Jason Derulö’s been desperately trying and failing to assert himself as a credible male solo artist since the launch of debut single ‘Whatcha Say’ in 2009, whose hook – the best part of the song, was sampled from a previous track. 2011 UK Number One Single ‘Don’t Wanna Go Home’ likewise relied upon a sample for its major success and received critical condemnation for its lack of originality.
New single ‘The Other Side’ is only the latest in a series of appalling adaptations for Derulö. There’s something so incredibly wrong about someone trying to imitate Chris Brown it doesn’t bear thinking about, but Derulö’s latest track is heavily inspired by Brown’s ‘Don’t Wake Me Up.’ There’s excessive auto-tune, a whiny, borderline painful vocal and an awful lot of attempted and failed MJ-style dancing.
Derulö’s clearly working hard at it, but he just isn’t very good. His vocal range is poor, the song could do with a heap less auto-tune and he’d do much better to have focused on cultivating his own sound instead of trying to imitate a host of other EDM male pop soloists. He doesn’t have Justin Bieber’s brainwashed Beliebers to support him, nor does he have Justin Timberlake’s victorious vocals to power on through.
He’s at least unashamed about his club-man-whore ways, declaring in the spoken intro to the official video that ‘one drink can change everything.’ He ticks practically ever cliché of the genre, going on about getting drunk, clubbing, kissing, talk about the bass and a few veiled metaphors knocked out about having sex with a girl.
One drink might be enough to change everything for Jason, but I dread to think how leathered I’d have to get to taken to the ‘other side’ where people actually enjoy his dance drivel…