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thesinglesjukebox · 8 days

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TINASHE - "NASTY"

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The TikTok career-heating inferno strikes another match...

[6.46]

Alfred Soto: "Is someone gonna match my nasty?" she wonders. The listener might wonder whether this midtempo R&B track with a trap beat does more than tease. [6]

Rachel Saywitz: Nasty Girls (nasty), rise up, our time is now! As the hot summer months sweat into our skin, now is the time to turn your ho-ing into overdrive. Now is the time to be a "Nasty Girl (nasty)," everywhich-way-when-where-how. You might be thinking: "but Rachel, I'm not a 'Nasty Girl (nasty)!' I don't grind on guys in the California desert dressed in raunchy Fast & Furious garb! I don't grab my crotch and then roll into a bridge pose!" My friends, listen to me. The nastiness of us has always existed deep within. It can be sex, sure, but nasty's birthplace is not sexual in nature. It is our soul's most primal desire—the desire to fuck. shit. up. Nasty is buying a pizza made for two people and eating it by yourself because this nastiness can only hold one worldly being. Nasty is reaching out to that friend you haven't talked to since college, then deleting all the photos you have of your college ex in your phone. Nasty is the carriage scene in the third season of Bridgerton where two characters hook up to an orchestral version of Pitbull's "Give Me Everything," and you watch it and realize: "Oh my god, listening to Pitbull is going to make me horny from this point onward," and you just kind of sit with that for a few months. Nasty is a white boy dancing soca with so much rizz that he lands a collab with Marc Jacobs and turn a Tinashe song into what might be a genuine hit, 10 years after "2 On." Nasty is your freak, unmatchable and entirely unique. One quick note on what Nasty is not—the reeking smell of your two-week old takeout leftovers. You should really throw those out. [9]

Julian Axelrod: How did it take this long for Tinashe to score a TikTok hit? She's been producing bite-sized morsels of freaky pop perfection since the Obama administration, so if it takes a nerdy white guy wining to recreate the magic of "2 On," that says more about us than her. "Nasty" doesn't reinvent the wheel because Tinashe's been honing that wheel for the past decade. She knows what lines to loop, she knows which beats will bang, and she has an endless arsenal of tawdry Tinashe-isms just brazen enough to make you blush. The success of "Nasty" is a testament to her unwavering commitment to horny excellence. Tinashe is the Malcolm Gladwell of matching freak. [7]

Ian Mathers: Match your freak? In this economy? [7]

Jonathan Bradley: Making a hot meme is nearly as good as making a hot song, but "Nasty" is too low-key to really be called a comeback. What is here is charming enough — robot voice, melodic kick sequencing, some nice vocal technique on the pre-chorus — but each idea comes back too soon, wearing out its welcome like a tired prompt tweet. [5]

Katherine St. Asaph: I have little to say that wasn't said better by Steacy Easton, about "Freak" by Estelle and Kardinal Offishall: "In two weeks I am going to a library at the Leather Archives in Chicago, and watching a video described as: 'unknown individual that calls himself Cowboy appears to be a master at whipping. Videos show various men tied to trees being whipped while having their genitals played with. Videos are home made and from his personal collection, they are copies of the originals according to a note found in the donation box.' This is my new standard of freakdom. Estelle does not measure up." Tinashe does not measure up either, not by monotonously matching the freak ante of a saucy Tinder ad on the subway. Basically, it's just moving kind of slow. [3]

Tim de Reuse: Something deeply funny to me about repeating the word "nasty" over totally clean, dry, unadorned sine waves: a dial tone in minor key, stark, inhuman, like the smell of a hospital. It's the opposite of sound design. Does that sound like I don't like it? I mean, on a purely sensory level, I don't, but it's a deliberate choice that's impossible to ignore. It's a lens that focuses everything down to that single repeated hook and the crunchy, over-articulated way she pronounces it. I let the whole track rattle through my skull three times on the bus yesterday and felt like I was being put under hypnosis. Your freak has my respect, Tinashe, if not my heart. [6]

Wayne Weizhen Zhang: The type of runaway, mind-zapping hit that has even the straight white boys in my classes humming along unconsciously. [8]

Jacob Sujin Kuppermann: Is it a good song or just a good collection of bits — the "match my freak" bit that everyone is doing, yes, but also the hook itself, the soaring, horny grandeur of the pre-chorus, the way Tinashe says she might just let this guy pay her lease? How much does that matter? In terms of shiny objects, this is stronger than anything she's done since "Superlove," but a song made just out of hooks can get a little tedious. She's independent now, but this is still factory pop: a delivery device for an attempted hit that lacks the connective tissue that her best misses have. [6]

Nortey Dowuona: Tinashe went a whole decade constantly failing to launch then suddenly slipped out of the iron grip of RCA and started dropping classics. But a lifer like Tinashe wasn't meant to stay away from the industry that's had her since she was part of the Stunners (which also included the excellent Hayley Kiyoko), so she signed to Ricky Reed's Nice Life imprint, released the bouncy, light BB/Ang3l, and went back on tour like any industry pro would. Now, we have "Nasty," a light bubbly fizz drink of a song co-produced by Ricky Reed and the fantastic Zach Sekoff (architect of "Crabs in a Bucket," "Homage," and "Party People" off Vince Staples's Big Fish Theory, as well as sharing in the spoils on "Freeman" from Dark Times). "Nasty" feels so comfortably settled and relaxed that you foolishly feel like volunteering to match her freak -- until the beat switches into a rippling bass wave over the drums that presses you until you crumple. Guess it wasn't you. NEXT! [8]

Taylor Alatorre: As good an illustration of the Duality of Tinashe as you'll find anywhere, almost as if it was constructed by her and Ricky Reed for that exact purpose. She sounds downright proud of herself in the chorus for pulling off such a clean bait-and-switch, with the "nasty girl" mantra a mere wind-up for the kind of angelic R&B slinkiness that she rightly feels should be her trademark. The problem with nastiness-as-pretext is that it threatens to make the parts of the song that aren't the chorus seem more vestigial than usual, but this is a problem that singers with half of Tinashe's talent would love to have. And it's not like there aren't steps taken to mitigate this issue: the pre-echo of the chorus gently hand-holding us into the confession booth, where Tinashe plays with her enunciation in weird enough ways to keep us invested until the portal to 2002 opens up. [7]

Dave Moore: I'm happy to see Tinashe reach official meme status, but "match my freak" is also the highlight here and it happens in the first 20 seconds, which makes me wonder how much of the single's success is the opening bit insinuating its way into popular consciousness. The song stalls out afterward. [6]

Michael Hong: "Nasty" is a solid distillation of Tinashe: confident and playful, with a hook that's immediately memorable and a pre-chorus melody that's just skillful but not showy. Doesn't stop the fact that she's released at least a couple dozen tracks in the past decade that are more interesting. [6]

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