Critical Reception
Nick Levine from Digital Spy gave "Boom Boom Pow" four out of five stars, saying that "it's a fairly ridiculous robopop stomper featuring no real chorus, 808s & Heartbreak-style beats, lashings of Auto-Tune, techno synths that arrive half-way through and this vintage diss from Fergie: 'I'm so 3008, you're so 2000 and late.' It may well become grating, but frankly who cares? Right now this just sounds cracking." Billboard gave the song a positive review, stating that the song "shows The Black Eyed Peas in fine form" and that it was "a knockout".
- Boston Globe: "Dealt with individually, substance-free, grammatically suspect dance-floor jams like current monster hit 'Boom Boom Pow,' the slinky 'Imma Be,' or the fuzzy 'Missing You' could be booty-shaking guilty pleasures."
- Dot Music: "E.N.D. opener 'Boom Boom Boom' has a long way to go before it even tickles the room, mid-tempo beats cushioning a Fergie vocal that an autotune stuck on override can't sort out."
- Entertainment Weekly: "Indeed, indefatigable Auto-Tune anthems like The E.N.D.'s propulsive lead single, 'Boom Boom Pow' (already the band's most successful to date), seem fueled by some mysterious slurry of dance-floor plutonium and diet Red Bull."
- Vibe magazine: "However, the intergalactic punch of 'Boom Boom Pow'–BEP’s first Billboard chart-topper–has stimulated a slew of cosigns from the likes of 50 Cent, Gucci Mane, and Kid Cudi."
- The Guardian: "As on their recent No 1 single, 'Boom Boom Pow', electronic clicks and buzzes are used lavishly, and the mood is as positive as ever. Just don't expect to love it immediately."
- Los Angeles Times: "The titles of the Peas' biggest hits tell the story: the giggle-inducing pun of 'Don't Phunk With My Heart,' the cheerily crude anatomical gesture of 'My Humps' and now the Imax-ready sound effects burst of the chart-topping 'Boom Boom Pow.'"
- Rolling Stone: "Whereupon the record segues into the Number One hit 'Boom Boom Pow,' and all hell breaks loose. There are Auto-Tune vocal trills, eerie synth chords, screechy disco-diva wailing, 808 thuds, raps about 808 thuds and a dizzying barrage of doggerel: 'I got that . . . digital spit/Next-level visual shit.' It is an assault on the senses, and on good taste. And it's the best thing The Black Eyed Peas have ever recorded."
- The Independent: "Contrary to Fergie's claim on 'Boom Boom Pow' that 'I'm so 3008, you so 2000-and-late', their supposedly innovative electro-beat stylings are tired."
Read more about this topic: Boom Boom Pow
Famous quotes containing the words critical and/or reception:
“If our entertainment culture seems debased and unsatisfying, the hope is that our children will create something of greater worth. But it is as if we expect them to create out of nothing, like God, for the encouragement of creativity is in the popular mind, opposed to instruction. There is little sense that creativity must grow out of tradition, even when it is critical of that tradition, and children are scarcely being given the materials on which their creativity could work”
—C. John Sommerville (20th century)
“To the United States the Third World often takes the form of a black woman who has been made pregnant in a moment of passion and who shows up one day in the reception room on the forty-ninth floor threatening to make a scene. The lawyers pay the woman off; sometimes uniformed guards accompany her to the elevators.”
—Lewis H. Lapham (b. 1935)