The video for "BeFoUr" places Zayn among ordinary British kids they engage in a little risky behavior, lighting bonfires and driving too fast, but mostly they just drift from haircuts to workouts to fast-food jobs and afternoons endlessly hanging around. Pop is often about uplift, but right now it's about getting through the day.
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So many pop songs right now reflect young people's attempts to step forward while feeling uncertain and overwhelmed: Justin Bieber's resentful " Love Yourself" the chilly declaration of self-sufficiency " Me, Myself & I" by rapper G-Eazy with Bebe Rexha 21 Pilots' self-explanatory " Stressed Out" Zayn's own angsty " Pillowtalk," which puts aside romantic dreams to confront how sex, especially in this moment of roofies and rape awareness, can feel like a war zone.
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Denied both the comfort of familiarity and the thrill of freshness, Zayn enters the cool light of morning. I've done this before, but not like this. There's a haunted quality to "BeFoUr," established through jarring turns of phrase like numb on a roof / set it on fire or I'll take all the right wrongs, and through the shimmer effect Malay creates by multi-tracking Zayn's breathy vocals and then leaving them momentarily naked. At very least, West's sensibility has influenced this song's floating paranoia. So that's what producer Malay was thinking about when he anchored "BeFoUr" in a low, insistent snare drumbeat. But hey, that phrase is also the title of a 2013 Kanye West song. "Flashing lights!" he wails in a reference to the photographer's bulbs that have made him blink since he was 17. Zayn has a real voice, and at one point he emits a mighty falsetto note before sinking back into his hoodie again. And then there's the bigger picture: melting icecaps, global conflict, their own parents' slide into debt and social precarity. "Innovation" is the mantra forced upon them often, opportunity seems sparse. Pushed to overachieve since infancy, yet assumed by many adults to be attention-deficient and emotionally unmoored, millennials like the 23-year-old Zayn are callow old souls buried in other people's information. It's the way this cry for a new start fits into a story that runs throughout millennial pop. But gossipy particularities aren't what makes "BeFoUr" feel relevant. On a literal level, "BeFoUr" is about Zayn's departure from One Direction, an atypically bitter split, as critic Rob Sheffield has thoroughly documented, within the polite world of manufactured teen acts. It's more like a near-disclaimer, weighing jadedness against bravado: the shrug that comes before an act of daring our hero isn't sure he wants under a spotlight. As an expression of excitement, of swagger, it's odd.
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I've done this before, the boy band brooder-turned-loverman intones, but not like this. Zayn Malik begins his latest solo hit, "BeFoUr," as if it were a statement of purpose: synthesizer swell, hushed pause, vocal hook manipulated to sound like he's speaking into a megaphone.