After a year of playing second-fiddle to a bunch of pop stars, Pitbull is back in business with a new album, Planet Pit, which is an odd name for a planet.
It sounds like the name of a Mad Max-like wasteland.
To be fair: I credit Pitbull with refining Latin pop music by abandoning the stale reggaeton beat and burying it down to dinosaur-bone depth last decade. He also dresses really snappy, like he belongs on the show Burn Notice. It's probably the whole being-based-in-Miami thing that they have in common.
But Pit's latest track, "Give Me Everything," doesn't have the color and character of what's still his best track to date, "I Know You Want Me (Calle Ocho)." And that's unfortunate.
Instead of an evocative tropical beat and a brass sample, "Everything"
provides a mosquito synthesizer noise that will worry all the dogs in
your neighborhood. Furthermore, with the cast of singers that crowds the
chorus, it's like Pitbull's a guest in his own track.
It's so jumbled that it's relatively difficult to distinguish this track from
similar Top 40 house-influenced tracks such as Usher's "Louder" and Pitbull's other
single out at the moment, "Hey Baby (Drop It To the Floor)." After a while, you start to
hear the difference, sure; it's Ne-Yo repeating the word "tonight" in the chorus, which is something that gets annoying really fast.
But that's just one of the annoying things. For instance, there's Pitbull's lyrical style, which often favors alliteration and referential
punchlines over making any sense whatsoever. In this track, we get a couple of
confusing lines "It's insane to wait, it ain't growin' money" and a
throw-away reference to Lindsay Lohan. If she weren't so hung over,
even she'd roll her eyes to that one.
Also, the chorus gives an odd offer to the ladies: "I might take you home
if I could, tonight."
What sort of pick-up line is that? If you're
unable to take a girl home, why make the offer at all? If a girl gets
that sort of non-offer, she's gonna have questions about the guy: "Is his
home, like, a mess? Does he live with his parents? Is his busy schedule
gonna, like, cut into our time together?"
For a song that demands everything, "Give Me Everything" doesn't offer much in return.