![]() 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. Now imagine said romance saved by a Cirque de Soleil dancer arriving on a trapeze with a sparkler-laden champagne bottle. ![]() 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. 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 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. 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. 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. 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. 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. 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. 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. 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 easy, fast & fun way to learn how to sing: 30DaySinger.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. It was also the best-selling single by a British and European male artist in North America since Elton John's "Candle in the Wind" in 1997, and the first by a British Asian artist since Freddie Mercury in 1980. The song also made him "the first UK urban act ever to top Billboard's Hot 100", and the first British act to have reached number one in the United States and not in the United Kingdom with a song since Seal's "Kiss from a Rose" in 1995. This made Jay Sean the first British act to score a Billboard Hot 100 number-one single since Coldplay's "Viva la Vida" in 2008, and the fourth British act overall in the 2000s decade. "Down" hit number one on the Billboard Hot 100 chart in the issue dated 17 October 2009, unseating I Gotta Feeling by The Black Eyed Peas after their 14-week reign at number one. The track was released to US radio on and digital retailers on 30 June 2009. The song went on to sell six million copies in the United States and received a large airplay on radio worldwide. ![]() "Down" is the seventh-best selling single of 2009 and has been certified Platinum in several countries. The single features American rapper and label mate Lil Wayne and is produced by J-Remy and Bobby Bass. In other markets, including the United Kingdom, the song serves as Jay Sean's lead single from his third studio album. The song was released in North America as his debut single from his first album there, All or Nothing. "Down" is a song by British singer Jay Sean. ![]()
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