Ever since Diplo and his larger Hollertronix collective started bringing fairly unvarnished versions of popular urban genres like crunk, Bmore club, and Miami bass to the discerning hipster elite, there's seemingly always been a steady undercurrent of backlash directed at the crew either on the grounds of lazy cultural appropriation or cynically ironic repackaging. To his credit, Diplo's always seemed like a genuine, serious student of his favorite sounds, and the tunes have been almost uniformly hot, so it was easy to accept not only an icon-in-her-own-right like M.I.A. but also a savvy chameleon like Santigold and even, to a degree, expertly crass party-starters like Spank Rock.
But, I suppose, a line must be drawn in the sand, and thrusting her crotch in the air obliviously on the wrong side of the divide is Amanda Blank. She's no Maya or Santi for sure, but vitriol against the girl has been especially intense considering that up until now she'd been on only a couple of mixtapes and on one track from Spank Rock's debut. Perhaps some of the extra-forceful disdain is owing to the fact that Blank sort of feels like the last bulwark between some imagined indie community of shared self-awareness and an outright void of crassness. Either she's working too hard to construct a mimetic parody of materialistic fuck-pop, or she's not working hard enough to separate herself from it. Either way, I don't see how you're not better off listening to Lady Gaga, who at least offers pretty good hooks.
A few good hooks, in fact, would go a considerable way toward redeeming Blank's largely forgettable debut, I Love You. Remember, Santigold's eponymous bow certainly didn't blaze any trails either, but it was chock full of irresistible, indelible tunes. Not so with Blank, who submits an album that runs a mere 33 minutes and yet still can't manage to outfit it properly, eschewing even the pursuit of catchiness and pop fun in favor of deathly deterministic robo-chants like "Lemme get some/ You don't want none" and "hottest motherfucker on the whole damn block," repeated ad nauseum. (Admittedly, "Big Heavy" does have a nice Blondie-ish breeze.) The torpor extends to Diplo, Switch, and Blank's other beatminders, who largely recycle well-worn tricks they've ponied up elsewhere, from the skipping vocal samples and dancehall drum fills of "Something Bigger, Something Better" to the crunk claps of "Lemme Get Some". Only "DJ", with its burbling techno groove, really succeeds at wringing something useful from Blank's "persona," evocatively communicating the self-abnegation of loneliness without sounding too much like a Peaches-level lobotomy victim. Of course, it's sandwiched between two tracks that troublingly rely on a beloved 1980s pop classic for much of their juice, Blank's Top Ranking mixtape holdover "A Love Song" (interpolating LL Cool J's "I Need Love") and I Love You's first single, the pointlessly "titillating" "Might Like You Better", which cannibalizes Romeo Void's "Never Say Never". Keep in mind, to date these are Blank's two best-known songs.
Far more apropos is the straight-up cover of Vanity 6's trashy relic, "Make-Up", a song penned for the 80s pop tarts by their puppetmaster, Prince. I don't know who's responsible for picking this song for the album, but if it's Blank then I at least ought to tip my cap at her stunningly precise grasp of her own place within the Diploverse.
