There are meetings between genres where creative sparks fly and new hybrid forms can be glimpsed, like undreamed-of particles in a supercollider. There are also meetings between genres which feel more like high level EU summits – whatever happens behind closed doors, the eventual communiqué is a document of pluperfect blandness. Guess which one Nelly ft Tim McGraw is!
Outside the US, McGraw’s legacy probably rests on a Taylor Swift namecheck: within the world of country music, he was a seriously big deal at this point, half of a Nashville power couple with Faith Hill and the writer of some of the top country songs of the late 90s, none of which I’d heard of before I started writing this. Which illustrates how much mainstream country simply didn’t travel – there’s no other English-language genre I’d have been so ignorant of – and underlines how weird it is that Tim McGraw has a Number 1 hit.
It’s an artefact, of course, of Nelly’s top-class marketing team and their negotiation of the release schedule to nab a second No.1 from Sweat/Suit. Like “My Place”, it’s an exploration of Nelly’s sensitive side, and his role as singer rather than rapper – his cadences shift to a leisurely flow on the verses, but the division of labour here is more complicated than the already-traditional rapper and hook singer. Nelly and Tim finish each other’s lines on the chorus, mirroring the effect of the split-screen video which presents the two going about their suddenly lonely parallel lives after getting ditched, brothers in wealth and misery.
Elsewhere McGraw gets a line or two, but mostly this is Nelly’s show, over a looped guitar lick and inobtrusive backbeat. The chorus and video make the essential point, though, offering the song’s answer to this duet’s implied question: what is the common ground between country and rap? In this case, wounded masculinity. Two sensitive, hurt, manly men articulating their identical pain but never touching: this is a duet, but in no way a dialogue.
A dialogue might have been more interesting. Anything might have been more interesting. “Over And Over” captures the miserable drag of the days after a relationship ends with too-dreary accuracy. It lives up to its title, returning continually to its one middling hook, wasting McGraw’s rich voice and Nelly’s charisma. Both men give polished, uninspiring performances and the track leaves no impression beyond an evanescent sense that an opportunity might, somewhere, somehow, have been missed.
What that opportunity might be is open to question. “Over And Over” is far from the first attempt to create a space where rap and country music can meet, and it won’t be the last. Some encounters are much more successful than this – eventually we’ll meet one – but as far as I’m aware most remain one-offs.
Still, the thought persists that something valuable must emerge when two such mighty American musics come together. Perhaps it’s also just that the opposite idea – that absorbing and drawing on hip-hop is a step too far for modern country – has implications that play into broader polarisations. But in this case the result feels more like a cross-brand promotion than music with any reason to exist.
(This entry is an example of where a gap between Patreon and site posting changed the context a bit – obviously since me writing this in November, the release of Cowboy Carter has shifted the conversation on the relationship between Black American music and country. I’ve not altered the entry, though, as that record has produced a later #1 and the questions and answers it creates are very different to the ones from this half-arsed collaboration)
Score: 4
[Logged in users can award their own score]
*hums ‘Baby Jump*
Tim McGraw having a UK number one is probably equivalent to EMF having a US number one.
Have long felt that the music is least interesting thing about McGraw. He’s a rare Nashville Democrat, he was involved in a bizarre incident in which Kenny Chesney stole a police horse and McGraw blocked the cops going in pursuit(!), there’s his parentage*, and there’s the Taylor song… His music, though? Utterly forgettable, I feel (happy to be proved wrong, though, if anyone can recommend his better stuff.)
*He was the issue of an apparent one-night stand. The father (Tug McGraw) was a then-unknown baseball player who eventually became a pretty famous baseball player – one of the big stars of the 1980 World Series (I, at least, have vivid memories of his pitching in those games). Tim McGraw apparently didn’t know that Tug was his father for a big chunk of his childhood, and then it took another chunk of time before Tug acknowledged him, although he eventually came round – I mean, that’s a country song in itself, right?
I’ll go slap bang in the middle with a 5/10 myself. Nothing offensive in my opinion, but perhaps not too much to get excited about. A tad on the repetitive side to my ears.
Always really liked this one. It’s ‘pretty’, which probably isn’t always desirable, but it is here. The song plays out in muted, pastel colours and subdued sounds. Everything, including the singing, is reduced to a whisper or a sigh, two singers and their scraped out sounds weaving icy gossamers around each other. Even the song feels intently underwritten and sketch-like, an emotional holding space for the singers to wallow in.
Only the gentle beat really marks out this out as R&B. Otherwise, if I had no idea who Tim was (and for many years I didn’t) I’d have singled out the track’s moroseness and gentle twang for evoking certain strains of post-punk or dream pop – those that the xx would revive a few years down the line – trapped within almost Ghost Box-y touches of ambient sound design (the record crackles, the 40s radio microphone effect on the middle-eight, the unresolved tapering off at the end). The effects may be there to fence the record in, to keep its melancholy from being overbearing, but if I squint my ears the effect is almost Tricky circa Nearly God. 7
Downloaded this at the time as I loved the gentle nature of it. Though can see how that could come across as lackadaisical and monotone.
Not sure how much Tim McGraw adds to this track, it is clearly a Nelly R’n’B lead, with mild faux country slightly mixed in.
There’s a awful lot of bunnies between now and Lil Nas X where “X ft. Y” collaborations feel like they got picked by the spin of the wheel. In that respect alone, “Over and Over” is a pioneering record.
It’s otherwise entirely innocuous “R&B for radio playlists that wouldn’t include much other R&B”, like “Dilemma” but not as good. That’s surely why we meet it – it’s the spiritual follow-up to one of the broadest hits of the preceding couple of years – but it doesn’t make it any fun. 4 is maybe harsh, but 5 isn’t.
The last of the four guest hosts before the big change in hosts (on the next Number One single) this chart show week – Scott Mills and Edith Bowman.
This song gets a 4 for me, or maybe a 5 depending on the mood.