Cher Lloyd – ‘Swagger Jagger’

This review was submitted by Philip Lickley, who runs the music blog .Wav Goodbye.

If you were born in the mid-eighties like myself then, when choosing a television channel to watch, you would have ended up on ‘Cartoon Network’, a 24-hour channel dedicated to nothing but cartoons. Before the explosion in new mid-nineties shows the channel was full of re-runs of classic cartoons: you know, ‘Tom and Jerry’, ‘The Flintstones’ and, my personal favourite, ‘Wacky Races’. But it wasn’t one of these shows that jumped back into my memory when playing the debut single by X-Factor reject Cher Lloyd. It was the classic Hanna-Barbera cartoon ‘Huckleberry Hound’, the blue dog that was always a little on the gloomy side and famous for singing the old song ‘Oh My Darling Clementine’. You see, you’re humming it now.

Now imagine you take this song and give it to a DJ to mash-up with Gwen Stefani’s 2005 song ‘Hollaback Girl’. Got it? Then this is what you get from Cher Lloyd, a song that flip-flops from her lyrical riff on the classic song to a pastiche of Gwen’s rapping, whilst someone operates an electronic hedge trimmer in the background. Oh, and it pays tribute to Missy Elliot and Benny Benassi before its three-and-a-half minutes are out.

Already this month we’ve had Rebecca “Friday, Friday, Gotta Get Down on Friday” Black dissing her haters in ‘My Moment’ and now we have Cher doing the same. Oh, and Maroon 5 are soon to release a song called ‘Moves Like Jagger’. I hope Mick has some copyright on his name? He’ll make a mint.

I suppose the title of ‘Haters, you’re taking the Mick’ was the working title of this song.
Swagger Jagger’ is an unusual song. It’s as if she had three good ideas for tracks and couldn’t place them anywhere on the album, so decided to weld them together in some form of electronic club-friendly dance tune with a ballad chorus.

Lyrically it’s not that bad, if a little on the basic side with her attempting to shoe-horn in every rhyming word to ‘hater’ as if to give the rhyming title competition in the tenuous stakes, but manages to throw in a reference to Twitter in its oeuvre of words, which at least gives it a more modern theme against its c. 1884 sampled chorus.

Swagger Jagger’ is a classic cut-and-paste track, taking its inspiration from more sources than a University dissertation. But it’s harmless and, dare I say it, quite catchy even if it’s a mess of styles and tempos.

The haters will love it.

Buy Swagger Jagger from the All-Noise music store.