“You are now listening to the skateboard peeyimp and the Louis Vitton don.” Aight, Kanye, I’m listening. The pop pedigree of these guys is unimpeachable; even their hiccups warrant a listen or two. But from the outset, something is awry with “Number 1”: String lines warble out with all the faded enthusiasm of a VCR-to-VCR copy of a copy, and electric keys skip lightly, and a one-two sleazeclap preset functions as a beat. The Neptunes usetacould polish a turd, channeling the sex-fiend in Britney that today only K-Fed (what up) gets to enjoy and giving an authoritative bounce to whatever half-assed slang Snoop or Nelly had cooked up. Through it all, Pharrell was the reliable hype anti-hero, a scrawny fuck with no flow and a hollow voice that somehow got to kick it with Jigga. His uninflected “uh” carried a slickness largely unparalleled in recent pop music, a gentle reminder: I made this shit.

But here he’s the star, and front-and-center that understated charisma is stretched paper-thin. None of which may be new—behold N.E.R.D.—but it seems newly wan here. It takes a full thirty seconds to differentiate his off-key sliding croon from the thick, muddy synths, and the track’s central conceit falls feebly. “Number one / Smash hit / Off the charts / Classic” = double meaning, because this new chick seems finer than the other ones, but, get it, the song’s supposed to blow up, too. Problem is, no one really gives a shit, even with Kanye’s golden touch. That might be because Kanye’s been relegated to Pharrell’s old role, dropping an “alright” hither and a “come on” thither, and then rapping a full chorus beneath Pharrell’s sung one, but mixed way lower, so that his emphatic, reliably egotistic delivery comes out muted and unnatural. So his shit’s just distracting, but you can tell that in the studio he thought he was handing Pharrell a stick of dynamite. By the sounds of things, the first time these two were within a country mile of each other was during the filming of the video. Which, for the record, also sucks. So there’s that.

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