Maroon 5 feat. Kendrick Lamar - Don't Wanna Know

This is just about my most loathed song in recent times for several reasons, some less obvious than others. This is the main one:

Lil Wayne is an extremely talented rapper whose persistent hustle in the 2000s made him among the most popular and in-demand rappers of the time. His style was off-the-wall and he has an incredible gift for wordplay and non-sequitur. He fell off a bit after he 'made it' but he deserves to be seen as an icon in hip hop.

If you found yourself condescendingly scoffing at the above paragraph, you are the reason I loathe this song. Because I've lived through about a decade of shitty memes from people who think Lil Wayne is untalented and would be working in the fast food industry if Tupac were still alive from people who heard a few of his songs and decided he had an annoying voice and heard he made a shitty rock album, from people who don't know what internal rhyming is even though Eminem is probably their favourite rapper. These are people so bothered that he occasionally features in pop hits that they express joy when he is hospitalised basically embodying the utter scum that they've dehumanised Lil Wayne to represent. If you haven't even listened to the Carter trilogy, your opinion is irrelevant and useless to me.

Now, I don't think Kendrick will ever have it as bad as Lil Wayne in that regard, but it is continually disappointing to see him turn up on mediocre pop hits time and time again without contributing much of substance or worth. Given how rarely his own music creeps into top 40 radio, there is going to be a substantial amount of people who only ever hear him in these songs, and will have a 'really?!' reaction when it's noted how acclaimed his music is.

It's quite telling just how different his features are when it doesn't feel like he isn't in the position to sanitise/minimalise his bars for radio. Just in 2016 he had great verses alongside Kanye West, Beyonce, Danny Brown, A Tribe Called Quest & DJ Khaled. But it's this and "The Greatest" that have hundreds of millions of plays on Spotify.

I won't lie though, I feel bad for Maroon 5 too in this regard. They've reached the point where their era as a smooth, respectable pop rock band has just about been matched in length as their era as a tacky, bland trend-chasing vehicle for Adam Levine's ego. There's clearly a good half and a bad half in their catalogue of hits at this stage.

"Don't Wanna Know" is perhaps the nadir of it all just for how shameless it is. The only thing stopping me from rating it lower is that it is on some level competent, and admittedly Levine's falsetto on this song is somewhat pleasing, but it's just an all around smelly product. The lyrics are particularly bad here too, where Levine just sounds petulant about a break up which in no way fits the ultralight beat (which it must be said, sounds comically like the Rugrats theme). The fact that the video was based on a 3 month late pop culture boon is just icing on the cake.
Laatst gewijzigd: 21/03/2017 09:10