Ginuwine... The Bachelor

There was, and remains, nothing quite like “Pony” so high on the charts — a performance by a beguilingly suave singer rendered into the monomania of an overcharged sexdroid thanks to Timbaland’s uninhibited Tex Avery-gone-Nicktoons hyperunrealism. (It sounds like Roger Troutman winning a burping contest, and yet here we all are thinking “yeah, that’s fuckin’ hot.”) But its lead-single status, both preceding the album Ginuwine… the Bachelor and accounting for its first-past-the-intro slot on it, cast a shadow so long that some of the other fascinating moments on it still qualify as legit surprises. Is it a gauntlet-throwdown to give your debut-album singer the opportunity to cover “When Doves Cry” a few years before peak ’80s nostalgia (and at the peak of Prince’s dispute with Warner Bros.), which necessitated turning its rhythm inside-out and overwriting its synthpop affinities with MoWax-adjacent trip-hoppy funk? Maybe, but you can hear Ginuwine feeling it to the level of seeming spiritually possessed. And can you get a slightly less audacious but still uncanny charge from the follow-up singles? The glitchy insistence of “Tell Me Do U Wanna” and its fluttering psychotropic horniness says yeah; the straightforward post-New Jack Swing headnods of “Holler” says but not too crazy; the burbling wires-crossed strangeness of “I’ll Do Anything / I’m Sorry” and its jitter-beat air of erotically charged remorse says I can change — and he does, because if he can adapt to Tim’s emergently bizarre yet directly effective future-club sounds, he can adapt to anything.