Give Me Take You

The new Timbaland track "Give It To Me" is compelling to me for a few reasons.  It's fairly enjoyable, firstly, as music, but it's also on the level of being something of a song that's appealing for all the same reasons that reality TV is.  You've got some kind of social viewpoint or staging of the three successful figures in the song, Nelly Furtado, Justin Timberlake, Timbaland.

It's common to gawk at the blatantly insignificant nature of lyrics like Timbaland's – he uses most of his mic time just to give himself props and to fuel a beef with a former protege – but there is one line in the song that's particularly interesting to me.  Even though they make it clear they aren't out to hurt anyone, the tone of the song, which I might simply call Adult, also lets on that they don't have any pretensions of looking out for anyone either.  So, when Nelly Furtado croons that they'll be "acting real nice" there's no doubt that there's some menace at work, however incidental it might be.

"Acting real nice" in the context of a rap song lyric is amazing to me because it is basically claiming manners as a possession, and a powerful one worth bragging about.  Why bother being real nice and then bore everyone by bragging about it?  Not that there's anything wrong with possessing social graces, but if there's a hint of compassion in the words, it barely registers with me, or is drowned out by all the other uncomplimentary sounds about it.  For me, the song borders on being the sort of uncomfortable reminder of people's shifting and manipulative persona's that you would find in the bleaker sections a Bergman film.