Wildstar
Urban Contemporary, 2002
Craig David’s transformation from garage/R&B star to porn star is cemented in the risque-sounding Slicker Than Your Average. Of course, he’s singing all about making love to hot chicks non-stop, but come on, look at him posing in the CD booklet! If Abercrombie And Fitch ditches its white boys, Craig David will be a shoo-in to lead off their summer catalog.
The title track is a puzzling diatribe against people who rip off his style and pry into his life. It’s a pretty rough track compared to Mr David’s slick R&B sounds he is used to doing, but I’m more puzzled by the fact that this silly twit actually thinks that the world cares about his private life. I mean, dude, you’re only putting out your second CD. After you get a freak nose job and ET eyes like Michael Jackson, then we’ll talking about invasion of privacy issues.
The tracks here are well-produced pap. It’s nice to hear a man singing for once instead of rapping bling-bling stuff like hos and cars and peppering “Murder, Inc” or “Ho! Ho! It’s getting so hot, take off your clothes!” inanities all over some female background singer’s vocals, but what Mr David is singing isn’t much different from the “girls, girls, girls, take off your clothes!” variety. And it can be pretty risque too (“I’m behind you in your bedroom/With your hands against the wall/But keeping one eye on the door” – Personal, a track about screwing his girlfriend while her parents are still in the same house). The 7 Days young lad has grown up to be a street hustler.
I love the bouncy Hidden Agenda with its smooth tongue-twister vocal stylistics and kind of like the ballad Rise and Fall, a duet with Sting, and the mid-tempo ballad You Don’t Miss Your Water (‘Til The Well Runs Dry), but most of the tracks here share the same production and vocal stylistics that get monotonous after a while.
Slick but tad derivative, with mixed, half baked rants against privacy invasion and other predictable “growing up statements”, Craig David’s CD isn’t bad, but at the same time, it can’t hurt if he gets his priorities straight first. Fast Cars and World Filled With Love don’t go together. It’s actually strange to talk about wanting privacy when you are singing about screwing your latest gal with the door wide open and the parents just downstairs. But that boy looks good, and it may be some consolation that he’ll probably grow up to be a big, soulful guy one day.
