Guilty thought: I’d like this song much more as an instrumental or even as a ‘song’, not a rap. Everything just clicks: the processed guitar strum that’s like Shek’spere with dirt under his nails, the string swells, the doorknocker beat (with a clap at the end for good measure.) And there are these little peals of electric blues running through the background that rise up just as the song is fading out. And echoing pings and twangs that play off the guitar, meant to sound like steel or slide guitar I guess but that sound straight out of a ’95 LTJ Bukem track. And Timbaland delivers what will probably be his only good chorus of the year (and a hilarious performance in the video, miming blues on an acoustic guitar, pulling the most ridiculous faces while doing so.) It’s tempting to say that Bubba will reverse Tim’s downward slide of late. This is his most stuffed track since ‘Cry Me A River’, but in place of that showpiece’s showboating, everything dovetails. Bubba does tend to bring out Tim’s most risk taking side, the cultish flipside perhaps to his use of Aaliyah as a ‘probe’ for his most far out ideas in a chart context. Literally a risk, in that this track hardly sounds like a hip-hop song at all: in fact, I don’t know what it sounds like, coming off somewhere between gospel, funk, shuffle-tech and southern boogie rock slowed down to 16rpm. It’s one of the best singles of the year.