A historical fact: Poo Bear wrote two of the biggest jams of the early ’00s: Usher’s “Caught Up” and 112’s “Peaches and Cream.” Even on a personal level, it’s hard not to root for Jason “Poo Bear” Boyd. After their Connecticut home was destroyed by a tornado, he and his family moved to Atlanta, where he wrote his first hit at age 14 (112’s “Anywhere”). But hitmaking doesn’t last, particularly not when you attach yourself to folks Boyd described as shady characters, including mid-’00s producer and cautionary tale Scott Storch, whose mansion Poo Bear lived in at one point. Even his PR, like documentary Poo Bear: Afraid of Forever, calls the industry “devoid of mercy.”
Thank Justin Bieber—strange as the prospect might seem—for Poo Bear’s comeback. The two started hanging out earlier this decade (“making bad decisions with a minor—smoking weed and getting into trouble,” he told The New York Times then started hanging out writing songs, including Skrillex/Diplo collaboration “Where Are Ü Now” and “What Do You Mean.” While these hits didn’t start the tropical house trend—a few years prior, a wave of European chill like Klingande’s “Jubel” and Robin Schulz’s remix of Mr Probz’ “Waves,” was washing ashore in the States—they made them ubiquitous in shopping malls, festivals and car radios near you.
Since then, Poo Bear has been busy but has kept a relatively low profile. “I don’t want to oversaturate the market, and I want to keep this exclusivity,” he told the Times—an ultimately futile task, given the 15 tracks of micro-targeted guest features that comprise Bearthday Music, ranging from B-listers to C-listers to artists who peaked two decades ago to Bieber, exactly once. If it all seems a bit like leftovers, it’s because that’s exactly what the album is, as Boyd admitted to Rolling Stone. “So many great songs go in the place I call the music abyss: We make all these great songs, record them, and nobody hears a lot of them. I wanted to be a vehicle for putting out those records.”
Expect to see a lot more of these vehicles, which also include Sia’s This Is Acting or Charli XCX’s Pop 2. After all, there are no streaming royalties in the music abyss; better to release your scrapped material and make money off it then have the demo leak, like “Hard 2 Face Reality” did in 2014. But unlike Sia and Charli’s entries, Bearthday Music is a Poo Bear album in name and pun only; he doesn’t sing on most of the album, nor, as a topline writer, handle much of the production. And the problem with hanging your artistry on a bunch of other vocalists and producers is that you are counting on them to be good.
Instead, Bearthday Music is interchangeably chill, spanning every genre at its absolute lowest key. There’s trop-house for festival food-truck lines; hip-hop that’s so laid-back it’s sedated; way too many campfire strums like “Love Yourself”—the sort of radio filler Poo Bear said in 2017 he didn’t listen to, since “it’s not inspiring.” Producers include Skrillex, Boi-1da, and the Audibles, but the only way to tell their work apart is by reading their contracts.
Poo Bear was never a particularly showy songwriter—he tends toward “melodies simple enough for a child to sing along,” he told the Times—and his best hits rely on the likes of Usher’s star power or Jack Ü-like production pyrotechnics. Nobody provides those; everyone is debangerized. Ty Dolla $ign’s “That Shit Go” does not. Zara Larsson contributes “Either,” a song about hot, melodramatic, conflicted love that Larsson sings with all the inner turmoil of someone caught without a pencil sharpener. When anyone is memorable, it’s not in the way you’d want. Perhaps hoping to recapture her Murder Inc crossover days, Jennifer Lopez tries out triplets; it doesn’t go well. And it’s maybe not the best move, as a lyricist, to hand your opening track and single off to Jay Electronica and these #deep words: “Love and death are quite similar/How they come and go like cat burglars/Reality is kind of hard to face/Like actual facts is to flat-earthers.” (To be fair, it’s hardly the worst thing written by a Roc Nation affiliate this month.)
None of this is Poo Bear’s fault, of course, but his name is on it, and he doesn’t offset it. Listening to the album straight through is like reading the source code to a recommendation algorithm: possible, but a slog and beside the point. Which is a shame, because the most missable track in the streaming context is the last one, “Early or Late”: Poo Bear’s one track here without a guest feature and, probably not coincidentally, the one track that exudes the R&B warmth of his older hits. “I don't want to be an artist,” Boyd told Rolling Stone, but nobody else is stepping up.
