This is the worst single of Justin Bieber’s early period, and there are those who would maintain that it’s still the worst thing he ever did. At any rate, it remains his most notorious effort to date, and given how widely despised he’s been for the last few years, that’s saying something. Granted, no-talent R&B joke Sean Kingston teaming up with the Antichrist of teenybopper pop wasn’t exactly a recipe for success on its face, but this song is far worse than anything either of them had previously done. The melody is quite catchy in an inane way, but the problem is in the lyrics. Simply put, the premise of the song…incorporating an ubiquitous children’s rhyme mostly associated with playground games into one of Bieber’s lascivious crooner-pop songs…is perhaps the single most misguided word choice of a year that was rather infamous for them. “Hey Soul Sister” and “Miracles” had more stupid lines in them, but even the former’s ‘so gangsta/I’m so thug’ or the latter’s ‘Fuckin’ magnets/how do they work’ would have a hard time competing with the chorus of this song for sheer idiocy (I’d also like to point out how painfully ironic it is to hear Sean Kingston singing this, given what the original words to “Eenie Meenie Miney Mo” were). The catchy tune and laughably stupid lyric mean this song has some enjoyment value as a camp item, but that doesn’t excuse the people responsible for it. The only person who could pull this kind of crap off was a very young Michael Jackson (and indeed, there is a Jackson 5 album track that is almost identical to this), and I think it’s pretty obvious that Bieber and Kingston are not Michael Jackson.
Verdict: It certainly has some camp value, but it is nonetheless insultingly bad.