It didn’t take long for this McCartney-West-Rihanna collaboration that Kanye West was talking about a few days ago, to appear on the web! You can actually listen to it via Rihanna’s website… The download link will lead you to iTunes where you can buy the song for $1.29, but you can also listen to a few seconds of the song via iTunes for free.
‘Four Five Seconds’ is a strange one for Kanye and Rihanna, a simple track with acoustic guitar, wobbling organ and especially the powerful chorus of their voices, singing ‘Now I’m four, five seconds from wildin’/And we got three more days ’til Friday/I’m just tryin’ to make it back home by Monday mornin’/I swear I wish somebody would tell me/Ooh, that’s all I want’. And I guess McCartney is just behind the guitar and the keyboards, apparently there is no singing with the kids for the septuagenarian!
Is it me or this sounds a bit cheesy-folksy, a bit campfire song, part old fashioned, part Jack Johnson tune mutated with powerhouse vocals? Not disagreeable but easily forgettable. Sorry I can’t hear the historic collab announced by Kanye last week. And Kanye’s voice is as much auto-tuned on this track as Macca’s face is photoshopped on this above picture.
According to rolling Stone, it’s unclear if the song will appear on an album by any of the artists, ‘though Ty Dolla $ign told Billboard earlier this month that the song would likely appear on West’s upcoming album’…. If it is the case, it is even stranger as I thought, as the tune doesn’t fit at all with the soundscapes that West has released lately, or would he be turning to a more gentle-folk-acoustic style? I am not sure what McCartney has to gain for these new collaborations, that he is young and edgy again? He should have taken a lesson from his collaboration with Michael Jackson who turned into a friend-enemy and bought the whole Beatles catalogue afterwards? Kayne has shouted his love for the Beatles lately, during his surprise appearance at the iHeartMedia Music Summit, so Paul should be careful. Anyway, be prepared for another ‘Who is that McCartney guy?’ wave in Rihanna’s Twitter feed.
