Wiz Khalifa feat. Charlie Puth - See You Again

I often find myself comparing this song to "I'll Be Missing You". It comes pretty much exactly one generation later and did the same deed of driving the buying market crazy when it hit. I often find myself wondering though, which of the two tracks is worse?

To be fair here, these are two totally different tracks. They're born of different eras, so of course that's the case. "I'll Be Missing You" is Combs mourning the loss of a very close friend. You can't fake the emotion in it. "See You Again" is Wiz Khalifa mourning a star in a reasonably rated car...series. Charlie Puth actually is singing about a close friend of his though, from what I understand it was kind of meshed into the rest of the song. It's easy to say that yes, "I'll Be Missing You" has the edge here, but it also has the downside that it's overwrought & underwritten, and there's something cynical about the whole thing.

But still the problem with "See You Again" is that it's just not nuanced enough. It suffers from the boyband schtick of putting no detail in so the listeners can do that instead, and it's just not what I want out of a track. It's providing too easy an answer for something that just isn't that. I like the song "Aerobed" by Cymbals Eat Guitars that came out this year which gets this right. Not only is it nuanced and specific, but it doesn't cut out the ugly parts or try to paint the narrator as a Mary Sue in the situation. Rarely will you hear a mourning song where the narrator admits that they didn't even give a shit about the impending severe illness of their friend.

A positive for "See You Again", it doesn't sample a song about stalking, and it doesn't earn Sting royalties for a riff Andy Summers came up with, bastard. It didn't push a mediocre album that ushered in a bleak era of hip hop (incidentally, Biggie's verses are the sole highlights in "No Way Out"). But it's just so draining to listen to, and so calculated that I don't want to give it any kudos.