Pitchfork

Shock Value is still a pretty unfortunate album, aesthetically and pop-chart-wise (current position: #60; #59 is Starbucks' Monterrey International Pop Festival CD), and "The Way I Are" is one of its more perplexing tracks: even if you're highly attuned to the artifice that dictates the flexible "sincerity" of a pop star's first-person in-song exploits and tend to ignore the logicistical inconsistencies, hearing Tim flatly drone about how he doesn't have any money on an album where he spends the rest of his time talking about how he does, in fact, have huge fucking piles of it kind of squashes the sentiment. That, plus the beat is a bad pseudo-trance version of "Push It". At least Keri Hilson sounds good, and not just as the only person on this track that doesn't sound less melodious than Gary Numan.

Since it's the latest single from Shock Value, there's a video, which (if you view it on the official Timbaland site) is "presented by McDonald's Double Quarter Pounder." This might tangentially fit the song's "I am broke yet I still love you" theme if you act under the assumption that broke people tend to gravitate towards low-cost high-calorie fast food, or maybe under a different assumption that a post-MTV economy requires videos from modestly-successful or unsuccessful albums to be subsidized by non-music industry sponsors. Pointless Adbuster-ness aside, though, Timbaland doesn't do much to act on the conceit of the track, unless you count "the video budget gave us just enough room for some stadium lights and a fog machine; hopefully we can scout a decent warehouse basement on the cheap" as a good signifier of everyman low cash flow situations. I don't know any poor people with suits that nice, I'll say that much.

Also, there's some soccer players.

[From Shock Value; out now on Interscope]