A View From The Top #47

So we’ve come to the end of August, the end of the summer, and the song leading us out is Cold Water; topping the charts for a fifth consecutive week. Are we going to be stuck in another Drake rut? Dear Lord I hope not. But congratulations need to be given to Major Lazer, JB and the rest: you’ve produced another mindless, wishy-washy song, which has hypnotised the masses into believing it’s good and edgy because of the Ed Sheeran syncopation and painfully repetitive and forgettable hook. Good work lads.

I thought I’d read up some other reviews of Cold Water before stripping it down and came across an interview on the Rolling Stone website with Diplo:

Diplo says that Major Lazer songs like Cold Water, full of diverse acoustic and Eastern flourishes, are embraced because pop is in a time of experimentation. “On the radio, we went through a bland period for a while, but now there is just some awesome music,” Diplo says, citing Drake’s One Dance and Rihanna’s Work as two songs that are pushing commercial limits. 

I think it’s fair to say these “Eastern flourishes” were a welcome change and novelty when they first started being used by artists, but they have become the new ‘bland period’ as far as I’m concerned. I see it sort of like a fad toy - the Tamagotchi for example, blew away 8-year-old me and for a while they were the thing to have, then they stopped being interesting because everyone had one. The novelty has worn off, least of all for us at PearShaped trying to find a new angle to write about the same mindless songs every week.

As for MO, Diplo praised her originality saying “Her word choice and her metaphors are just so foreign from American songwriters who tend to overuse the same phrases.” Whilst he is horrendously over generalising American songwriters, originality may be more the case for her own songs, but MO’s contribution to Cold Water is thoroughly underwhelming. Her verse is thrown in as a sort of afterthought and has no lyrical genius, and clichés dominate: she wants to stay afloat and have someone take her home. It hardly makes you think twice.

As for the rest of the charts, second place is held again by DJ Snake and Justin Bieber, with Closer taking the third spot. If you listen to these three songs on the trot you probably won’t realise you’ve listened to three separate songs. It becomes one EDM orgy that you don’t really want to be a part of. What was that about ‘diverse’ music Diplo?