Usher feat. Nicki Minaj
“Lil Freak”
from Raymond vs. Raymond
LaFace, March 2010
It takes some truly breathtaking chutzpah to recast Stevie Wonder’s epic, epochal social-awareness scorcher “Living for the City” as the “Kashmir”-style hook for a song in which the singer hectors a groupie into fucking another woman for his viewing pleasure. Even a guy like me, who’s self-published his opinions on everything on a near-daily basis for the better part of a decade, can only glimpse that kind of ego from where I’m standing with the help of a Hubble-level telescope. Fortunately, Usher Raymond is just the creep for the job. The dour, diminutive man who would be King of Pop has no compunction tarting up that “la la la la” hook with exotica strings and deploying it as the backing track for a paean to fauxbianism that repeatedly features the phrase “You let her put her hands in your pants.” The second it dawned on me that yes, that’s what he’s doing, I laughed out loud at its gloriously bad taste and thought “Oh, I’m downloading this, alright.” Sacrelicious!
“Lil Freak” really has three selling points to overcome Usher’s sunglasses-at-night anti-charisma. One, that huge, absurd hook in the chorus. Two, the subtle, atmospheric pulsing tone that by the second verse is pretty much the only instrumentation besides percussion–it’s got this weird subterranean-lair vibe to it that suits Usher’s sexual supervillain persona in the song. Third, guest rapper Nicki Minaj, the aptly named (I don’t think I’d gotten the pun of her last name before just now) Harley Quinn to Usher’s unsmiling Frank Miller Joker. I don’t think Usher has any idea how ridiculous what he’s up to with this song is, but Minaj certainly does–how else to explain a verse in which she lists all eight of Santa’s reindeer, uses the phrase “tig ol’ bitties,” and barks “EVERYBODY LOVES RAYMOND!” in praise of her host singer with all the comical ferocity of that guy who refers to the Lord Humungus as “the Ayatollah of Rock ‘n’ Rollah” in The Road Warrior? Let this song put its hands in your pants.
(via Matthew Perpetua)