Idolator

ARTIST: The Roots ft. Patrick Stump
TITLE: "Birthday Girl"
WEB DEBUT: March 10, 2008

ONE-LISTEN VERDICT: Purportedly the first single of their upcoming Rising Down, the Roots team with Fall Out Boy's Patrick Stump... and it kind of sucks. Which is too bad, since everything else that's leaked from their 3,579th album has been pretty excellent! Remember the all-the-way-live, ridonkulous, distorted "75 Bars (Black's Reconstruction)" that got us through the cold throes of late February? And the deliciously moody, horrorcore-era Dre squeak of "Get Busy," which lit up our early March? (It's been 22 years, and we never get tired of hearing Joeski Love getting scratched.) And now we get this Cody ChesnuTT-meets-Gym-Class-Heroes emo-love jam?

Lame, sure, but fuck it. We'll gladly swallow a sell-some-records tactic if it means another album as solid as Game Theory (and, hey, we already established today that critics and the public have different tastes). So once I buy the album (or some kindly saint at Def Jam sends me a promo), I'll just quietly skip this like I did "Back Like That" on Fishscale or "I Know" on American Gangster. And by "quietly," I mean "make this blog post and be a huge dick about it."

Plus Kip Winger already proved that writing a song about wanting to bang a 17-year-old is kinda gross. Thankfully, we didn't have to see Black Thought's chest hair this time around.

WHERE TO FIND IT:Nah Right.