or interesting. It was shocking in 1999 when he talks about dumping his wife in a pier so he can be with his child without her interference. I would never condone that, but I was highly attentive. But 18 years later, saying you have Ivanka Trump in the back of your car is just creepy. Definitely the worst song on the album.

“Nowhere Fast” features Kehlani on the chorus and exciting violin strings that accompany Eminem’s commentary on the rap game. Kehlani is definitely talented, but I don’t think her style matches Eminem. Overall the song is middle of the road. Not horrible, not amazing.

Now that he’s dissed Trump, talked about a bad relationships, his “killer” lyrics, and the rap industry, it’s time to go back to a fun song and make more jokes about butt & boob implants. “Heat” is very similar to “Remind Me”. They both use a rock and roll sample and discuss the same shallow content. The sample isn’t as entertaining as “Remind Me”, so that makes it harder to tolerate the excessive double entendres and play on words just to illustrate offensive commentary on a woman. I try not to overuse quotes, but I had to save the worst line.

“Girl, you’re just gonna have to put them other chumps on the back burner/You got buns, I got Asperger’s (Ass burgers)”

I mentioned earlier that this next track “Offended” grew on me over time. The issue with tonally switching back and forth is it’s difficult to tell how seriously Eminem takes himself. How can I know Eminem is actually self-conscious about others’ expectations of him, when he immediately calls himself godlike and makes multiple songs about boob jobs? Here, Eminem makes it clear he is trolling and wants to offend and irritate a hater. Once I understood that, I was able to just enjoy it as a dumb track. The instrument is fun and bouncy, and the chorus is extremely childish, but purposely done so that it’s hard to criticize it seriously.

I can sum up the next two tracks, “Need Me” and “In Your Head” as forgettable. “Need Me” is another track about a toxic relationship ft. P!nk’s amazing vocals. Although the ratio of P!nk to Eminem on the song makes me think it should’ve been a P!nk song featuring Eminem. And on “In Your Head” Eminem simply describes his displeasure with past decisions, the most notable part of the song being The Cranberries sample on the chorus, which ended up being wasted on a take it or leave it track.

“Castle” comes outta left field as a MAJOR upgrade from the rest of the album. It almost feels like it belongs on a different album completely. The chorus is slow building with these subtle organ keys and a bassline where the instrumental doesn’t quite kick in but it hints at a explosion about to occur. Liz Rodrigues on the chorus helps Eminem deliver this song; a series of letters that Eminem writes to his daughter, apologizing for things in her life that are impacted by him and his decisions. They’re written in 1995, 1996, and 2007.

The first verse talks about his excitement about having a new baby daughter. The second verse talks about his failed album Infinite and how he’s not sure how he’s going to provide for them, but he’s stumbled onto an idea (The Slim Shady LP, which thrusted him into mainstream success). The third verse is in 2007, where he states his guilt for her life being thrusted in public light, his distaste for fame, his pills addiction. During that time, Eminem was suffering from drug addiction and nearly died from an overdose. The song ends with him taking pills and audibly collapsing onto the floor.

“Arose” picks up where “Castle” leaves off. Eminem talks over a piano ballad and an echo-ey drum that makes you feel like you’re in an empty dark room. Eminem is currently in the ER hooked up to life support machines, talking about the things he’ll miss if he dies in the hospital bed. Amongst other goodbyes, he tells his daughters to take care of each other and he’ll always be in their memory. Truly heart wrenching. But as he says goodbye to everybody, he suddenly fights to stay alive, his heart starts beating, and he recovers. As he recovers, he mentions rewinding the tape of time. Rewinding to before he made the mistake of overdosing.

Then, in an expert display of technical skill and creativity, the track rewinds to the instrumental for “Castle”, and Eminem delivers a final verse that has a much more “onward and forward”, positive outlook. It brings tears to my eyes every time I listen to it. He describes shredding the old letters and not letting the past hold him back. And that the first half of the song is what he would’ve wrote to his daughters if he had made it 2 hours later to the hospital, which is about how long the doctor said he would’ve lived if he hadn’t checked in. In this masterpiece of a closer, Eminem connects back to the concept of reviving. Without question, the best song on the album and the best outro of any Eminem album

Final Thoughts

The Intro “Walk on Water” and outros “Castle”/”Arose” feel like they belong on a completely separate album; they’re totally different from the tracks that encompassed the middle. So while those three are great, the album ultimately suffers from inconsistent themes and messages. If Eminem would’ve stuck with vulnerability and maturity, this album would’ve been great. Overall, the project isn’t horrible. But besides the few high points, I’m disappointed.

Top 3 Songs:

1) Arose

2) Castle

3) River

Overall Grade: C-

#music review #album review #hip hop review #hip hop #eminem

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thesinglesjukebox · 7 years

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ZAYN & TAYLOR SWIFT - I DON'T WANNA LIVE FOREVER (FIFTY SHADES DARKER) [3.84] We shift from our BBC Sound Of 2017 coverage to the pop charts, but we're not any nicer...

Lauren Gilbert: This is Bad. For all that "Love Me Like You Do" felt like Lights Redux, it was a perfectly solid song outside of context. This features Zayn wailing (someone needs to tell him falsetto isn't always a good idea) and Taylor utterly failing to save the track. It feels like someone told her to write something cinematic, and you can indeed picture the scenes from Fifty Shades Darker that this will soundtrack: Dakota Johnson looking sad in an art gallery, Dakota Johnson looking sad in a cab, flash of Jamie Dornan looking Imposing and Sexy, Dakota Johnson looking sad in a different art gallery. Movie soundtrack singles aren't required to be this dreadful. [2]

Katie Gill: Confession: I adore the Fifty Shades of Gray soundtrack. It's the only place where awful Beyoncé remixes can sit side-by-side with various Top 40 artists trying to be "sexy" but in a watered-down, approved for Clear Channel radio type way. And speaking of Clear Channel-approved sexiness, there's this song! It's kind of awful! Zayn is desperately trying to do his best Prince with that falsetto and Taylor Swift is straight up phoning it in. It's a half-assed mess and I LOVE IT. Every time the chorus starts up with "I DON'T WANNA LIVE... FOREVER," I break out into giggles. Which granted, isn't the intended effect of the song, but don't make your song sound so silly and I won't laugh at it. [3]

Maxwell Cavaseno: There's a way to take narcissistic angst and self-torment and make it work. Last year Kehlani turned the grotesquerie of the IG Meme Disease of Harley Quinn and Joker's Bonnie & Clyde archetype into a perfectly tragi-dumb song like "Gangster" for Suicide Squad. The year before that Beyoncé made "Crazy in Love" go all overwrought and comically grave for Fifty Shades of Grey's soundtrack, and the Weeknd finally got to take his supplanting of a personality with kinks to the top 40 for that same project. This formula is not foreign in pop of the 21st century -- that indulged feeling of inner darkness and putting on that King/Queen of Pain crown is pretty common. Heck, Swift even knows how to mock it. So who do I blame for taking such an obvious task and somehow screwing it up into an over-eager romp mistaking "darkness" for some sort of just plain ol' romantic tension? Is it Antonoff, who thought he was trying to make sadomasochism "fun" (ha, double entendre)? Or is it Malik, who we've spent a good amount of time trying to draw fake depth from like water from rocks? It's a simple enough scheme, and there's a whole sea of edgelords who'd gobble it up with appreciation. Why couldn't anyone realize that here? [2]

Crystal Leww: I'm one of the handful of people who thought that Zayn's debut album wasn't a total trainwreck -- while the album was 80 per cent filler, it also had its moments. Taylor Swift, despite her general media personality, is a phenomenal songwriter and a pretty good pop star. She's proven that she can effectively pen songs for other people to make their own. So why does "I Don't Wanna Live Forever" sound like the worst parts of Zayn have dragged Taylor Swift into the hole of boring anonymity. This is so slow, so long, and so unsexy. The lone bright spot is "I been looking sad in all the nicest places," which like, fine, we get it, you're Taylor Swift, but at least it's declaring who they are as artists. [4]

Claire Biddles: Like "Pillowtalk," this is trying so hard to be sexy, but it's so unconvincing, and like "Pillowtalk" it's because of the deeply unsexy performances. Both Zayn and Taylor come across as pretty asexual to begin with, but the constant forced falsetto makes for a really unpleasant listen. I guess at least if you went back to someone's flat and they put this on you'd know to make your excuses and leave before the boring sex began. [2]

Olivia Rafferty: Because when I'm commissioning a big, sexy number for my big, sexy film, I obviously think of Taylor Swift and Zayn. The lyrics barely grasp at anything that resembles a sentiment, and the "oh-oh oh oh" refrain is an ironically vapid space-filler. The biggest crime is that at some points the song actually has a little charm: that breathless, "baby, baby/I feel crazy," or Taylor Swift's verse. And then for some reason it was decided that Zayn must screech falsetto on the chorus, and TaySwift must sing the most criminally Swiftian lyric I've ever heard: "I've been looking sad in all the nicest places." A half-hearted attempt to follow the anthemic "Love Me Like You Do" and a half-decent soundtrack the first time 50 Shades rolled around. [4]

Megan Harrington: Overwhelmingly, duets between men and women are in service to a romantic narrative. And on the surface, "I Don't Wanna Live Forever" is no different, a supposedly lusty song tacked onto a supposedly lusty movie. But are there two performers any less sexual than Zayn and Taylor Swift? The two share a vocal chemistry similar to the rush neurotics feel when they stumble on a perfectly organized shelf of books -- and that's their only chemistry. The song, then, must be about something else, something other than desire and lost love. The refrain "I just wanna keep calling your name/until you come back home" suggests that we might have our first duet in service of finding a lost puppy? [7]

Ramzi Awn: The right kind of anthemic also happens to be the kind that makes Taylor Swift sound good. [9]

Alfred Soto: Although Taylor Swift's name is in the songwriting credits, this soundtrack theme has the fingerprints of men who would destroy the world with a blank falsetto if only she'd stop the nonsense and Come Back Home. The Weeknd. Drake. Everywhere I look, this po-faced pair: immobile with anger, confusing churlishness with pheromones. [4]

Jonathan Bradley: The Fifty Shades franchise offers pop royalty the chance to roleplay their unconventional fantasies, mixing sex and power, darkness and destruction. So goes the theory, anyway: the results (The Weeknd's "Earned It," for instance) have tended towards pouting and murk with neither titillation nor intrigue to compensate. Zayn has yet to evince the ability to project himself beyond the blank slate of his good looks -- his falsetto "baby, baby/I feel crazy" on "I Don't Wanna Live Forever" has none of the desire or desperation that even a novice R&B singer could unearth from those words and their attendant post-Timbaland, click-clack rhythm. Taylor Swift is a smarter vocalist; even if she's had little experience with R&B cadences, she still knows how to suggest a lyric like "I've been looking sad in all the nicest places" conceals fathoms of feeling beneath its surface. But Swift the writer doesn't play nice with the other kids; her perfectionism and her steely-eyed creativity doesn't well accommodate an equal partner, to the extent that her most triumphant 2016 work was "Better Man," where she was the most powerful voice on a song in which she did not appear. Swift might well have within her a tantalizing reflection on sex and mortality, but a shared promo single for sequel Hollywood erotica, released in her gap year, is not where we'll hear it. [5]

Andy Hutchins: One of the greatest stratagems of Taylor Swift's genius-level career was befriending Lena Dunham. Despite Lena Dunham being Lena Dunham, that brought Swift into pop maestro Jack Antonoff's orbit at almost the precise moment when she was transitioning from pop-country to pop-pop, and when he was just done being trained in frequent Kanye collaborator Jeff Bhasker's style on fun.'s Some Nights. (I mean, it's either that, or living with a woman who is now dating the First Daughter's strenuously Democratic brother-in-law, or being born to millionaire parents. It's hard to weigh artistic and social positioning and inherited privilege with Tay!) Since Red -- which Bhasker worked on, naturally -- Swift has worked in Antonoff's milieu, even if her biggest singles have been Max Martin specials: Shadowed gloss-pop, with just enough darkness contrasting her natural brightness to make her "edgy" and "fun" without also being sloppy. ("I been lookin' sad in all the nicest places" says plenty about Swift's conflation of status and composure with happiness.) "Forever," -- "Come Back Home" in a less fatalistic world -- showcases how well she fits there, her breathy anonymity as a singer well-shrouded by the misty production and Zayn, whose far stronger falsetto is the star of the song itself. But he's been here in the twilight, and Swift is only still immersing. [7]

Anthony Easton: I love how his voice slides up when he sings "baby" -- like Michael just a little bit -- and I love how that is the only attempt at overshadowing her. In fact, a sample of both of them singing "baby, baby" to each other is a fascinating competing example of pop history as pop performance. The rest of it is disappointingly anonymous. [6]

Mo Kim: "Gimme something," yelps Zayn in the first verse of this track, a pre-mortem for a slog that (save a few nice twinkles in the production) gives us nothing. [1]

Katherine St Asaph: Every generation gets the "Once in a Lifetime" it deserves, and fails to get the "Who Wants to Live Forever" they so achingly want. [3]

A.J. Cohn: Likely, this is meant to sound dark, achingly romantic, and sensual -- notably not typical descriptions of Swift's music. Unsurprisingly, her vocals are thin and uncomfortably breathy. Her chemistry with Malik is similarly unconvincing and not for his lack of effort. Using his exquisite falsetto to full effect, he seems to be trying his sexy best to make a slow jam out of a sub-1989 bonus track. [4]

Will Adams: Ah, it's easy when everyone contributes equally to the disaster. Jack Antonoff's production is like a 1989 demo, with unfinished ideas (that false climax before the last chorus, like Zayn came too early, is the worst) and a sluggish arrangement. Zayn's yelped falsetto hasn't gotten any better, and Taylor Swift's attempt to display versatility is just as laughable. As a Fifty Shades song it's perfect, in that it's trying so hard, but "I Don't Wanna Live Forever" is so sexless, detached and inept that I can only imagine that Zayn and Taylor recorded their respective vocals with a mirror in the studio. [1]

Joshua Copperman: There's a specific kind of electro-pop song that goes for maximalism, where, to paraphrase Rick McCallum, every second has so many things going on. Jack Antonoff and Swift's last single together, "Out of the Woods," is one of those beautifully overwhelming songs. They reunite here, but for an R&B slow jam that plays to none of their strengths and seems to go out of its way to be "darker," and not joyfully bombastic, which both singles from the previous movie were. Every time it sounds like it's going to explode, it pulls back, like they want to try this whole minimalist thing out, but don't know how to pull it off. The deliberate, yet misguided, attempt at minimalism would also explain the decision to not autotune Zayn's falsetto. (Zayn and Taylor sound nearly identical anyway; if I'd heard that this was actually sung by the Ten Second Songs guy, I wouldn't be entirely surprised.) The defining moment of this whole trying-too-hard-to-sound-effortless thing is the anti-climax at 2:58, inexplicable and inexcusable -- everyone involved is capable of great pop music, but that moment was where I stopped trying to give them the benefit of the doubt. As long as Taylor doesn't go down this route for her next album, this experiment can be forgiven, but experiments should not sound this formulaic. [4]

Thomas Inskeep: My partner, upon first hearing this, suggested that he could barely hear the difference between Zayn and Swift, particularly on the chorus, and he's not wrong. Neither of them should be centering their singing on their falsettos, both of which are incredibly unappealing, and additionally it sounds as if Swift stripped all of the personality from her voice before entering the studio. This song is all bombast, if the bombast were made from tissue paper. And since Jack Antonoff is involved, it of course has the predictable "boom-boom-boom-boom" drum track he's been recycling since fun.'s "We Are Young." Nothing, absolutely nothing about this is any good; fittingly, since it's soundtracking a new Fifty Shades movie, this is the musical equivalent of an empty-calories Hollywood blockbuster. [0]

Nellie Gayle: Did you ever see that one painfully awkward interview between 50 Shades costars Jamie Dornan and Dakota Johnson? Never have I seen two people less likely to generate brutal lust and desire in a believable way. That is, until I heard Zayn and Taylor were collaborating on a song for the same franchise. While Zayn's favorite habit is snaking his way around R&B tunes in an overreaching falsetto, Taylor prefers to lend her reedy vocals in the spectrum of pop-country to Top 40 bops. One thing both Zayn and Taylor accomplish very well in their respected fields is relatable anguish. Taylor's vocal thinness translates into despair, while Zayn's insistence on turning every lyric into a gymnastics exercise for his vocal chords. The production involved is really what transforms this song, and it's clear that this is a surface-level reflection on a franchise neither star has any interest in or connection to. The 50 Shades empire is about presenting dangerous ideals to bored and titillated white women around the world, and this song manages to tease any sweetness or tenderness out of that narrative and turn it into a sultry, almost danceable banger. It's Taylor's riskiest bet yet -- if you listen hard, you can hear the wails of Republican mothers around the country in the chorus as they wait for their daughters to be corrupted by this song -- but it still remains a tame anthem to romantic melancholy more than anything. [5]

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#Zayn #Taylor Swift #I Don't Wanna Live Forever (Fifty Shades Darker)

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