Jacquees Threatens to Out-Sing Ty Dolla $ign and Jeremih on ‘The Light’ Remix

Jacquees, the spark-plug R&B singer signed to Cash Money Records, released his debut album 4275 earlier this year. It was full of great singing, but not always great songs.

He’s been fixing that problem recently by remixing already-proven hits by other artists. He started by releasing his own version of Ella Mai’s single “Trip.” Jacquees followed that on Monday with a bright update of Ty Dolla $ign and Jeremih’s “The Light,” which he previewed on Instagram over the weekend.

“The Light” is the lead single from a delayed collaborative album featuring Ty and Jeremih. The two singers rip the bass riff from Keni Burke’s much-sampled 1982 hit “Risin’ to the Top” and use it as the foundation for a series of come-ons: “Let’s have sex,” Ty sings, before adding, “but not without the foreplay.”

On his “Quemix,” Jacquees is very comfortable with both the retro bassline — he’s played with this sound before, notably on his 2015 mixtape cut “Know You” — and the blunt come-ons: At times his song has the qualities of a sex-instruction handbook. Jacquees’ tone, as always, is piercing and inimitable. During the second verse, he adjusts his singing pattern into pleasing double-time, as if he’s making fun of the slow, predictable bass line.

Though Jacquees hasn’t yet scored a crossover hit, he’s been a constant presence on radio in the last 12 months, and the next great hope for Cash Money, which hasn’t produced a young star in several years.

This year, Jacquees collaborated with TK Kravitz on “Ocean,” an underappreciated duet that has spent 18 weeks on the mainstream R&B/hip-hop airplay chart and cracked the Top 20. “Ocean” is now on its way down, but the single still reached 4.8 million listeners through the airwaves last week. Rising to meet it is Jacquees’ new single “You,” which is just beginning to get some pick-up at radio (363 spins last week). “You” was also retroactively added to 4275 as the album’s final track.