Review: Black Eyed Peas -- I Gotta Feeling (iTunes #1)

A recurring feature on this blog is going to be reviews of the songs at the top of the charts.  I use the singles chart at iTunes as a good representative of what’s popular at the moment.  To choose what to review, I’ll start at #1 or keep on moving down the list, skipping over songs I’ve already reviewed.  Some of these songs may be terrible.  Hopefully some will be good.  Who knows?  There won’t be any wishy-washy rating scales here; there are only two choices, thumbs up or thumbs down.  LIVE OR DIE.  (Too dramatic?  Maybe.)  Not gonna lie, I’m mostly doing this because I have trouble remembering the order of the numbers on a 1-10 scale.

Listen to “I Gotta Feeling”.

This review comes at a time when, apparently, the Black Eyed Peas have reached an astonishing 23 weeks at the top of the Billboard charts– a record.  “I Gotta Feeling”– at, naturally, #1 on the iTunes chart as well, is a hard song to review, because I gotta mixed feelings about it, so I’ll break it down into pros and cons:

Pros:

• Nice strong chord progression.
• Fun, breezy vibe that definitely lends itself to the pre-partying atmosphere described in the song.
• This song puts more Yiddish terminology on the radio than anything since Fiddler on the Roof. 
• Fergie maniacally yelling “drank!”
• I actually thought this song was really fun when I first heard it and didn’t know who it was by yet.
• It’s better than “Boom Boom Pow” (but so are the tortured shrieks of the damned).

Cons:

• There’s not really any singing or rapping, just a feeble approximation of both.  So basically, par for the course for the Black Eyed Peas.
• Stupid lyrics.  Par for the course, etc.
• At almost five minutes this song seems endless.  I think I entered and graduated college while this song was playing.

Ultimately, this song has to be given a grudging thumbs-up.  Ideally The Black Eyed Peas would just go away, but unfortunately this seems to be only Phase I of their ascent, and sort-of-not-bad is the best we can hope for from them at the moment.  Take it away, Maybe A Telemarketer Woman!

It’s interesting to note that the Black Eyed Peas seem to have given up any pretenses towards hip-hop.  I mean, this song is less street than Enya.  And that’s not very street at all.