His hook for “Make Me Better” is fine, but it doesn’t quite leap out of the speakers at first. Ne-Yo is a perfectly reliable and perfectly boring hook-machine with a versatile but indistinct voice. A couple of them are real clunkers: the “Batman and Robin” thing, “I’m gon’ need Coretta Scott if I’m gon’ be king.” More than anything, though, they’re notable for how Fab describes a romantic relationship as something like a corporate merger, two movements with intersecting interests becoming one. (“Return of the Hustle,” his other first single, is a pretty obvious attempt to recreate the success of “Breathe,” but I don’t think it has any of that song’s iconic snarl.) His loverman lyrics on “Make Me Better” don’t have any particular emotional impact, and they aren’t especially seductive.
And when he deviates from that form these days, he’s less likely to come up with a serious banger like “Breathe” and more likely to come up with something like “Diamonds on My Chain,” his new album’s devastatingly boring first single. He’s released so many boring rap&B love songs that that seems to have become his dominant form of expression. Fabolous has been responsible for great things in the past (“Breathe,” “Young’n,” his guest verse on Clipse’s “Comedy Central”), but none of those great things have ever prevented him from coming across as an off-brand Jay-Z. Everything about the song seems unremarkable at first glance.
But let’s go with it for a minute: “Make Me Better” starts out as the latter and eventually becomes the former. I’m not sure that split totally works for me, since I tend to like silly and dumb pop songs way more than most people.
#Ne yo fabolous make me better trial#
Mike Clancy, the Voice’s web news editor and someone I first met because he was covering the Irv Gotti trial for AM a couple of years ago, said today that there were two sorts of summer jams: the big anthems that you love and the sort of silly and dumb pop songs that you might not like that much the rest of the year but which always sound a lot better during the summer. What’s interesting about “Make Me Better” is how it feels like nothing much on first listen but then gains power with repetition. And the song that sprang to mind first when I thought of this was Fabolous and Ne-Yo’s “Make Me Better,” a song so omnipresent in New York that it seems to rise up off the asphalt like waves of water-vapor. I don’t know if I’ll turn this into a regular thing or what, but I can certainly think of a few completely inescapable songs that I haven’t written about at all yet, songs that really demand some kind of response, especially since we’re about halfway through the season now. So I thought it might be fun on days when not too much else is going on to have a look at some of the other strong contenders for the title. Virtually every song that finds its way onto the radio during these months is somebody’s song of the summer, and a few that didn’t make it on probably are as well. All sorts of variables come into play: old preferences, regional proclivities, personal experiences. It’s a completely subjective thing a person’s pick for the song of the summer says more about the person than it does about the song. But the great thing about this question, of wondering which song is the real pick, is that there’s no real right answer. And I wrote the entry in response to a Kelefa Sanneh article that named Rihanna’s “Umbrella” as the song of the summer, choice that seems to be the closest thing we have to a consensus pick right now. I already gave my answer of my pick for song of the summer, the Shop Boyz’ “Party Like a Rock Star,” a song I’ve probably already written about too much. Yesterday’s entry, about the phenomenon of the summer jam, was a whole lot of fun to write, mostly because it’s always fun to sit and wonder which song is going to be the one to call up memories of this summer in a few years.
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