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The second is to focus strictly on the merits of Robin Thicke’s new The Evolution of Robin Thicke (Star Trak). It is a balanced record in that the dirty funk of songs like “Cocaine” is enough to negate the other parts, which sound exactly like how you remember bad Babyface songs sounding. This approach is as boring as his songs that sound like bad Babyface.
The other way is to play the race angle, which you might phrase as, “Who the hell is in charge of handing out ghetto passes these days?” Back in 2002, John Mayer was the guy who wanted to romantically bad-touch that one actress, Justin Timberlake was barely getting over the video where N*Sync were supposed to be puppets, and Robin Thicke was cruising the streets of New York by bike in possibly the most douche-chillingly white video of all time. Now Mayer is the most beloved guitarist in hip-hop, T.I. showing up on a JT track makes more than strictly financial sense, and The Evolution of Robin Thicke has not one, but two songs with Lil Wayne — one of them a rerelease of a track from Weezy’s Tha Carter II, which means that Thicke somehow got on the best rap record of last year. I’ve always loved the way that hip-hop’s embraced the most random-seeming trends, but the whitebread-white-boy-as-accessory thing is at the very least perplexing. You’d figure hanging out with dudes who order from the J. Crew catalog could only hurt your hard-earned/well-scripted street cred.
