In Nelly Furtado’s hit song “Promiscuous,” she and Timbaland exchange quips like “Is that the truth or are you talkin’ trash/ Is your game MVP like Steve Nash?”
Thankfully for Furtado, voting for the NBA’s MVP didn’t go differently. Otherwise, she might have been stuck with the unenviable task of finding a rhyme for “Nowitzki.”
The song and its many puns is the latest entry in a rich, if not particularly esteemed, pop tradition: the conversational, call-and-response tune. Furtado and Timbaland, who produced her new album “Loose,” trade lyrics in a talky, flirtatious manner.
Furtado: “Pay attention to me. I don’t talk for my health.”
Timbaland: “I want you on my team.”
Furtado: “So does everybody else.”
The video for the song (which also features a Justin Timberlake cameo) at one point even turns into a split screen, with Furtado and Timbaland purring on opposite ends of a cell-phone call. The song is currently the no. 3 single in the country, according to Billboard magazine.
“It’s that whole dance that goes on,” Furtado said in a recent interview with MTV. “There’s that mystery there, the fun, playful sexiness, the verbal Ping-Pong game.”
’80s throwbackBut there is a question of whether the style of “Promiscuous” is dated. It immediately recalls Positive K’s 1992 one-hit-wonder, “I Got a Man,” a song that — one would have thought — could only have existed in the late ’80s or early ’90s.
Positive K: “What’s your man got to do with me?”
A (unnamed) girl: “I got a man.”
Positive K: “I’m not tryin’ to hear that, see.”
Part of Furtado’s aim with “Loose” is an ’80s sound, says David Hiatt, associate editor of Rolling Stone, which recently ranked “Promiscuous” as the magazine’s favorite song. The second single from “Loose” is the equally catchy “Maneater” — an obvious allusion to the 1982 Hall & Oates song by the same name.
“The entire Furtado album all feels retro,” Hiatt says. “It’s kind of retro in the same way that the Gwen Stefani album (“Love. Angel. Music. Baby.”) was an effort to make an ‘80s party dance album.”
There are, of course, many other examples. LL Cool J’s 1995 nearly X-rated single “Doin’ It” also featured a guy and a girl cooing back-and-forth. It’s clearly the standard dynamic for these type of tunes.
“There’s something about that male-female interplay that screams to pop radio, ‘Play me!”’ says Hiatt.
Call and response, then and nowThe Montreal band Stars is naturally given to such give-and-take since it features two singers with distinct voices: Torquil Campbell and Amy Millan. But they take a darker, more reserved approach.
On “One More Night,” off their 2004 album, “Set Yourself on Fire,” Campbell and Millan trade verses, singing from the alternate perspectives of a just broken-up couple spending one last night together at a “dark little heaven at the top of the stairs.”
“Take me like that/ ruin it all/ then build it again by the light in the hall,” sings Millan.
But the tradition goes much further back. “Baby, It’s Cold Outside,” a hit in 1949, really isn’t so different than “Promiscuous.”
Female: “My maiden aunt’s mind is vicious.”
Male: “Gosh your lips look delicious.”
Female: “Well maybe just a half a drink more.”
Sung by many, from Dean Martin to Jessica Simpson, it was a more innocent duet about a fast-talker trying to convince a promiscuous girl to stick around. To accomplish the task, Martin, Positive K and Timbaland all employ wit, rhyme and even a little reason.
After all, baby, it really is cold outside.