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Last Hurrah

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Reviewer

Kristin Smith

Album Review

Bebe Rexha has quite a history of musical talent and contribution. She’s worked behind the scenes for years with artists such as Eminem, Rihanna, Selena Gomez and Lil Wayne, among others.

But it was her 2017 breakout hit “Meant to Be” (a collaboration with Florida Georgia Line) that pushed her to the next level of personal recognition. And now she’s stepping into the spotlight again with her latest hit, “Last Hurrah.”

This pop song focuses on Rexha’s bad habits, even as she vows to get clean. Rexha declares her intent to leave all her baggage in the backseat—that is, once she’s finished indulging … again.

Just One More Time

We all have some bad habits, ways of living we know need to change. But that doesn’t mean it’s easy, or that we really want to change.

Rexha says she wants to kick hers. So she says she’s done with “the drinking/ … the smoking/ … the playing/ … the joking/ …the ladies/ …the fellas,” as well as “the heartache” and her personal “demons.”

Well, maybe not just yet. Maybe … “right after this weekend.”

That’s because her real plan is to starting working in earnest on her “karma” after just “one more night of pure nirvana.” A night where she goes in at full speed, ignoring what’s really happening inside: “This is my last hurrah, once I start/I ain’t gonna stop ’til I go too far/Last hurrah and it’s OK/Maybe tomorrow I won’t feel this pain.”

Or, maybe she will.

Angels & Demons

A week after this song dropped, Rexha released its accompanying video, which takes the song to a whole new level of explicit. In a YouTube interview, Bebe told Zach Sang that there was an R-rated version. A version that apparently featured nuns smoking marijuana and other things, but that it was cut once her father and a few others watched.

But even with those scenes slashed, there’s still plenty of risqué material here. Bebe begins the video wearing pure, white angel wings and ends dressed in black leather, writhing on a bed in a red-lit room with a cross hanging on the back wall. And almost everything in between is pretty explicit.

The camera shows us people engaged in S&M; up-close shots of women in thongs, bras and pasties; same-sex kissing at clubs; nuns drinking alcohol and performing crude hand gestures at a strip club; and Rexha confessing to a Catholic priest … right before she lures him into a bathtub. Basically, it’s your standard “what’s the most shocking stuff we can show” kind of montage, mingling images of sex, religion and excess. One scene even appears to feature Rexha wearing both a halo and a crown of thorns.

There’s a lot more, but we’ll leave it at that.

Let Them Eat Cake?

Rexha’s latest track was, apparently, inspired by a slice of chocolatey goodness. Rexha shared that she had a friend who was on a strict diet and, moments later, broke it by eating a piece of cake.

Her friend wanted Rexha to think about writing a song based on the conflict of our inner desires—the good, the bad and the ugly. And while the song may have started with something as trivial as a diet, it’s evolved into much more.

“Last Hurrah” is about that inner battle, fighting against the urge to do what you know you shouldn’t do. But, as the song and video show, so many times we do it anyway. “I tell everybody it’s about chocolate cake,” Rexha joked in her interview with Sang. “We’re all trying to escape something and that’s OK, because nobody is perfect.”

It’s true: No one is perfect. We all make bad decisions at times and must learn from them.

But learning is the key word. If we continue to give in to our bad habits and temptations, they will only harm us in the long run.

This song, especially when combined with the video, sends a very different message: It’s OK to give in. It’s OK to escape. It’s OK to indulge. And the bad habits Bebe Rexha and her friends cave into here aren’t the kinds of things you likely want your kids watching and imitating.

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Kristin Smith

Kristin Smith joined the Plugged In team in 2017. Formerly a Spanish and English teacher, Kristin loves reading literature and eating authentic Mexican tacos. She and her husband, Eddy, love raising their children Judah and Selah. Kristin also has a deep affection for coffee, music, her dog (Cali) and cat (Aslan).