The Definitive Guide to Living in the Capital , Cairo , Egypt

If you’ve been anywhere near a dance floor or a radio
station in the past six months, chances are you’ve been exposed to one of David Guetta’s
infectious, bubble-gum dance hits. The 43-year-old French DJ’s fifth and latest
album Nothing But the Beat is a double CD album that follows
the same formula as his last release One
Love: feature the vocals of the most popular pop singers of the season on a
simple dance melody, add a few naughty lyrics here and there, make the beat
irresistible, and pow; you’ve got yourself an album.

While this formula worked on One Love mainly because the album
produced massive hits like ‘Sexy Bitch’ and ‘When Love Takes Over’, Nothing But The Beat has more star power
but not enough potential to match One Love‘s success. Yes, Akon, Jennifer Hudson, Nicki Minaj,
Snoop Dog, Usher, Chris Brown and Dev are all featured on the first CD, but apart from
‘Sweat’ featuring Snoop Dogg (who seems to have no issue crossing over after his country music endeavour) and ‘Without You’ featuring
Usher, few of the songs are that memorable. Then again, you don’t listen to
David Guetta for substance.

CD2 of the album is pretty pointless, featuring vocal-free dance tracks in what feels like an attempt on Guetta’s part to be more house and hardcore than CD1 permits him to.

This is great music for the dance floor,
for a house party or for a high-cardio workout, and many of the songs have a
feel-good sound to them, like ‘Where Them Girls At’ featuring Flo Rida, and
‘Nothing Really Matters’ featuring will.i.am. Others seem purely there to
provoke and shock, like the eloquent Timbaland and Dev collaboration ‘I Just
Wanna F’, which is painful to listen to, or Akon’s ‘Crank It Up’, which is just
typically Akon and sounds like pretty much every other dance track the ‘Smack
That’ artist has made. 

The worst tracks
– in this reviewer’s humble opinion – have got to be Nicki Minaj’s ‘Turn Me
On’, which is one of the album’s first singles and jars painfully because of
Minaj’s nails-on-blackboard vocals, and Sia’s ‘Titanium’, another single
release. Despite Sia’s powerful vocals
and the song’s catchy opening riff, Guetta’s rhythm and melody actually ruin
the original song.

That being said, it’s pretty much a given
that most of these songs will be played ad nauseum for the next few months on
every dance floor in the country, and will be among the top requested tunes on
radio stations. So if you hate Guetta, good luck escaping his music. Instead,
we recommend you embrace the bubbly, superficial and easily forgettable dance
tracks.