"Young Hov, y'all know when the flow is loco..."

There's a little snippet in my first post about "Poker Face" being GaGa's "synth-powered freight train". It's only fair to mention Beyonce's brass-boosted variant, which had rolled through the Billboard charts five years earlier. This is arguably producer Rich Harrison's finest work (Amerie's "1 Thing", which deserves its own post, is also in prime contention). Harrison took a horn line from the Chi-Lites' 1970 "Are You My Woman? (Tell Me So)", and flipped it just brilliantly.* The sassy Queen Bey vocal on top is icing on the cake.

Lyrically and vocally, this song would establish a Knowles trademark, one that (in my opinion, as always) sets her apart from the cohort of R&B divas on today's market: her near-complete capacity to go bat-shit insane on a track. On this one, she's not just in love - she's crazy in love. It's that kind of rampant energy that puts her at that Queen spot.** (Mariah used to be there. Now she's all bloated. Yikes.)

It is here that you should know: I am a raving mad Jay-Z fan, and will habitually give him between 50 and 2,000 percent more credit than he deserves. But, damnit, it's his wry brilliance here that really makes the track tip over into "smash hit" territory (and gives this post its title). As with his earlier sixteen-bar turn on Mariah's "Heartbreaker", Mr. Carter plays a simple role - coy, seemingly detached object of feminine love - with ease.

* Think about the way the titles of the sampled and sampling songs fit together. The Chi-Lites ask "Are you my woman?"; Beyonce answers "yes", and leaves no damn room for further questioning.

** I devoted some tweets to this topic, along the way managing to compare Beyonce to George Costanza. Twitter is fun.

Songs

Beyonce f. Jay-Z - "Crazy in Love"
Chi-Lites - "Are You My Woman? (Tell Me So)"