NE-YO v THE DREAM

um yeah it's not backlash just the song is only kind of good

well it's kind of great actually so it's more of the fact that i'm not totally enthused about this production trend

i've never had a problem w/ his vocals btw

i was just joking about the backlash

and yeah, I like his voice so I'm not bothered by the sparse production...this is like "i luv ur gurl," i'm sure the album'll have more of the layered stuff

yeah i don't disagree about the album as a whole but "booty" and "single ladies" are all over the place and discombobulating (which is cool but can get tiring) whereas "i luv your girl" is really low-key and unobtrusive like snap music

btw i want to start a petition to re-title the album this:

<3 vs $

― Darryl Strawberry (The Reverend), Thursday, September 25, 2008 6:38 PM (1 month ago) Bookmark

“Kiss”

U.S. 7" single
Single by Prince and The Revolution
from the album Parade
B-side "♥ or $"

i think i like a lot of the details more than the song...the echoed "eh...eh....eh" is great. i look fwd to the rest of it growing on me.

Most of you guys are insannnnne, this track is fucking awesome! MINIMALSEXYELECTROSPRING! EH EH AHHH!!!

looking back it's kinda funny that the official dream thread started out as a ts: ne-yo v. the-dream with the-dream losing.

not that funny, when you consider that The-Dream had just been out for a few months at the time, Ne-Yo would probably still win if the poll were done again today,and there are several Ne-Yo threads but pretty much just this one for The-Dream.

i voted dream

feelin it'

it's called "cringing" apparently

how did you know what face I was going to make when I listened to that song?

how did you know what face i was going to make when i read that "zing"

yeah, not too impressed w/ that... hopefully it's not on the album.

He changed his single to "Rockin That Thing":

http://www.zshare.net/audio/516822100f886fb0/

Album pushed back to February...

he should probably lay off the whole "radio killa" thing until he's got a single that definitely isn't going to flop.

i would give everything i own to see The-Dream recreate this entire thing in live action. not sure who would play simon & theodore.

kinda love 'rocking that thang', actually. it's got that hard-to-pin-down "epic lullaby of the everyday" feeling he's good at ekeing out. although that doesn't seem quite it either.

los da mystro possibly more key to dreamery than tricky at this point? at least while tricky's busy showing off his impressively dead-on pastiches of other producers.

don't you think?

'single ladies' - swizz
'high price' - bangladesh
'touch my body', 'luv' - jd
'let me see the booty' - lil jon
'touch my body rmx' - polow and by extension timba (altho way more in spirit than in exec really)

i like how its almost as if tricky's deliberately underlining the fact that he's been more of a jobbing bryan-michael coxish type jobbing industry producer for like the last 15 years who got big with a huge record and refuses to replicate/"be an auteur" on the back of it

yeah i know what you mean...really feeling Los more these days, although i think Tricky is still pretty talented.

the tricky background check was inspired by listening to the 1996 braxtons album the other week and getting stuck on this song, and then being shocked @ the credits! the other one of his on there is a note-perfect swv 'right here' rip, although neither can stand up to 'so many ways' obv.

http://www.discogs.com/artist/Christopher+Stewart

if anyone got any more of these lying around put em up put em up

haha of all that is still trumped by los' one background nugget, but nevermind eh

los da mystro possibly more key to dreamery than tricky at this point?

i almost started a love/hate songs produced by los vs love/hate songs produced by tricky poll but i think we have enough posts about that album

i would've voted for los though

"it's got that hard-to-pin-down "epic lullaby of the everyday" feeling he's good at ekeing out. "

I haven't heard the new song but this seems spot on w/r/t the-dream's charms. A lot of my favourite moments on the album are him hanging out with his girl, "talkin' bout dis/talkin' bout dat", mussing her make-up before they're about to go out ("you got you're hair did/I'm about to mess that shit up" being maybe my favourite line in a pop song this year), watching Oceans 11 before sex even (though this was probably included for rhyme scheme purposes only).

I'm actually a bit surprised at how the production credits breakdown on the album, though I guess you could say L.O.S. pretty much does all the prettiest tracks. Tricky Stewart covers more range I guess.

tricky does the bigger tracks - i prefer that.

rtc brought it up elsewhere, i forget where, but the-dream's rmx of shontelle's 't-shirt' is u&k.

ugh, wrong your/you're in my post, I hate that.

yeah, the shontelle remix is a good example of what tim's talking about, although personally i do find that affecting warmth far more easily perceived (imagined even, perhaps) in his collaborations (whether duetted or just songwritten) than it is during much of love/hate.

hay tim have u heard that 'touch my body' remix yet btw! i was kinda champing to go off on one about it but you're the only one that subscribes to my ostentatious newsletters tbh.

incidentally this is where you go "other duets?" and i cackle and do a big cloak move thing and then man like dbs scoots along with the zshares. probably.

haha i think i just wasted a full half hour sternly pondering the-dream, kill me! this is totally what gets my goat about this thread though - is it seriously only me that finds his appeal so complicated? did everyone pick it up and go "wau yes love it" first time they played it? cos it's not enough having al go "he's annoying!" and everyone else go "this is a great album!" and then 400 posts of the itchy & scratchy show when YOU'RE BOTH RIGHT AND IT GOES HAND IN HANDDDDD

rtc like him he was just having trouble writing about him

― deej, Thursday, 1 May 2008 20:17 (7 months ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

this was some savage shit btw and i will kill u over it one day :(

is it seriously only me that finds his appeal so complicated?

yes.

fwiw, rtc, I spent a lot of time being all conflicted about this album before I finally gave in to it

i spent 0 seconds being conflicted about it

i remember reading on idolator about ppl hating the sentiments of his songs, but rtc do you find him annoying from an aesthetic standpoint or do you have issues w/ his subjects/morals/whatever? to me the songwriting here was always brilliant - "and i feel like an outward boxer in the very first round / tried to keep my guard up but she caught me and im goin down" is such a sweet (and fresh!) lyric. idk man to me he was always on point. i never had any reservations

ummm "out worked boxer" >_<

i guess to me the album sounded to me like the greatness and diversity of radio r&b of the past few years distilled into one album

yeah, a lot of my problem with it initially is dude is dick, but I learned to love his dickishness

i dont get how he is a dick

i wasn't really conflicted any further than that i slept on the album for ages cuz i hated 'falsetto' so much, and only checked it out after rich juzwiak put 'ditch that' and 'living a lie' on his fourfour mix. i still hate 'falsetto' and skip it every time though but its obnoxiousness doesn't really bleed into any of the other songs.

if anything i get where al's coming from a bit more - i dunno how good a songwriter the-dream really is, lines like "springtime summertime falltime winter" (and loads more across the album) do seem awfully hackish out of context, but he sells it on record.

man, "Falsetto" is the most classic slow jam from a record with several

it's the actual falsetto bit i can't listen to

it's a bit nails-on-blackboard

uptempo mix of 'falsetto' be miraculously great though.

(almost as good as 'outward boxer', one of my fave wire songs.)

will answer reservation q's in a bit once i've reread everything i already said on rolling r&bs on the past - we do all so hate endlessly repeating ourselves round here, after all.

in the meantime, what are yall's thoughts on 'rocking that thang'? i look forward to seeing it on your 2010 lists.

yo rtc i remember empathizing with yr confusion -- i think i recognized immediately that it was great but what was weird was just that it was great in spite of his frequent corniness -- like there are some lyrics on this thing that would be huge clunkers on anyone else's record. def a 'more than the sum of its parts' experience

For a long time I've assumed it was "I feel like an out worked boxer on the very first round" but I had this mental CLICK last week and now I hear it is "I fell like an out worked boxer on the very first round."

I didn't find "Falsetto" obnoxious really, but (especially post-"Bed") in isolation it seemed like the schtickiness of his schtick was this perhaps ignominious distillation of all voluptuous sex-obssessed mid-noughties synthy slow jams, R Kelly X pixeldust with nowhere to go.

And then of course the album presents this as like a corner that you have to turn around to make it to the unexpected territory of "Nikki", "Luv Songs" et. al. Like he's orbiting the earth twice so that he can use that force of gravity to shoot off into space. In the context of the album "Falsetto" works really well, it's like the exhausted gooey centre of the "Fast Car" --> "Nikki" --> "She Needs My Love" journey.