Drummer Boy (Justin Bieber song)
Leaked days before the album's November 1, 2011, date on October 28, "Drummer Boy" is an uptempo hip-hop techno club track where Bieber sings the original song's lyrics and melody while rapping about himself, poverty and charity.
[4] "Drummer Boy" is Bieber's third collaboration with a notable rapper, after Ludacris with "Baby" and Kanye West and Raekwon with a remix of the My World 2.0 (2010) cut "Runaway Love".
[7][8] On November 30, 2011, Busta Rhymes and Bieber performed "Drummer Boy" as part of the annual Rockefeller Center Christmas Tree Lighting Ceremony.
[20] Analyzed Nate Jones of People, in repeats of "The Little Drummer Boy" melody, "[Bieber] shoots the notes sky-high and rides them down on a shuttle of Mariah Carey melisma.
[25] "Drummer Boy" was met with polarization and mystification from reviewers upon its release; critics called it a "a goofy modernized spin", "confusing", weird, and "as awkward as it sounds, but at least it's different".
"[29] Entertainment Weekly found it Under the Mistletoe's worst track, complaining that "Bieber spits some of the looniest white-boy rhymes off the shores of Lonely Island", citing the example, "I'm so tight I might go psycho/Christmas time, so here's a recital.
"[14] Busta Rhymes' contribution was well received by The Guardian's Caroline Sullivan, who generally found the guest stars the "saving grace" of the album, as a "raucous flow".
[32] Randy Lewis, a writer for the Los Angeles Times positively commented that the song "injects some adrenalin into that war horse" of an album of "head-scratching fare", and the Financial Times journalist Ludovic Hunter-Tilney claimed "Bieber strikes gold with his bonkers version of 'Drummer Boy' when he goes all B-boy with rapping, Timbaland-style beats and a yo-yo-yo’ing cameo from Busta Rhymes.
Some critics felt "Drummer Boy"'s modern music genre and incorporation of references to non-Christian holidays and pop culture, such as Chinchilla coats, Twitter, and BlackBerry phones, bastardized the source material's meaning and message.
"[31] Bieber's pleas of giving to charity was appreciated by some reviewers, including Tris McCall of Inside Jersey, reasoning, "Tennyson he is not, but you can tell the kid means it.
Kirk disagreed with the complaints; he felt that the spirit of the song matched that of the story of the holiday standard, which was about a boy being encouraged by Mary to give a gift however small.
[36] The Skinny equivalently described it as a "hell of a banger", elaborating, "it's got all the vital components that make for an alternative Christmas song – superfluous vocal runs, shit-hot bars ('Playing for the king / playing for the title / I'm surprised you didn't hear this in the Bible') and a Busta Rhymes cameo.
"[38] In terms of holiday hip-hop tracks, it was one of the top 25 in an unranked list by uDiscoverMusic, and the 12th best by Billboard in 2018, which also claimed it to be the fourth-best Justin Bieber deep cut in 2017.
[18] Jones declared Busta "deals with rhymes the way Buster Keaton dealt with trains" and Billboard's Sai Cinequemani celebrated his verse as "amusing" and "rapid-fire".
[48] Entertainment Weekly, in 2018, listed it as one of the most ridiculous Christmas rap songs ever, suggesting it was only outed in quality by Rhymes's collaboration with Jim Carrey, "Grinch 2000".
[52] It was listed the ninth worst Christmas song by The Guardian and the sixth-worst by Time Out London, which expressed irritation towards Busta's line "eggnog with a little sprinkle of vanilla' like he's at the till in Starbucks" and suggested the rapper should have known better.
[55] Maija Kappler, in a 2018 HuffPost retrospective on Under the Mistletoe, despised "Drummer Boy" for its several "unforgivable" elements, citing "the misuse of Busta Rhymes" and "our early-2010s tolerance of white Christian pop stars trying their hand at rap on not one but two different verses".
