27 March 2008
Our first Irish number one from a San Marino Eurovision entrant, ‘Low’ is also the first of Flo Rida’s six chart-toppers here. Given his chart dominance in the late ’00s and early ’10s, his unlikely Sammarinese repping in 2021 felt like a punchline to the gag of how far Flo Rida’s star had fallen. (Name recognition wasn’t enough to see San Marino get higher than fifth-last in that year’s Eurovision, won by Italian neighbours Måneskin, but they at least beat Euro-powerhouses the Netherlands, Spain, Germany and nul-points era United Kingdom.) It also suggests that while Flo Rida may have had hits he never really had a fan base, occupying the same marketplace for ephemeral hip-hop-hooray floor-fillers as his notable collaborators Will.i.am and David Guetta.
In fairness, though, ‘Low’ has a winning mixture of the cool, snazzy crunk sound, still just about box-fresh in 2008, and that big-stepping, chassis-shaking chorus. For a while this was the go-to signifier for cliched party-hard bros: Tom Cruise’s fat-suited studio head in the dreadful Tropic Thunder breaks out some slap-that-booty moves to ‘Low’. Flo Rida himself doesn’t quite stoop all the way down to that level of crassness, but in true ’00s fashion it’s a dumb, laddish track where he’s a would-be player ogling some girl just trying to dance at her local club but who he sees as a clothes-dropping pole-dancer and “a pornography poster”. Ultimately, Flo Rida doesn’t bring much personality or character to ‘Low’: he’s just a nagging, anodyne rapper who lucks onto a chart-topping, multi-million-selling formula – a perfect fit for those future Will.i.am and David Guetta collabs.
