I had my doubts from the moment I heard Selena Gomez was going to be featured on the remix of Rema’s hit song “Calm Down.”
Let me start by saying that Rema did not need Selena Gomez in order to make this song popular, the original already had more than 100M Spotify streams. Those are astronomical and impressive numbers for any artist to achieve, let alone a young, up & coming artist from Africa.
My biggest hesitation with this collaboration mostly had to do with my belief that Selena’s voice would not mesh well on this song. See Selena sings like she’s whispering almost, not saying it is a bad thing, I just didn’t believe it would flow well with “Calm Down.” I finally listened to the remix and I was both pleasantly surprised and to some extent affirmed in my hesitation of the collaboration.
Selena’s first verse should have stayed in the drafts; it did nothing to move the song forward or make it any more interesting than it already was. The verse mostly sounded like a forced conversation from her part, instead of a smooth iteration of the lyrics as required by the beat. As in, madam, that was really unnecessary.
So, I really thought the Disney star had lost me just from her first verse, but then as Disney child stars do best, she brought the magic of Mickey Mouse to the chorus when she started singing, “Baby show me you can calm down, calm down.” At the moment is when I actually started to vibe to her singing. Selena you really had me fooled in the first half but you redeemed yourself with that chorus. Not only did I like her individual portion of the chorus, but I enjoyed it even more when Rema and Selena’s voices were in-sync. The engineer and producer knew what they were doing by meshing these two voices together on that portion of the song. Together they sounded like a beautiful collision of two different cultures.
Now let’s go to her second verse, my sister in Christ, you really disappointed me with that second verse of yours. Abeg, Selena had me hooked on the chorus only to let me down on her second verse. Now I am no longer calming down, rather falling down in utter disappointment. Just like her first verse, this second one did nothing to progress the song forward. The whole point of a remix is to bring something different to the original song. When it comes to her individual verses, our beloved sister did not understand the assignment, I fear.
At the end of the day, I am still resolved in my initial thought that this collaboration makes zero sense artistically.
Now on the business side, that is a totally different story!
Aside from the music aspect of this collaboration, everything about it actually makes sense. From a business perspective, an artist would be stupid not to do a collaboration with the famed Disney childhood star and fifth most followed (344M+) individual on Instagram. Rema on the other hand has only 3.7M instagram followers, which is a pretty good number on its own but compared to Selena’s we are clearly discussing two individuals at different points in their careers. She has 30M youtube subscribers and several music videos with over 400M+ views. The song already has 5.7M+ Spotify streams in less than a week of release, so it’s clearly doing well.
The level of exposure that Rema will undoubtedly gain from this collaboration should not be underestimated. These two artists have very different audiences in terms of music taste, but their fan bases are similar in that they are a more younger, diverse and open-minded crowd (Millennials & Gen Z) that spends a large part of their time on social media and streaming platforms.
Rema could not have picked a better collaborator in his quest to expand his fanbase, but I am afraid Selena’s voice proved insufficient for the task of artistic value-add to “Calm Down.”
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