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April 14, 2005
Amerie's "One Thing"
This is the only thing on pop radio right now that stops me from flipping stations. It's produced by Rich Harrison, the same guy who did Beyonce's epochal "Crazy in Love." He also did the new J-Lo single, but we'll forgive him for that. Harrison's trademark is to start with a red-hot sample, crank it up in the mix, and force the vocalist to dance around it. J-Lo's overwhelmed by the sax riff in her single, but Amerie does an amazing job bouncing off the thrilling drum riff in "One Thing," sampled from an old Meters track. The mix is pretty bare bones - mostly the sample, the vocals, and a single guitar chord played once each key change. What makes it work is that Harrison lets the drums, not the vocals, take the lead. At one point, in fact, Amerie just drops out for about 30 seconds, so we can just enjoy the killer riff.
The single was featured on the Hitch soundtrack, and the original version of the video had a lot of fun intercutting between Amerie's moves and Kevin James's attempts in the film to get down. During that drum break, instead of the typical video gyrations, we get thirty seconds of James's enthusiastic fumbling. Sadly, now that Hitch is out of theaters and the song's a hit on its own, MTV Hits is playing a second version of the video without any film clips. It's still the best thing in their rotation.
Posted by tedf at April 14, 2005 02:20 PM
Comments
Yeah, "One Thing" gets much play around our house and in my head--definitely my favorite single in months. I'm curious to see if we'll still be hearing it out car windows down our block this summer--Crazy in Love had some serious longevity that way.
Posted by: amoeda at April 15, 2005 10:00 AM
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