i really hate bye byes save for this one

BYE BYE
Mariah Carey
E=MC²

Rating: A+

Bye Bye was poised to be Mariah's 19th number hit with its multi-format hit potential. Sure it's not the best track off E=MC². Heck, her first single Touch My Body is an album filler. But Bye Bye, like all the songs off the new record, is just plain addictive. Like ice cream.

The track was produced by the Norwegian duo Stargate and surprisingly, it does not resemble anything like Beyonce's Irreplaceable, or Ne-Yo's So Sick or Jordin Spark's Tatoo. And just so you know, Mariah had already worked with these producers on the more popular version, the Make It Last Forever Remix of Thank God I Found You back in 1999, years before Beyonce even dreamt of singing "to the left, to the left".

The production is just so polished, the vocal layers so smoothing and beautiful. Structure's well-crafted - you can't go wrong with three sets of choruses. And the words indeed manage to tug at the listener's heart without being cheesy. It is a sweet and soft personal lamentation (and not seeing her back at number one tops the list of her woes), and yet the song still reaches out to her "peoples". It is, as of June 2008, the perfect commercial pop song. And the barely-there "hey's" interlaced in the chorus adds a tinge of urban flavor.

This would have been Mariah's nineteenth number one if not for the poor marketing strategy employed by her producers, and of course the ill-timed wedding.

Can I just blame this on global warming instead?

*******

And soon as you reach a better place, still I'll give the whole world to see your face. And I'm right here next to you. It feels like you're gone too soon, and the hardest thing to do is say bye bye.