This is going to be one of those annoying reviews which takes the billion-view signature hit of a highly successful artist and picks away at production choices which – objectively! – have been extremely successful. “Lonely” is not a one-hit wonder; it failed to tank Akon’s promising career; and the fact the guy dropped largely out of sight at the turn of the decade is absolutely nothing to do with his decision to marinade his biggest hit in an infuriating chipmunk-voice pitch-up of a Bobby Vinton song.
I suspect “Lonely” is a marmite hit. For the tens of millions of people who hear it as a romantic milestone in a classic pop-R&B decade, the sample is presumably a poignant and distinctive flourish on top of a defining vocal performance from Akon. For me, it’s a vastly irritating earworm that overwhelms Akon’s very genuine talent. One of my biggest problems with it – and again, probably a reason to like it from another angle – is that Akon’s own singing voice is unusually high and lonesome for a 00s R&B star. There’s a sentimental, crooner’s poignancy in how Akon sings which makes him stand out in his field, and the “Mr Lonely” sample sliding into it sounds like he’s taking the piss out of himself.
Akon’s first hit showed us that voice in stronger circumstances. “Locked Up” tackles one of America’s 21st century crises directly, candidly and at ground level – an epidemic of incarceration targeted at young Black men like Akon, whose keening voice sells the hopelessness of his plight. Akon claimed to have spent the early 00s inside on a three year stretch – when websites found no trace of this his story shifted, but his exaggerations don’t dent the emotional honesty in Akon’s stark, vulnerable singing.
They do however tell us to approach Akon and his marketing with a slight cynicism, a feeling justified by his management’s candid admission that “Locked Up” was a “street record” designed to build credibility as a backstop for when the much more pop oriented “Lonely” hit. It’s easy to imagine “Lonely” launching first and being treated as the gimmicky record it broadly is – “Locked Up” lets Akon present it as a display of versatility.
The thing that makes it a gimmick is also what makes it distinctive – the decision to take Bobby Vinton’s “Mr Lonely” hook and do it chipmunk-soul style. We looked a bit at the Kanye West influence on R&B and hip-hop production back in the “Like Toy Soldiers” entry, though there the emphasis was on the familiarity of the sample – not as much an issue here, “Mr Lonely” is 40 years old at this point – rather than the treatment of it. But it’s the chipmunk part of chipmunk soul which gives the technique a lot of its impact, making a familiar sample sound strange and emphasising that you’re flipping and using it, rather than just standing on its shoulders. In Eminem’s track the sample illustrates the song’s theme, but it’s also there as just a marker, a blast of punctuative hook in between the verses.
In “Lonely”, though, it’s a lot more intrusive – the song feels like a duet between Akon and Vinton, except Vinton’s been turned into a kind of Jiminy Crickit companion to the miserable singer. Speeding the sample up also has the effect of rendering Vinton somewhat uncanny, making him sound even older than the song is – and it was already a surprise to me to find it was post-Beatles at all. He seems like an old music box, a mocking ghost of pop’s past come to remind our young swaggerer that heartbreak is ancient and eternal.
This ageing effect suggests another comparison for “Lonely” – White Town’s “Your Woman”, which sounded like a lost artefact from the shellac age. But that song was a lot more successful – it got some of its power by Jyoti Mishra letting himself be caught in the time warp, his own voice sinking back into the crackle of a bygone time. “Lonely” keeps Akon firmly in the present day, and the result is like one of those animated films where live actors and cartoons meet: they can be charming, but they can easily feel artificial and awkward. With this song, I say the latter: the fact I’m discussing this means I was well outvoted.
Score: 4
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