Skylar Grey’s collaboration with Eminem, “C’Mon Let Me Ride,” contains filthy, unclever and thinly veiled euphemisms for screwing. It’s got a playful verse structure and an equally childish lyric video, and a chorus that is as tooth-rotteningly sweet as a Capri Sun jingle. It takes the melodic and lyrical page from Queen’s “Bicycle Race” and has it sung by Eminem doing his best Pee-Wee Herman imitation, while the term “banana seat” is beaten (eh? get it?) to it’s maxim.
It’s a joke…. no, really, it’s meant as a joke.
It was written as a satire of “overly sexified music, media and the girls who try and imitate it.” Hence the tossed-off effect of the terms “slut,” “bitch” and Em’s dragging-d*ck rhymes.
“I’ve learned from Em I can have more fun,” she told Rolling Stone in an interview published in October. “He’s very sarcastic and makes me laugh all the time and there are parts of my attitude I have in person but I’ve never shown in a song. I feel like he showed me I don’t have to be afraid to show that side.”
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For those who have headt Grey’s previous output and famous songs, then it’s immediately apparent that the song itself is the punchline. She’s done some down, emotional stuff, including Dr. Dre and Eminem’s “I Need a Doctor,” another Shady classic “Love the Way You Lie” with Rihanna and T.I. and Christina Aguilera’s saddy “Castle Walls.”
What makes “C’Mon Let Me Ride” into dark humor is the fact that you, I and our 14-year-old cousins hear this sort of ridiculousness daily. This anti-thought, anti-women exaggerated sexual nonsense is a norm, and Grey and her production partner are really very good at imitating it.
She even looks the part: the frustratingly lascivious single cover features Grey hoisting up the wheels of a mountain bike in a field of manure, squeaky-clean and bikini-clad with her shorts unbuttoned like “oops.” The viewer collects his or her jaw from the floor so as to continue laughing. Or crying. Or going “blehh” in your mouth.
“C’Mon Let Me Ride” is off of Skylar Grey’s “Don’t Look Down,” which Eminem executive produced. It’s tentatively due in the spring.