Whether they’re petroleum-based or digital downloads, singles remain pop’s most fascinating format. Twice a week in Single Spin, a singles-focused twist on Second Spin, we’ll take a look at a song, sound, scene, or star that we think deserves more than two lines and a Rapidshare link–whether it’s CMT country, underground dance, unfriendly noise, or anything else served up one tune at a time. Today we hear a combination of unrealized promise and cheesy cheek in a current blog favorite that revives a 1999 pop-dance smash you may have wanted to forget.

Wiz Khalifa’s “Say Yeah” showed up on no less than three MySpace bulletins–and one message board thread–over the last week thanks to its video dropping on YouTube, and it’s easy to understand why my online buddies might briefly boggle at a hip-hop tune that purloins the ecstasy/agony of the one-finger doot-doot from Alice Deejay’s “Better Off Alone,” a song that made turn of the millennium trips to the mall a euphoric experience. (Even if it was hard to feel too loved-up when you were killing time as designated bag holder during your companion’s layover at Wet Seal.) The clip gives Kalifa’s tune a second go-round with the kind of spontaneous, unconscious street-teaming that gets desperate label marketing departments moist even if it’s just a minor followup push more than a month after the song first hit blogs/sites whose descriptions do not always inspire you to leave the comfy confines of your RSS reader to access the download or sift your way through the daily pile-up of non-opinion for the stream. The fact that I’m writing about it a good two weeks after the video hit the Internet probably just means that too much MDMA has crippled my all-important blogger’s response time, but nonetheless, I remain fascinated by “Say Yeah” all those days later, and for reasons beyond the context of music crit turnover in Web 2.0, the bargain Gorgeous Ladies Of Epcot Center video treatment (notable mostly for its shameless use of Photoshop lens flare), or Khalifa’s flow (passable), and the views on leisure time and the distribution of personal funds expressed in his lyrics.

While most not instantly repelled by the hook will probably hear “Say Yeah” as a gimmick good enough to survive a two-week run before it’s suddenly the victim of yet another unsentimental hard drive pogrom, within those 10 or 12 shrill notes I (half) hear the perennial thrill of young folks with samplers making weird-ass bricolage from seemingly incompatible sources and rewriting pop history in favor of all those sounds long since judged beyond the pale thanks to certain calcified conceptions of cool. If you think that’s heady stuff to try and pin on a record by a baby gangsta riffing on a couple of Dutch producers who were almost outshined by their backup dancers’ vinyl bikinis, well, I admit I may be obsessed to the point of foolishness by the potential in pop’s continuing intercontinental cultural summit. (Even if this time, it’s just the meeting of urban America and Amsterdam pop-trance.) But it’s only because I believe these cross-genre hookups still offer a much better chance for surprise/innovation/dumb fun than the steady diet of Flo Rida that 2008 has given us so far.

Still, “Say Yeah” is not a wholly unexpected development in Eurocentric stunt sampling, especially when one of our favorite tunes of 2007 rewrote Technotronic for homecoming slow jammers and when this (which really deserves a few thousand words of its own) almost went unheard as it slipped between the SXSW notices in my inbox and when plenty of folks have outlined how pop radio has been slowly rewritten in the last half of the decade by rave’s rule book. “Say What” is just the most blatant post-rave lift so far, and not coincidentally the cheesiest. Khalifa is a 20-year-old MC treading the line between major label breakout and mixtape nobody who currently lays his head in Pittsburgh, making him barely cognizant during the heyday of Ya Kid K but a ripe 12 when Alice Deejay hit, his musical brain (like that of his 20-year-old producer) just malleable enough to be by influenced whatever radio/video happened to be bumping during the peak of trance’s brief infiltration into U.S. pop, when tunes like “Never Be Alone” were called up (down?) from weekend nights spent broadcasting live and direct from your town’s bridge-and-tunnel hotspot, when Paul Oakenfold had annexed huge swathes of rack real estate in big-box music sections.

So “Say Yeah” is, among other things, less a future-focused Netherlands-to-Pittsburgh conference call than a shameless celebration of holding onto grade school taste by two guys old enough to cast primary votes and not yet able to get into 21-and-over nights, and that juvenile vibe, which hangs over every minute of “Say What” (and other songs of its ilk), may be what’s so off-putting to many listeners. (Trance isn’t exactly the sound of modern maturity to begin with.) Tip, Phife, and the gang may have actually blared Archies records rather than jazz sides from kiddie turnables for all history knows, but for certain hip-hop fans, the important thing was that they had put away childish things by the time they were cutting their own tunes post-graduation. And unlike Timbaland hunting up Abdel-Halim Hafez or even Bronx bombers refashioning German art-rock, “Say What” doesn’t get a pass from old heads because it’s A.) is pretty crude (even if the perverse side of me wants to argue the Alice Deejay sample’s deployment is no blunter than “Planet Rock” or “Big Pimpin’” once you’re familiar with the originals) and B.) panders to high school kids (and Internet dwellers) with a big hunk of a known quantity despised by the self-serious rather than going Akai alchemical on something more outre. Listening, you can almost see the ashen looks on aging faces, but time and pop’s merciless rate of talent turnover means naysayers should know by now that anything and everything may eventually end up devoured without prejudice by novelty-hungry tween hordes.

But while I’m generally in favor of pop shrugging off acceptability with a don’t-give-a-fuck brutishness and while I’m also an unrepentant fan of novelty and juvenalia, “Say Yeah” is, unfortunately, only just OK as these things go, meaning it’s hard to grumble about 21st-century ephemera addicts who’ve already stricken it from iTunes. As someone who once tried to Quixotically convince alt-weekly readers that they should give DJ Sammy some shine, I don’t share the position that this trendlet represents a Euro-axis Of Evil threatening hip-hop’s way of life. I know the song’s heart is in the right place. But the high-speed hook never meshes with the down-low hip-hop groove, only getting interesting/tolerable during the tingly half-time breaks. Had those moments been stretched out over a full 3:00, “Say What” might have made for a decent, techno-tinged mixtape track that would utterly lack the look-at-me value producer Johnny Juliano alighted on the moment he found a copy of Who Needs Guitars Anyway? in the back of his closet next to his middle school yearbook.

And since repeated exposure turned “Never Be Alone” into anthemic water torture, the off chance of “Say Yeah” escaping into heavy rotation–either because of viral whatever or because Kanye’s relative good taste primed the pump–would means this Frankenstein could turn Pronti, Kalmani, and DJ Jurgen’s keyboards (one of trance’s great mysteries being how it took three dudes to come up with one riff) into a generation gap irritant on the level of your “Crank That” variation of choice^*. For the second time. Which I’m not so sure about. Because above and beyond enjoying producers pulling off seemingly incongruous sonic combos and watching high school kids bait their elders, I enjoy these songs because of the immense pleasure I derive from both rapping and big, stupid synth hooks and would prefer to not have “Say Yeah” turning my opinion/inspiring idle thoughts of suicide six months from now. And yet even with with that worry in mind, I’d still like to close out with five pop-dance tunes that I’d love to hear some enterprising Fruity Looper have his or her way with because of their as yet untapped potential for making our charts a better place.

1. DJ Sammy - “Heaven”

Kinda platonic/interchangable as far as trance riffs go, but nonetheless waiting to be pitched down to booty-pop tempo.

2. Da Hool - “Meet Her At The Love Parade”

The main hook positively sophisticated compared to “Better Off Alone.”

3. Rollergirl - “Dear Jessie”

Perhaps more suited to an R&B cut.

4. Aqua - “Dr. Jones”

and

5. Vengaboys - “We Like To Party”

They don’t even have to be good. I just want someone to have the stones to take this sound all the way.

Wiz Khalifa [MySpace]
“Say Yeah” [YouTube]

(^* Interestingly, while elderly listeners across a variety subcultural affiliations seem to be giving this song the gas face–hardly surprising, since I recall Alice Deejay clearing not a few rooms full of Neutral Milk Hotel and Nas fans alike upon initial release–younger indie kids do seem to be embracing Kalifa’s tune to an extent that they don’t seem be repping for, I dunno, the Pop It Off Boyz; whether they’re enjoying it as a goof or because they’re blog-era omnivores who hear no difference between Urb-approved Frenchies and the kind of cornball poppers-fodder that gives minimal techno fans agita, nostalgia seems to be at least partly at work, proving once again that any pop reputation can be at least partially rehabilitated by good ol’ warm childhood memories.)