Filed under: design of a decade, lists, music | Tags: 2003, christina aguilera, design of a decade, lil kim, scott storch
[2003: Back to reviewing my favorite songs one at a time.]
10. Christina Aguilera featuring Lil’ Kim, Can’t Hold Us Down
Scott Storch was never a particularly likable person–dating Paris Hilton and wearing hundreds of thousands of dollars of jewelry and terrible sunglasses does not make one endearing–but for a while there the founder of Tuff Jew Records produced some really awesome pop singles. Maybe not anything from the Brooke Hogan album, or the Ruben Studdard comeback, or the MC Hammer comeback, but before that. He had co-producer credit on The Roots’ You Got Me and Eve’s Let Me Blow Ya Mind, for instance, and then he produced Pink’s Family Portrait, Lil Kim’s Lighters Up, Beyonce’s Baby Boy and Naughty Girl, and Chris Brown’s Run It. He’s also responsible for seven of the tracks on Christina Aguilera’s insanely long Stripped album, including Can’t Hold Us Down, the album’s opening song.
After her debut, Aguilera kept busy appearing on tracks like Lady Marmalade and the still-pretty-good Ricky Martin duet Nobody Wants To Be Lonely, but nevertheless Stripped almost seemed like a comeback album for the singer. Xtina needed to start her album off with a bang, and she did, incorporating hey-ho backup singers, a guest rap from Lil Kim, and lyrics about gender standards that proved ideal for many a karaoke bachelorette party. It’s one of Aguilera’s strongest vocal performances and one of Storch’s best productions, growling with hip-hop swagger without sounding too much like a white-girl Disney princess trying to be tough. Which, you know, it could have.
Can’t Hold Us Down was the fourth single from Stripped; it plays off the public’s surprisingly tepid reactions to Dirrty while at the same time providing a far catchier anthem for girls to sing along with. It’s a pretty complex song, but never seemed forced or crazy as it switches from the verses to the chorus to the breakdown to the Matthew Wilder-interpolating Lil Kim part. It picks up speed about a minute before the end, with the hey-hos doing double-time, before a surprising forty-second digital breakdown that comes more or less out of nowhere.
Aguilera and Storch wouldn’t work together again; he wanted a private plane and God knows what else to work on her Back To Basics album, and things deteriorated to the point where she recorded a song about him, F.U.S.S., which allegedly stands for Fuck You Scott Storch. (The lyrics say that she’s moved on and didn’t need him; for some reason that required the writing assistance of American Idol judge/general terror Kara DioGuardi.) He’s trying to make his own comeback; there’s a pretty interesting profile in the new Details where he basically disavows everything he did after 2005.
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I remember this song. It was so cool to see her with lil’ Kim. I don’t blame Storch either. I can’t stand it when these big-wig people think they need every little thing handed to them on their demand. I think F.U.S.S. was one of the best “music gifts” like that I’ve seen…too funny.
Comment by musicgal23 February 3, 2010 @ 1:16 pm