Maroon 5 Featuring Wiz Khalifa - Payphone

July 16, 2012 Critic Jonni 0 Comments

Maroon 5 has quickly become an international famous band, but a lot of people knew who they were before hand with songs like "She Will Be Loved" and "This Love". They disappeared off the radar with their second album, but thanks to the likes of The Voice (US), Maroon 5 is once again at the top of their game, and I very much doubt they'll ever come down again. The band used to be called Kara's Flowers, which isn't exactly a great name, so I'm glad they changed it before becoming famous (however would we be saying that if they did make it under that name?) The band consists of Adam Levine, Jesse Carmichael, Michael Madden, James Valentine and Matt Flynn. This song is their second number one in the UK in a row, this band will be around for a long time. Wiz Khalifa features on this song, he's real name is Cameron Thomaz. He is an American rapper, who has had a number of hit singles, both solo and featured. I feel like he is one of these artists who is trying to make an impression on the UK chart and just isn't quite getting there.

"Payphone" is the first single from Maroon 5's album Overexposed. The song was written by Adam Levine, Benjamin Levin, Ammar Malik, Dan Omelio, Shellback and Cameron Thomaz. Most of these songwriters have appeared on my blog before, and it's quite a collaborative effort, no wonder the song got to number one in the UK. This song will be remembered if not for the catchy tune, definitely for the cover version entering the top ten. Precision Tunes, who tend to do covers of songs and release them on iTunes before the original song gets released, did a cover of this song, it was released early, and managed to peak at number 9 on the UK chart the week before the original got released. Will this happen again in the future? It seems unlikely, however there are a lot of songs that aren't released until later on in the year, and we're already seeing a few cover versions already making the top 100, so I presume it's always possible.

This music video is extremely high budget, it's the only words I can come up for describing it, it is reminiscent of a James Bond movie, and if given a few more minutes I reckon this would have been a great video, however continuity errors really gets on my nerves in music videos, it happens a lot of the time, but this one really shows them off, and is something a lot of people have already picked up on.

I like the overall storyline, of how there's a robbery at the place where Adam Levine works, but then I feel like everything goes out of proportion. First up, he steals a gun, like that would help him much, and then instead of firing he runs away, and somehow he's quick enough to dodge the bullets... Instead of running to the police he runs down the street, and loses the cops, but then he steals a car for no reason, why do such a thing? And then when loads of cops and helicopters are chasing him, he manages to make 2 or 3 police cars crash, and somehow that gets rid of all the vehicles chasing him, and then furthermore he parks the car (going straight past a guy who's standing on the walkway, what that guy is doing there? Who knows), and walks away from the car and then it blows up, and he doesn't get hurt by the explosion... This just doesn't all add up that well does it?

However I'm going to give it the benefit of the doubt, this should be 8-9 minutes long, instead it's cut short into 4-5 minutes, so continuity errors are expected. However they could've have made them less obvious. The song is really catchy and this music video does shine out of the crowd, so it is definitely worthy of this rating.