No. 33: Eve Shakes Her Way Onto Our List
Because the song at No. 33 moves to the beat of a… well, you know.
Really, this spot could have gone to either Eve’s “Tambourine” or to Beyonce’s late-breaking B’Day single “Get Me Bodied,” which is to say that, for all of Eve’s curled-lip sass or B’s hair-pulling ecstasy, the spot really belongs to the semi-ubiquitous Swizz Beatz, responsible for the best of the recent wave of uptempo urban dance records not produced by the Timbahands team or one of their entranced proteges/biters, polyrhythmic late-decade playground jams played by the self-proclaimed one-man-band like a one-man-pep-rally: manic layered percussion, disco whistles, rung alarms, and shouted/sampled hooks, no brass section necessary. (In the end we picked “Tambourine” because it’s your typical snapping 21st-century Swizz track but, like, moreso, buzzier and stuffed with little drum hooks and snare fills.) “You gotta shake your ass,” but compared to the Euro-steppers ease of “The Way I Are” and its ilk, you gotta work twice as hard here to keep that ass from tripping itself up.
Eve – “Tambourine” [YouTube] Idolator’s 2007 Top 40 List Of Awesomeness