Pitbull sez: Dance ’til you can’t dance no mo’, sip a lil’ somthin’, then hook up happily with a hottie you just met.
Plugged In sez: “Give Me Everything” is little more than a new-millennium take on Stephen Stills’ 1970 ode to free sex, “Love the One You’re With.”
The Black Eyed Peas have practically built a career on this hedonistic, don’t-think-about-tomorrow, it’s-all-about-tonight platform. Britney, Ke$ha, JLo and Lady Gaga have all offered their takes on the dance/drink/sex shtick, as have a list of rappers and R&B stars as long as your arm.
Now make that list as long as your leg, and add Armando Christian Pérez to it. The Cuban rapper better known as Pitbull tells a woman at the club, “Tonight I can make you my queen/I can make love to you en’less.” And lest she voice any hesitation to his hard sell, he hints that rollin’ with him might involve enjoying other fruits of his celeb status as well: “This is insane/The way my name growin’/Keep money flowin’/ … Can’t promise tomorrow/But I promise tonight.”
The suggestion that they need to party like it’s 1999 because tomorrow is 2012 is reinforced with this: “I might drink a little more tonight/And I might take you home with me if I could tonight/And baby I’ma make you feel so good tonight/’Cause we might not get tomorrow.”
Helping Pitbull deliver his carpe diem invitation to a night of casual carnality are established R&B singer Ne-Yo and relative newcomer Nayer. Dispensing with subtlety, Ne-Yo tells his conquest, “Tonight, I want all of you tonight/Give me everything tonight.” Then he tells everyone else in the club they should do likewise: “Grab somebody sexy and tell ’em, hey/Give me everything tonight.” Nayer isn’t quite so demanding, but she still ends up in the same place: “I want you tonight, I want you to stay/I want you tonight.”
The video matches the lyrics’ sensual vibe. Ne-Yo rides an elevator up to a dance club par-tay, sweet-talking his lady the whole way. Pitbull’s affections seem to go several directions when it comes to the women attracting his eye, with one of them stalking him via a closed-circuit security camera. But there’s no real plot here. Instead, it’s just folks dancin’ and drinkin’ (Voli vodka bottles are conspicuously placed throughout the video), Nayer sidling suggestively up to both male singers, and lots o’ leg and cleavage.
Pitbull swears he’s just having a good time and wants others to do the same. In an interview with Entertainment Weekly, he said, “With all the negativity going on in the world right now, people need an escape. When you give them a hit record or a great record, it allows them to escape for at least three to four minutes.”
Pitbull’s right about one thing: We do need a respite from the bad news of our day. But his ideas about what that escape should look like prove to be equally bad news.
After serving as an associate editor at NavPress’ Discipleship Journal and consulting editor for Current Thoughts and Trends, Adam now oversees the editing and publishing of Plugged In’s reviews as the site’s director. He and his wife, Jennifer, have three children. In their free time, the Holzes enjoy playing games, a variety of musical instruments, swimming and … watching movies.
