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What's Love Got To Do With It

by Kygo & Tina Turner

The late-90s was something of a nadir as regards hip-hop artists lazily ripping off other people’s hits to rap over. Although I suspect the years will never quite wash away the pain of Puff Daddy’s ‘I’ll Be Missing You’ or Will Smith’s ‘Wild Wild West’, thankfully the majority of these cash-ins have now faded into well-deserved obscurity. So you’d be forgiven for not recalling Warren G’s 1996 rip-off of Tina Turner’s ‘What’s Love Go To Do With It’, despite it’s appearance in the cinematic masterpiece that is Jackie Chan’s Police Story 3: Super Cop. What’s depressing, though, is that Kygo’s recent version somehow manages to feel even more lazy and cynical. I mean, could there have been any more of an ‘EDM by numbers’ production than this? Happy-house pumping piano: check. Edited ‘vocal mosaic’: check. The same tired old filtered-noise risers, sub-drops, and four-to-the-floor beat programming: check. And you know what’s even worse? He’s stripped out one of the most beautifully managed final-chorus key changes in the history of the charts and replaced it with a massive cliché instead: that inflatable tom fill at 2:24 leading directly into the key change. I must confess that, even though I was driving at the time, I couldn’t stop myself literally facepalming in despair when I first heard this on the car radio!

Don’t worry, though. It looks like he’s now decided to abandon such frothy celebrity pap in a fresh quest for artistic integrity. With Vin Diesel. I wish I were joking…