Why This Song Sucks: The Knux's 'Run,' featuring Kid Cudi

Why This Song Sucks: The Knux's "Run," featuring Kid Cudi

By Shea Serrano Wed., Sep. 28 2011 at 6:00 AM

[Editor's note: Why This Song Sucks determines why particular tracks blow using science. It appears on West Coast Sound every Wednesday.]

Song: The Knux's "Run," featuring Kid Cudi

History: Dang.

Everyone <3's The Knux. Including us. Especially us. They are L.A.'s gorgeous alt-hop twosome. They have cool hair. They wear jean jackets. Their second album Eraser came out yesterday.

They make music that makes you want to run as fast as you can. They have a (disguised) stylized nihilism that, at times, encapsulates hip-hop's new zeitgeist perfectly, even more readily than, say, the tired gangsterisms of Florida's biggest mistake (Plies), and maybe even as capably as their accidental savant (Ricky Ross). But they are not infallible.

Here on "Run" with their sordid, uncommitted guitars, with Kid Cudi's pointy shoes, and with their homogenization of the vibrant rap bailiwick that made them so vital three years ago, they are fallible like a motherfucker.

Morphology: "Run" is kissing cousins with the raunchier, decidedly more ambitious "She's So Up," the first track from Eraser.

Quick Aside: "Run" might be the quickest retread of a song since whatever Pitbull's last two songs about culos and boats were. If you're going to redo one of your own songs, you should wait AT LEAST three years to do so. Oh, BTW, Drake's Take Care in stores soon.

Cogent Evidence: The video is enormously entertaining. Watch it above. It is linear and spiraling and stars an attractive woman (cool) who shows her boobs (cool) but does not clean her vagina after peeing (not cool). Yet it does not mask the bruising banality of the song itself. The chorus:

I said she's gonna run, run, run; that girl's gonna run. Run, run, run; that girl's gonna run. Run, run, run; that girl's gonna run. (And she's gonna run.) Run, run, run; that girl's gonna run.

She may be going to run, but she's not really doing anything. She was probably too skinny in middle school. Her name is probably Jennifer. She probably spells it Jenipher.

Scientific Analysis: Via the site for Harvard's Science Center for Dissecting Knux Songmanship, this graphic proves precisely how uninspiring her devised existence is.

Tags:

Kid Cudi, The Knux, Why This Song Sucks

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Kevin Santana

ur such a fucking hater gtfo of here try to make a song or get sum money like them fag.

Brada3

Your retarded and have no idea wtf your talking about shut up critics will never understand the artists message

Militant Angeleno

You judge a song solely on lyrical content? How rock journalist. Pretty weak science right there.

West Coast Sound

Did you not read the part about sordid, uncommitted guitars?!

LaFemmeNoLa

I'm sure editing works wonders. Saw these guys live at event last week- not only were they lousy. No stage presence, spent half the time asking people to come closer to the stage. What they fail to recognize, playing good music at an acceptible decible will make people come forward. Blasting garbage? I'd rather be outside. Work on that fellas. Oh, and you may want to wash your hands, because word travels fast when you have members of your group stealing things from the very hands that hired you. Classless. And SKETCHY.

Pamallestandford79

Wtf are you talking about? No stage presence? I've been to plenty of their shows and they always kick ass. You obviously must be a Katy Perry fan or deaf if you would call the music they do garbage. Sorry

CuriousCat

What venue? Name names

Pamallestandford79

Wtf are you taking about? I've been to plenty of their shows and they always rock. You would have to be deaf to call they music that they create garbage. Sorry...