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Wyclef Jean ft. Akon - 'Sweetest Girl (Dollar Bill)'

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Fraser McAlpine | 10:35 UK time, Friday, 16 November 2007

Wyclef JeanIt's call the tipping point, and what it describes (in a really simplified form) is the moment where things suddenly collapse just because of one very minor change in circumstances. Like the moment in Buckaroo! where adding a bucket makes the donkey buck and throw everything off its back. There's nothing massively significant about the bucket itself, but in the context of the game, it's the one extra item which makes all the difference between winning and losing.

In this case, the tipping point which robs this song of a higher star rating (a rating it richly deserves), is the video, for reasons I will get to in a second.

In the meantime, there's the song. It's not often you hear a hip hop track which takes a sympathetic view of girls who have had to find a way to make their good looks pay their bills - whether by latching on to rich boyfriends in clubs or via more obvious (and legally suspect) means. There was that Common/Lily Allen thing a month or two ago, which matches this for compassion, but that was more about wannabe stars...

And it's even rarer for such a track to feature the vocal talents of Akon, a man who is happy to admit that he goes to strip clubs to write his sexiest (sexist?) songs, AND to liberally quote from 'C.R.E.A.M.' by the Wu Tang Clan and 'Gangsta's Paradise' by Coolio. Factor in the fact that this musically has the warmth and bounce of classic Bob Marley (albeit a modernised version) and an addictive tumbledown melody in the chorus and we really have got something rather special on our hands.

Which makes the video a little confusing, to say the least. It's not that it's a bad video, and anything which highlights the plight of refugees - stuck in a Biblical limbo, awaiting salvation or damnation - has to be a good thing. But the two things just don't go together. The song is about a cute girl who has to barter her looks for cash in order to survive.

The video is a James Bond-style fantasy undercover exercise where Wyclef goes to an internment camp in order to ensure that a pretty girl gets into the US, because she's pretty. Put the two things together and it's kind of insensitive to...everyone.

Which is the one big strength that the song has, the sensitivity on an issue which is normally treated with high contempt by your over-macho rap fellas. Jeez, all they had to do was make a dark, vague, mockumentary-style clip like 'Hey There Delilah' and this would be a total smash. But having made a video which shows they don't even understand the song they've made, it's spoiled the song a bit. Sorry.

Three starsDownload: Out now
CD Released: November 19th

(Fraser McAlpine)

Comments

  1. At 12:36 AM on 17 Nov 2007, Rebecca Jones wrote:

    I LOVE THIS SONG. It has a good and different sound to it. I also love Wyclef and Akon.

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