It’s one of the songs of the year. Cee-Lo Green’s expletive-laden F**k You received a million hits in four days with its original typography-only video. An official music video was released since and combined the two videos have generated over 7.5 million Youtube views.
Straight away, the song was turned into source material for dozens of remixes and covers. 50 Cent was first up in offering a freestyle with a single verse over the song the weekend it debuted. Since then, the versions have kept coming. Mashups of the song paired it up with Katy Perry’s I Kissed A Girl, The Fratellis’ Henrietta and Eminem’s Superman quite successfully. Meanwhile a host of producers have remixed the track providing us, perhaps unnecessarily a Baltimore club edit, a deep house version, an electro version and of course, the obligatory dubstep remix. A dubstep version is consistently the worst offender in the remix world, offering a tactless producer the opportunity to add some unimaginative low-end “wub wub” to the song and the various Cee-Lo versions are no different.
The best remix comes from Philadelphia rap duo Chiddy Bang who use the song as a jumping off for a decent hip-hop rhyme-heavy version.
F**k You has provided inspiration for many a cover version too. The Cover Me blog has collated their opinion of the best which take in bluegrass, acoustic guitar-led, one-man band, solo piano, punk and violin adaptations. The best renditions come from the females who take the other side of the argument of the song and change the lyrics like Toronto’s Anjulie who focuses on the girl who usurped her.
The best place to hear all of these versions, remixes and covers is The Hype Machine – an aggregator of music blogs. Just search for ‘cee lo’ to find them.
Digital mentioned Fiddy Cent earlier, the rapper has always been good for a laugh what with the silly video game storylines and a Jim Sheridan biopic on his life. Recently though, Fiddy took over his own Twitter account and many of his updates have been unbelievable since. Rude, misogynistic, profanity-laden, angry and with plenty of ‘LOLs’, his tweets have taken in sexual etiquette, insults derived from replies to him concerning his spelling and his mental state, gangsta talk and much more. You’d be forgiven for thinking that his account was hacked but no, it’s really him.
When 50 appeared on Graham Norton’s show last year he came across as a genuinely nice bloke. His Twitter account however makes him come across as a bit of an oaf. 90% of his tweets are unprintable but here’s a sample: “I want everybody to know from the bottom of my heart I do not appreciate yal (sic) calling me crazy I’m special.” Indeed, Fiddy. Indeed.
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