Hot-to-trot collaborations enliven music scene
Adam Levine (left) and Gal Gadot in “Girls Like You”
When the world around you is in such a disputatious mess, you can always rely on music and its endorphin-releasing ability to chase the blues away.
The start of the rainy season enlivens the pop charts with hot-to-trot collaborations that don’t rely on quarrelsome hip-hop artists rapping about who’s better or richer to keep the entertainment biz eventful. But oftentimes, the music itself is more than enough.
Take Maroon 5’s feel-good “Girls Like You,” which has lead singer Adam Levine and Cardi B paying tribute to fun-loving girls who demand to be taken seriously.
The single is catchy as all get-out, but its music video amps up its viewability by getting extraordinary women, each one as successful as the next, to shake, swing and shimmy with Adam as he sings about “spending the night/making things right.”
If you think you saw “Wonder Woman’s” Gal Gadot, TV host Ellen DeGeneres and singer-actress Jennifer Lopez sharing the screen with Adam, your eyes weren’t playing tricks on you. In fact, they’re just three of Adam’s 26 fabulous guests in the video.
The stellar guest list includes (in order of appearance) singer Camila Cabello, comedienne Phoebe Robinson, Olympic gymnast Aly Raisman, actress-comedienne Sarah Silverman, Gal, vlogger Lily Singh, author Amani Al-Khatahtbeh, actress-producer Trace Lysette, comedienne Tiffany Haddish, activist Angy Rivera, YouTube personality Franchesca Ramsey, “Stranger Things” actress Millie Bobbie Brown, Ellen, Cardi B, JLo, Olympic snowboarder Chloe Kim, World Cup soccer champ Alex Morgan, recording artist Mary J. Blige, actress Beanie Feldstein, activist Jackie Fielder, race car driver Danica Patrick, politician Ilhan Omar, actress-director Elizabeth Banks, plus-size supermodel Ashley Graham, singer-actress Rita Ora and Adam’s wife, Namibian model Behati Prinsloo. Go, girls!
For her part, Christina Aguilera trades flirtatious lines with 25-year-old new wave rapper GoldLink in “Like I Do,” a cat-and-mouse chase-themed, R&B-tinged cut from her eighth studio album, “Liberation.”
Christina Aguilera
The song features fun-filled song-and-rap froth as Christina puts her playful guest in his place during
their “little fuss and fighting,” and reminds him who’s the boss: “Stop talking, you’re so much better when you don’t speak/Can’t play me, I’m out of your league/You can’t do it quite like I do/I may not want to, but [I] just might have to show you what I do/Show
some respect, and it can go far for you.”
In “Solo,” Demi Lovato’s dance-floor thumper with Clean Bandit, not even heartbreak can stop the singer from having a good time. This time, the 25-year-old singer cheers herself up by going dancing, even without a man by her side: “Every single night, I lose it/I can’t even hear the music without you/Try to stop myself from calling/But, I really wanna know if you’re with someone new/I wanna woop-woop-woop, but I’m brokenhearted/Cry, since the day we parted/Touch, but I got nobody here on my own/ So, I do it solo.”
Demi Lovato
Unlike Demi, Troye Sivan and his friend Ariana Grande don’t even need to paint the town red to “party and play,” as their mellow dance single “Dance to This” demonstrates.
Troye Sivan (left) and Ariana Grande
The noirish, hook-heavy jam tells the story of a couple who doesn’t mind dancing “under the kitchen lights” as long as they can spend every night with each other.
