Groups like Gorillaz, the new BEP, and Girl Talk made music that mirrored the iPod’s function: randomizing play on one’s musical library and putting things back-to-back. As Apple tries to convince customers that Apple Music is somehow different and better than Spotify, it feels like a good time to take stock of the company’s effect on the music landscape. ITunescore really started in 2001, when the iPod was released and about the time the Black Eyed Peas added Fergie to the lineup. The klezmer honk of Derulo’s “Talk Dirty” packed wedding dance floors for a year as pop-rap continued its latest love affair with sampled live horns that began with Macklemore’s “Thrift Shop,” but “Talk Dirty” is hardly classic. It feels like song as formula (not in a prog or math rock way) that always just works out to the lowest common denominator.

In iTunescore, each component remains separated like oil and water: Worldbeat flourishes feel forced, and the combination of genres seems arbitrary, like a Frankenstein’s monster made from parts of existing popular songs. The best musical fusions feel like genres are braising into one another. It often contains elements that I like separately and want to enjoy together, except that it lacks some fundamental cohesion. Nonetheless, he has become a hitmaking force to be reckoned with on the radio.įour albums in, Derulo has become the master of a genre forever connected to the debut of the iPod. Call it iTunescore, the sound of “ formless, narrative-averse 21st-century pop music,” as my colleague Steven Hyden said. Designed to fit into any randomized playlist, it boils down eclectic musical genres into one deeply inoffensive style. He’s clearly a hard worker, and there’s nothing wrong with his voice per se, but there’s a personality missing from his music.

At the risk of sounding old and rockist - but sincerely just based on hookiness - it is no “I Want You to Want Me.” And the whole album, which is a brisk 38 minutes and 45 seconds, delivers adequate thrills that don’t beg for a replay. There is an anonymity to Derulo’s music.ĭerulo’s inescapable new single, “Want to Want Me,” is a refreshing popsicle the first time you hear it, but it melts right out of your head.

Everything Is 4 is Derulo’s fourth album, and, like his previous work, it is perfectly pleasant but somehow forgettable. In one way, this is his strength, but it’s also the reason Derulo has to keep saying his name: He’s too musically chameleonic for us to know it’s him otherwise. He knows we might not know “Want to Want Me” is a Derulo song, because it sounds unlike his other songs, except that all of his songs sound unlike one another. Name-checking himself is Derulo’s trademark gimmick. I didn’t notice until my first headphones listen to Jason Derulo’s “Want to Want Me” that the singer does, in fact, whisper his last name at the beginning of the song.

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