Album Review: DIRTY BLONDE by Bebe Rexha
Bebe Rexha’s fourth album hides prayers and panic inside dance-pop hooks built for a packed room. Her plainest, meanest writing about herself beats every chant about bouncing.
Everything here is post-midnight. Somewhere in a club, someone’s telling the bouncer not to turn on the lights. The dark’s got work to do. As long as the morning can’t get in, the night has to wait; whatever’s on the other side gets pushed one more song back. Mostly, the tracks are what they say they are. Glossy, high-end pop pitched at a floor full of bodies. Bebe Rexha has had ten years to build hooks like these—earworms that should lodge in place and never leave. Rexha stuffs her tracks with material they were never made to contain. A prayer finds itself amid the bounce. A fear of not making it home snakes its way beneath a chorus. The hook stays intact, the confession travels on the inside of the record.
“Lord, forgive me,” Rexha asks on the open of “Hysteria,” “If I don’t make it home tonight.” Two lines later, the track’s all crowd-work—“Turn it up, make it bounce/Hysteria in the crowd/Got the world in a trance”—and the prayer is never answered or acknowledged. It lingers at the doorway as the drums shove it into “bang your head, don’t kill the vibe.” The same trick holds, with a higher lift, through “Çike Çike.” Its chanted, Albanian hook (“Çike, çike, luje belin, çike”) goes round the waiting-for-an-Uber, a phone number pressed into a hand with a 347 area code, and a bouncer brushed away; almost tossed into the side, in the bridge, is the real admission—“I just came here to clear my mind.” “Tokyo” has a one-night stand with someone who was told that she was a fan. Rexha ditched the boyfriend she came with in a single aside, “Left my boyfriend in Nantucket,” and talked herself into the assignation, “I’m out in Tokyo, so my attitude is ‘Fuck it.’”
On “$.H.I.T.” and “Nobody’s There,” she’s picked a bit and followed it to the very end. The “S.H.I.T.” bit is a pun that she will not let go of: “I’m the sugar-honey iced tea,” spelled out for anyone who hasn’t followed yet, “I’m the S-H-I-T.” If that’s the line, the verse has to fill it in with a week’s worth of personality, Monday having fun, Tuesday blowing someone off, Wednesday being loved, Thursday being single, Friday a freak, Saturday a creep, and then, “Sunday, I’m asleep like a sweet little angel.” “Nobody’s There” turns that swagger into the third person; into a “she” who’s got “fire in her eyes” and “can make the room go loud,” and wants to “dance like nobody’s watching, like nobody’s there.” That “she” is Rexha from an arm’s length away; that restless urgency is handed over to someone who she can watch over the room.
When she reaches for something bigger than a bit, the writing thins like “New Religion,” Built on interpolating Faithless’ 1995 single “Insomnia,” she wants the floor to feel like salvation and states it explicitly: “I feel the beat, I feel the beat/It’s like a new religion.” The bridge reaches for a real before and after: “I used to believe there was nothing for me/That nowhere was where I belonged,” and then the song just keeps widening that one hook. ‘Drink and a Little Love’ has a better, smaller idea, exhaustion as its own ache. “Stressin’ all day,” she sings, “I’ve been cryin’ my heart out,” and all she wants is “a drink and a little love.” ‘Life has been lifin’, she admits, and the song settles for pleasant when the words under it are tired enough to be sad.
Light acts like a switch; she keeps flipping it the wrong way. ‘Lights off, what just happened?” is how the chaos begins on ‘Hysteria.” “Don’t turn the lights on,” she pleads on “Nobody’s There,” “don’t let the morning come,” and the logic is clear. A dark room means the night can’t end, and the reckoning can’t begin. “Sad Girls,” the David Guetta collaboration, makes that bargain its whole theme. She watches someone leave with another and dances anyway, “tears dipped in glitter and Molly,” stating “I’m alright for the hundredth time,” and then, flatly, “That’s a lie.” Then she’s begging to keep the room dark: ‘I’m not ready for the lights back on.”
Two songs let the dance lift go almost entirely and are the better for it. “i like you better than me” runs on comparison and self-hatred, a hook that fixates on wanting to “fit in those size-two jeans” and a verse that fully embraces the ugly machinery: “I get off on being insecure,” “there’s something wrong with me for sure.” When a friend’s positivity makes it worse, she names that, too, “your toxic positivity... You know you’re only making it worse.” “Night Falls” takes a slower, darker turn, loneliness setting in “when the night falls,” thoughts of an ex that “makes my skin crawl,” her mind reported from the inside as “way too dark,” waiting for “a glimpse of light,” while the chorus repeats its message that ‘never gets better.” Bluntly, in her own words, the dread carries more weight than any chant about bouncing.
The best of these shifts that blame outward and become really ugly. Rexha speeds past the house of an old flame in “Time” and flat-lines her position (“I wasted all my best years on you,” “I’m fucking bitter, but I’m not a victim,”“I had to lose and let you win, to love myself again”), and you know, that’s the line, that’s the end of the story. The chorus circles round one plain statement of truth—“So many good times/But I never had a good time,” and that tells me more than all of “New Religion” does of a successful one. Similarly, “One Day” is a curse, with Rexha promising her ex he’ll be “haunted by the ghost of me.” The really great parts are quieter than all of that and, at least, less earnest. Halfway through “The Way I Want You,” having just admitted to still calling him up at 4AM, and admitting that “the pills don’t work the same anymore,” Rexha hits the joke—“I talk to my therapist like a billion times/And that bitch is overpaid.” It follows with the real reason we’re all still depressed (“my anxiety won’t go away”) and a perfect sentence for any bad relationship (“sick and tired of being sick and tired of loving you”). All that uncomplicated meanness is the greatest thing to come out of Bebe Rexha’s DIRTY BLONDE.
Great (★★★★☆)
Favorite Track(s): “i like you better than me,” “Time,” “The Way I Want You”