POLLow da Don

all classics

1. throw some ds
2. turnin me on
3. promise
4. forever
5. london bridge
6. pimpin all over the world
7. whatever u like

i like to think that polow has had a very positive effect on southern rap music

ahh i totally forgot "get buck", that's in the top 4 or 5 def

woah, is "Love in This Club" really not on your shortlist? it's probably second for me, to "Promise"

idk i guess it's not the smartest but i always liked it

two of my faves, Fallen (Zone 4 Remix) and When I See U (Remix) are not on here

of the ones available I'm gonna go with Promise

i'd be down for a remixes poll

Sorry for any unforgivable omissions

you apologized but
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X-ZhbWYiGF0

xxp otm

i like to think that polow has had a very positive effect on southern rap music

otm, i love that man. his verse on "throw some d's" is one of my favourite of the decade

i never slip, i never fall,
a lot of hoes give me they numbers but i never call

and then when those group vocals come in, such a beautiful warm happy moment

i'm gonna break you off (and that's all)
every freak should have a picture of my dick (on they wall)

I really like his verse at the beginning of the Fantasia remixes - he sounds so honest and hurt

wanksta, bustah

wow I never had any idea he did "Neck Of The Woods" and it really sounds nothing like his other stuff!

classic: promise
borderline classic: throw some d's, london bridge
love: buttons, pimpin all over the world, hero
like: turnin' me on, whatever you like, forever, love in this club, never ever
zzz: get buck, cryin out for me, runaway love, neck of the woods
ugh garbage: drop, blindfold me

None of these deserve a vote. Just vocals, bass and drums=way too little.

"Promise" is v textured and melodic imo btw eat shit and die

I think the following are pretty much unimpeachable:

"Promise", "When I See You (Remix)", "Fallen (Remix)", "Pimpin' All Over The World", "Forever", "Buttons", "Throw Some Ds", "Get Buck".

I underrated "Forever" for ages until that amazing SYTYCD Season 4 routine.

"Promise." Then "Throw Some D's"

thankfully you didn't include that dogshit nelly/fergie song

"Promise" over "Throw Some Ds" and "Turnin' Me On"

"Get Up" remix is up their too

there*

shit i forgot about that mario song - another classic

polow did a track for the new weezer album btw

iirc this prod is really dope but is ruined by the rapping of juelz santana

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XH0hPo8T8m0

nooo juelz is nice on it. let's the beat roll along without distracting you too much.

i voted get buck because it's the first one i fell in love with

i was obsessed with polow like a year or two ago and collected every instrumental of his i could find. i could post some if there's any in particular that people want. he's gotten lazy lately tho, and real fat.

my other favorites are promise, boy looka here, touch that ass, and eve & kelly rowland like this which is sometimes my favorite of all

also obv london bridge is crazy good but i like glamorous just as much.

also never ever and that fantasia remix were among my most played songs in the years they were released. i would just listen over and over

'get buck' is dope, al's rankings are all wrong ... i voted for that, 'forever' #2

Get Up" remix is up their too

― hood acumen (The Reverend), Thursday, October 8, 2009 11:48 AM (1 hour ago) Bookmark

forgot about this! I have been searching for a > 128 kbps version of this for ages. anyone got one?

Oh Yeah "Like This" and "Get Up (Remix)" are brilliant how could I forget???

omg this amazing poll

1. promise
(2. when i see u (remix))
3. whatever you like
4. get buck
=5. buttons
=5. throw some ds
=5. turnin' me on

^^those are the classic-beyond-classics imo - yes i'm aware i just basically retyped the poll. "whatever you like" goes so ridiculously hard - i love how nicole makes the titular line sound so powerful, nothing submissive about it at all - it's about her all-conquering capabilities.

I CAN SERVE WHITNEY HOUSTON AND BOBBY BROWN - heart "get buck". love the horn line coming in at the last minute too.

"promise" is basically my favourite song of the 00s though. like, the one i'd vote for if i only had one vote. (did it make the pfork list?) (lol forget i asked, don't wanna know.)

forgot about this! I have been searching for a > 128 kbps version of this for ages. anyone got one?

ditto!!!

<3 whatever you like

i love how nicole makes the titular line sound so powerful, nothing submissive about it at all - it's about her all-conquering capabilities.

OTM

lest we forget the AMAZING VIDEO for it

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wr4W5J7nkNE

also i must dissent w/the "forever" praise here - i like it ok but if polow has often excelled at making generic beats which are somehow more than what they bite, or the fundamental essence of a sound or something, "forever" just literally sounds like anything else. also, a touch too much autotune.

^^^ I totally agreed with this initially. SYTYCD made me realise it's the real prom scene soundtrack for twenty-eight-five-that-is.

throw some ds or promise. do like buttons too.

'Forever' is first among equals, as it were

mmm, so glad we got ourselves another worthwhile poll thread to recap everything we knew everyone had already said and was gonna say all over again.

having said that though,

- polow's remains one of the most drastic falling-offs i can think of; dunno how far i researched this at the time but i still reckon brian kidd or some other downlow member of backroom staff surely has to retrospectively be given a lot of credit for the best of these.

- totally forgot kelly rowland 'like this' ever existed! ace tune.

- did i ever mention how much i hate 'turning me on'? i really hate 'turning me on'.

i like to think that polow has had a very positive effect on southern rap music

― there's a blap for that (J0rdan S.), Thursday, 8 October 2009 02:21 (14 hours ago)

expleekay?

yeah dude has definitely fallen off -- even taking into account that i do like "turnin' me on," it's like one hit out of a dozen near misses and miserable failures in the past year or two. that juelz mess is one of the better recent beats i've heard from him, though.

"get buck" is so fucking inert, i like big bassy brass riffs as much as anybody but he does absolutely nothing with it and even without such a boring MC i'm not sure how much potential it'd have.

get buck is a million times better than i remembered. thanks, poll.

also, the synth coda at the end of throw some ds makes it >>>everything else.

the crying out for me beat is great too. i've always really liked wayne's verse on the remix i guess mostly from a formal standpoint

http://www.ozonemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/10/tpain.jpg
lol

No R. Kelly's Best Friend, no credibility. I'm sorry but that is an unacceptable omission. What is this, Pollow amateur hour?

Polow didn't even produce that song, he was just a guest on it

What is this, amateur hour?

mm yeah i do take the point that 'promise' never came across as an ab nihilo paradigm shift or anything, but i find it extremely hard to constellate a lineage - however intuitive - all the same. i even recall a few internets people having 'promise' down as little more than a 'one in a million' throwback, and there's an obvious element of truth in that of course.

as you know i always took that brief tim & bob period for a hangover of easternism moreso than anything, and though it works undeniably now as a rhetorical pointer i still can't help feeling it's being taken out of context somewhat. this would really be a pointless disagreement to keep having though so whatever!

incidentally, jasper cameron who co-wrote/produced/who knows 'promise' has been part of lloyd's production team since the beginning, and i could definitely argue a case for those relevant strands (let's say uh utopian futurism, 80sness (promise as bangles' eternal flame!), easty stuff) being particularly noticeable throughout his career. (his wiki also says he did tiffany evans 'lay back chill and be free'! - which people once again refused to give a shit about despite my ardent stansmanship.)

http://www.dailymotion.com/video/x3qz3m_aaliyahone-in-a-million-promise-rem_music

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fL1lrRozmsI

what i especially like about the latter is how it locates the vocoder in 'promise' as merely a devante swing hallmark, rather than a daft punkian 80s move - still though i think it's too broad and poppy a counterpoint to ciara to quite be tucked away like that.

Even though I view it more as a thing unto itself now, when "Promise" came out I assumed it was trying to sound like:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AVuJ16Tabbk

Which I'm sure is the reference point for Devante, too.

teedra moses

― i got nothin (deej), Sunday, October 11, 2009 1:49 AM Bookmark

Oh, sorry, I forgot about the huge impact, influence, and popularity of Teedra Moses. She really set the trends.

And yeah, completely agreed with RTC about Tim & Bob as easternism hangover, although I guess they did take that in a bit more lush and prettified direction.

man, anytime i take a secular line on pixelcloudz and someone else comes clattering in after me i feel like such a child murderer :(

tru enough about troutman as the reasonable middle ground to what i wz saying anyway, although i do feel devante took it in a different direction. (have not thought through this point at all btw.)

I suppose in Devante's case there may be a "via-Teddy Riley" in there somewhere. Can you articulate the different direction you feel Devante took it in?

rev i dont think tim was making a pt about the 'huge impact, influence and popularity of teedra moses' fwiw

not that she was exactly some mysterious ??? figure to R&B fans ... ive met irl teedra moses fans

funny thing is i couldn't remember which one on her album was "backstroke" and listened to it today and man i can't even figure out what the connection between that and "promise" is, pretty vague link there

i think its more about the mood of the song than some production technique or something, i see where hes coming from w/ that ... its kind of like sensuous-evocative or something

yeah...it just confused me since all the other songs in the discussion had a more concrete similarity.

I'm not saying "woah they are all the same" - just that I don't think "Promise" exactly announced a new direction in R&B, it just perfected a general vibe of intoxicating lushness that various producers and artists had been going for for a while. I guess that's a pointless truism on some level 'cos you can keep going further back in time and finding more and more precedents ("Rock The Boat" etc.).

Probably my perspective is informed by having made a mixtape of this kind of stuff (incl. Ashanti stuff like "Voodoo", Mya's "It's All About Me", the original version of "Dip It Low", written by Teedra/Poli...) just before Ciara's "Promise" came out i'm pretty sure.

Yeah it's right that a certain easternism hangover, er, hangs over a lot of that stuff, but only because that was the perhaps the most accepted means by which to convey this kind of decadant slowjam vibe in the mid-00s. A lot of the second album Bobby Valentino stuff kinda shifts that vibe to a more straightforward stripjoint at the bottom of the ocean (i.e. polow) feel, and while in one sense this proves the centrality and importance of "Promise" it also reveals how small a distance there was b/w the two.

I think r|t|c even made some joke about people confusing paul poli with polow da don, though that may just be due to the names.

I'm not trying to disprove anyone's point - more just saying that at the time "Promise" was like this moment where a lot of the different things I was listening for in R&B at that point suddenly snapped into a perfect single articulation. This strikes me as probably more important than "announcing a new direction" anyway.

I guess for me, "Promise" marks the shift in the default slow jam template from mid-00s pretty easternisms to the late-00s layered-synth style that Terius and his cohort would pick up the ball and run with. (I think "My Love" is important in that shift, too.)

see to me that seems a generalisation a thousand times vaguer than the pixelcloudz one... maybe we should all just quit while we're ahead huh.

tim yeah i tried to find where you posted that tape tracklist when you first mentioned teedra! if you remember where it's @ can u repost??

also did the electrik red crew take their ball and go home or what

::shrugs:: we like "devotion" and you don't, do we need to hash that out further?

ilm, ladies & gentlemen.

i mean i probably wouldn't like it as a single and maybe would think of it as an inferior "promise" but i think it works well in the context of the album, it's good to have a track like that in there

be that scintillating insight as it may, the whole point of the discussion is about assessing the merits of 'devotion' through comparison to 'promise'. also can we dead this bitchmade shit of reducing everything i (or anyone else who dissents from yessed-out holding hands and sincerely tries to back their pov up) say to "wahh you don't like it" cos it's really not that.

(first person to post fourfour's "i'm not here to make friends" youtube comp gets a cookie)

whatever man, i was being live and let live because i can see both sides of the argument and don't really feel it's a song worth dissecting on that level to defend or attack. can't win for forfeiting with you though, i guess.

i mean hate on my shrugging half-assed diplomacy if you like but there's nothing remotely "wahh" about it

see to me that seems a generalisation a thousand times vaguer than the pixelcloudz one...

no idea what you're talking about, pretty sure I've never used the term or alluded to the idea of "pixelcloudz" ever

it's a circa 2007 finney & zemko neologism for tim & bob lushness imo oh fuck now i'm speaking their language

can't believe it took this long for someone to clock this was all just a ruse to publicise our old beats tbh

idk if i can justify this but i def remember "promise" seeming rather more sui generis at the time than the culmination/start of anything else particularly

Automatic thread bump. This poll is closing tomorrow.

Ha I just found where I posted the tracklist for that comp: on the thread for Ciara's "Promise"...

Christina Milian - Dip It Low (Original Version) (the one with less beats)
Mya & Sisqo - It's All About Me
Janet Jackson - Empty
Ginuwine - So Anxious
Ashanti - Voodoo
Amira - My Desire (Dreem Teem Mix)
Amerie - Need You Tonight
Teedra Moses - Backstroke
Wayne Wonder - You Make My Life Complete
Nicole Wray - Make It Hot
Bobby Valentino - Give Me A Chance
Nivea & R Kelly - Laundrymat
Nicole Wray & Mike Jones - It's A Man's World
Kylie Dean - Keep It Moving
Sadie ft. Kano - So Sure (Target Remix)
Teedra Moses - Complex Simplicity
Ashanti - Rescue Me

I'd do it differently now obv.

Automatic thread bump. This poll's results are now in.

yeah i f/w these results, even if personally i hold "promise" a little dearer

I think I actually rate the remix of "Get Up" slightly above "Promise" even, if only for the way it balances its smothering softness with the original version's energy, while simultaneously just being so much better than the original. But then maybe it's because I came to it later and so have listened to it a lot more than "Promise" in the last two years or so.

it's not that much better than the original!!

maybe i would think it was if i had a version of it which was >>>128 fucking kbps (HINT)

the og is oddly underrated though, love it when it goes all pastoral and sweet

Well, I'd say the original is great whereas the remix kinda changes my life every time I listen to it.

I think my version is 128kps, but I'm the anti-Nick Southall when it comes to such things.

i'm anti-southall when it comes to being an insane audiophile but if i can barely hear the track - esp when it's the production i'm listening to - it's not ever going to be lifechanging, really

Ha I listen to 96kps uk funky sets and have my life changed all the time so 128kps seems like audophile heaven.

also audiophile heaven.

relistening to it now and it just hisses so much that it's sort of unlistenable. and those dramatic synth bursts sound like they could be so amazing if there was any depth or richness to them. why do we have to even put up with shitty mp3s in this decade anyway.

xps yeah idk how you can do that either, 96kbps is just not going in my ears. how do you even hear the details or the bass or ANYTHING in that?!

I actually have a whole ideological position re the overemphasis of the importance of bass missing the point w/r/t funky that I won't bore everyone with here. But that notwithstanding, yeah, you're right, it's annoying, but if I didn't listen I would never have heard amazing tunes like Scotty D's refix of Armand Van Helden's "Mother Earth".

Back to "Get Up (Remix)", I really do think it's twinkliness (leaving aside the hiss) mixed with its propulsiveness is kinda remarkable. Very few songs I can think of that really capture that vibe so successfully, though Teedra's "Last Day" would be one (apologies some dude).

maybe i would think it was if i had a version of it which was >>>128 fucking kbps (HINT)

― lex pretend, Wednesday, October 14, 2009 7:37 AM (1 hour ago) Bookmark

^^^

I found some 192 kbps ones awhile back, but I think they were just transcoded from the original 128 kbps one, which I think was just a Myspace rip anyway...

someone should break into polow's cave and steal the masters

soz 4 lateness on this (went on hols), funny that 'throw some ds' won this since i kinda quite never considered it part of the polow canon (sampled beat and only a co-production i think?). plus lol at polow dropping this 'promise' jack right after the thread:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QbauX5wmga4

superbanger imo tho!!

Ha I just found where I posted the tracklist for that comp: on the thread for Ciara's "Promise"...

Christina Milian - Dip It Low (Original Version) (the one with less beats)
Mya & Sisqo - It's All About Me
Janet Jackson - Empty
Ginuwine - So Anxious
Ashanti - Voodoo
Amira - My Desire (Dreem Teem Mix)
Amerie - Need You Tonight
Teedra Moses - Backstroke
Wayne Wonder - You Make My Life Complete
Nicole Wray - Make It Hot
Bobby Valentino - Give Me A Chance
Nivea & R Kelly - Laundrymat
Nicole Wray & Mike Jones - It's A Man's World
Kylie Dean - Keep It Moving
Sadie ft. Kano - So Sure (Target Remix)
Teedra Moses - Complex Simplicity
Ashanti - Rescue Me

I'd do it differently now obv.

― Tim F, Tuesday, October 13, 2009 7:38 AM (1 month ago)

can we make some additions to this, re: promise bites?

most (or maybe all) of those are pre-"Promise"

that's my point dude

im asking for examples since then, besides the obv already covered itt

"little freak" is not the post-"spotlight" comeback i was hoping for :(. the Stevie sample feels forced and (though i usually don't buy this kind of argument) i get kind of queasy thinking about its recontextualization for a song that goes "let her put her hands in your pants/be my little freak." also it intuitively seems like a bad sign when you need to cop the only semblance of melody in your beat from a song that famous