Black Eyed Peas: "Boom Boom Pow"

This game is over. Maybe before Wall Street fell we could see ourselves boldly jetting into a shimmering future, but now? This trying to sound more futuristic than the last guy, this minimal beat and square waves and spacey noises thing? It’s over.

One harbinger of the end is how self-conscious and thin the trend has become. Witness in the very title “FutureSex/LoveSounds” the grafting of the roboboogie thing to other aesthetics. Earlier practitioners weren’t just time travelers but disco infernos, tomcats, strippers, maneaters, and dancing queens. They realized that singing about being futuristic over a futuristic beat is at best redundant, and at worst exposes your track as a crass attempt to bite a trend. Enter the Peas, oblivious to it all, claiming to carry the mantle. In between the whizzing and whirring, all they have to offer is “I’m so 3008 / You so 2000 and late.” The “next” in “next level shit” was never supposed to be just about time.

Yet even in this, the rickety claim that their shit is ahead of the curve, the Peas can’t get their story straight. They hate on the competition for being on that “Super 8 shit / That lo-fi stupid 8 bit,” yet big-up their use of 808s. If confused.i.am and Fergie think name-dropping HD flatscreens and satellite radio is all hip next level, someone send them an Evite and blow their minds.

“Boom Boom Pow” is not as bad as techno-future pop will get, but its shittiness is the sign that the movement is finished. Its heroes—and here I’m thinking mostly of Timbaland/erlake, Danja, and their ilk—must find their inspiration elsewhere, be it from the fertile sounds of Detroit, the neo-soul of “I Decided,” or the arena-hop of Just Blaze. Black Eyed Peas may have hit number one on the Billboard Dinometer last week, but if they want to stop playing catch-up with the zeitgeist they need to read the news once in a while. I mean, The Energy Never Dies? I have some Bear Stearns stock to sell you.