Tinie Tempah – Europlop!

Tinie Tempah feat. John Martin – Children of the Sun

There’s the chorus. Which is just glorious.

Tim: “I know, I know, it’s rap,” he said a couple of days ago as if it was banned. Not necessarily, so here’s some more. This is, you’ll notice, a lyric video; there’s an actual video but we’re having this for two reasons I shall mention in due course.

Tim: Firstly, the proper one features a lot of people staring directly at a solar eclipse, which is very dangerous and a terrible example to set, so obviously we shouldn’t have that.

Tom: I was going to be all sarcastic about that but, actually, seriously, that’s a really stupid thing to put in a video for all ages.

Tim: Secondly the fun thing about this lyric video is that it omits all the rude words; I suppose that’s a good thing but it does mean that reading along with him rapping serves only to draw attention to the missing words, and what has suddenly become my favourite line which I’d not noticed before: “I told my bro to call an ambulance cos I caught a cold and went spazz on em.”

Tom: Bloody hell. I can see why that got censored out. In fact, I’m wondering whether we should have done the same.

Tim: Nah. And as for the rest of it? The rapping is, well, good if that’s your thing and perhaps not so much otherwise, though I can’t help feeling that some of the cultural references may well date it fairly quickly (or, in the case of the Harry/Vegas line, make it already seem five years old).

Tom: It took me a while to place that reference even now. Tinie’s style isn’t my favourite, but he’s clearly got skill — and the fans to prove it.

Tim: And along with all that, there’s the chorus. Which is just glorious, and exactly why I love it so much. Because yes, after a while, the non-stop spoken stuff coming at you can get a bit too much, but you know it’s worth it because that chorus is coming back, and when it does it’s just great.

Calvin Harris feat. Tinie Tempah – Drinking From The Bottle

The chorus on this is brilliant.

Tom: As I listened to the first verse of this, I wrote this opening line: “Calvin Harris needs to get himself a new synth patch.”

Tom: …and then the proper chorus kicked in. Not the pump-up “We live, we die” pre-pre-chorus, not the downbeat pre-chorus, but the actual full-on Calvin Harris jump-up-and-dance chorus, and I figured that maybe he can keep using his usual one for a bit longer yet.

Tim: Pre-pre-what now? Get your terminology right, boy: a chorus is strictly vocal; the hook you are discussing is in fact the post-chorus. Dearie me.

Tom: Can I just call it the “good bit”?

Tim: Oh, I suppose so. But you’re right – could be varied, but it’s actually pretty good anyway.

Tom: Yes. The chorus on this is brilliant, and here’s the thing – I’m not sure it’d seem quite as good if it didn’t have those lacklustre verses to compare it with.

Tim: Lacklustre in musical or lyrical sense? Because I think they should get points for grouping together Cyndi Lauper, Lady GaGa and Blondie. Once you throw in Danny DeVito you’re pretty much begging for a Brit Award for the most peculiar cultural references in a song.

Tom: That should definitely be a Brit Award.

JLS feat. Tinie Tempah – Eyes Wide Shut

This was inevitable.

Tom: I suppose a collaboration like this was inevitable. There’s only so far you can go with boy-band ballad harmony, and getting someone else in to do the rap vocals is a better idea than letting any of the condom-peddlers have a go.

Tim: Yeah, but – he isn’t, really. He’s there for less than fifteen seconds; according to maths that works out to about six and half percent, which barely justifies the ‘featuring’. The cynical part of me would suggest that they’re aiming for the Tinie Tempah fans, because for whatever reason the JLS fans aren’t enough. God knows why, though – they’ve not really had a problem getting a number 1 before now.

Tom: There’s hardly any interaction between the two, though. JLS sing. And then Tinie Tempah raps for a bit. And then JLS sing for a bit more. With the exception of a couple of quick exclamations at the end, it’s almost as if Tinie just recorded his verse to a click track and let the producers paste it in later.

Tim: Weird thing: Tinie’s yelling out the names, but thirty seconds into the song after JLS have done their bit. It’s as though they correctly thought, ‘Yelling out names at the start of the record is silly. Let’s make our song properly,’ but then he came along and said, ‘What’s this? I’m a rapper, I can’t be in a song but not yell my name out a the start! How dare they try and stop me.’

Tom: Speaking of which: I reckon you’re thinking “this sounds a lot like Calvin Harris’ I’m Not Alone“. And you’d be right – because Calvin Harris produced this too, not so much ‘laying down’ the track as ‘copying and pasting’ it.

And, while we’re at it, did they really have to rip the title from Stanley Kubrick? I’m assuming JLS aren’t getting involved in masked orgies. If they were, the tabloids would be onto them like a shot.

Tinie Tempah – Written in the Stars

Tim Jeffries, ruining hip hop for other people since 2010!

Tom: I know it’s not the normal style of music we review, but the new single by Tinie Tempah is bloody amazing. It’s released on 27th September, and it’s called Written in the Stars – not to be confused with the old Elton John and Leanne Rimes track. There are three reasons why I like it:

Tinie Tempah actually shouts “let’s go” just before he starts.
The hook is lush. I don’t mean that in the slang sense, I mean that in the same way you’d describe a tree. It’s a genius bit of complicated, layered, melodramatic major-key pop genius with a synthesised string section behind it.
He namedrops Malorie Blackman, the young adult science fiction writer. I had to listen to that line again just to make sure I heard it right.

His earlier stuff seemed gimmicky, but this isn’t: it’s a full grown-up British rap track, and it deserves to go worldwide.

Tim: Good: the music. Perhaps even ‘very good’. The chorus is excellent, and while the rapping isn’t my thing I could happily have this on in the background. Eric Turner is definitely someone I may look into at some point in the future.

Bad: the lyrics. The second half of the first verse and the second verse seem to give a vague ‘look at me, I started low down, but I’ve worked my way up slowly but surely’ autobiographical idea, showing us he’s a good guy, he’s had stuff to work though; let’s think about him and feel for him. This would be great – it could even be slightly motivational for school kids who are feeling down on their luck. Except it can’t, because he starts out by more or less saying ‘look at me, I’m flipping awesome’, Flo Rida-style, which makes him seem like an arrogant prick and kind of destroys any desire I have to get to know him. I’m sure you’re not, Tinie – in fact, you’re probably the lovely guy we see in the rest of the song – but you’ve ruined it. Sorry.

Horrendous: one lyric in particular. ‘Was leaded astray’. I don’t care if it was to make some (not particularly apparent) point about a bad education or something: it’s awful, and no excuse will change that. You’ve had enough dodgy stresses elsewhere that ‘I was led astray’ would work just as well and not be massively annoying.

Like I said, I could more than happily have this on in the background. The music’s brilliant, and I can’t really fault it. If I have to listen to it and pay attention to it, though: sorry, but no.

Tom: Damn. Now you mention it, it’s like the spell is broken. That ‘brap brap’ in the first verse annoys the hell out of me, come to think of it, along with some of the dodgy stresses you mentioned. It’s a shame because the rest of it really is so good.

I tried hunting for other music by the same team, but the producer’s name is simply “Ishi” – which is ungooglable – and I really can’t find anything else about this particular Eric Turner online. That’s annoying because I want an album that sounds like this… only without Tinie Tempah.

Sorry, Tinie.

Tim: Hurrah! Tim Jeffries, ruining hip hop for other people since 2010!