Wayne isn't given as much credit for popularizing Auto-Tune as an effect in rap as, say, Kanye, but he is almost certainly more central to the narrative of it becoming a dominant tool. This song may have been criticized as one of Auto-Tune's most egregious moments, but if anything it's an example of how much Auto-Tune, when used as an atmospheric filter, can actually enhance the life and humanity of the words. The amount of movement in his short verse here is insane-a gurgling plunge of melody about a girl dropping it low to a rhythmic rapped riff on how attractive she is to a soaring croak describing a grand philosophical battle and deep declaration of love to a final jubilant evocation of the moment in time.Īll of it has infinitely more character than Jay Sean's conventional vocals. Wayne's voice crooning "she coooold" is the kind of thing that echoes around in your brain for years, as important to his legacy as any bar over some skeletal Southern rap instrumental. What's truly iconic, though, is that Wayne took a totally generic pop song for the period, hopped onto it with his bizarro pop flow, and turned it into something memorable. I told you this music was the height of recession pop! If you need further proof, consider that Wayne is literally wearing a shirt that says "COMMUNISM" in the video. Finally, we get that acknowledgement that makes everything snap into place, the current events reference of "and honestly I'm down like the economy" to close out the verse. And then, too, he gives it some stakes: "I'm fighting for this girl / on a battlefield of love / don't it look like baby cupid sending arrows from above." This love, which also involves this girl getting down low for Wayne, is suddenly a cosmic battle between the forces of Love and Not-love, with Wayne the brave soldier a mere pawn in their designs. The girl becomes a more fascinating character-zero degrees cold, so cold in fact that she prompts Wayne to invent the term "over-freeze." She's foreign-here the video gives us a British flag to emphasize the cross-Atlantic collaboration between Wayne and Jay Sean-but Miss America to Wayne. Just the part alone where he catches the word "down" from the hook to begin his verse is like a soothing balm of weirdness sweeping into the song. The aroma of Acqua di Gio fills the room.Īs those images suggest, this song might tend toward the too-sterile end of the spectrum were it not for Lil Wayne's martian voice swinging in to give it a humanizing touch. Now imagine said romance saved by a Cirque de Soleil dancer arriving on a trapeze with a sparkler-laden champagne bottle. It is, to use a critic's term, music that sounds like a cologne commercial. Imagine a romance in which the two paramours find themselves threatened by the sundering powers of a velvet rope and you have a rough idea of the vibe. This song is very much the sonic equivalent of its video, which involves dudes in suits that can best be described as "going out suits" hitting uninspired hip-hop dance moves while Jay Sean waves light around with his hands. It's a pretty simple song, reflective, as I said, of the general anxiety of the time: "baby don't worry, you are my only, you won't be lonely, even if the sky is falling down." Jay Sean's voice soars and sparkles like a digitized graphic floating through space in an early 2000s sci-fi movie, assuring the object of his affection that everything will be OK. "Down," released on Cash Money (who recently had to pay him over $1 million in back royalties), reached number one on the Hot 100, the only Wayne song to do so other than "Lollipop." In 2009, according to Google, it also had the fifth most-searched lyrics of the year, behind Lady Gaga, Miley Cyrus, Taylor Swift, and Beyoncé. He went on to explain the value of features in general in a way that I can only describe as entirely and unexaggeratedly reflective of the song in question: "I always say, like, what would happen if Picasso and Van Gogh decided to do a painting together? What would happen if Mozart and Beethoven collaborated to do a symphony? What would happen? I love the idea of putting two creative minds together like that." Is "Down" bringing together Jay Sean and Lil Wayne the equivalent of Picasso and Van Gogh teaming up? Who am I to say otherwise? "People who wouldn't know me here in the United States would know Wayne was on another song, so let's check that song out," Jay Sean, who is British, told the Wall Street Journal in 2012, explaining the power of Wayne's presence.
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