Retail Therapy

Album: 23 (2022)
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Songfacts®:

  • "Retail Therapy" refers to shopping as a way of lifting your mood when stressed or anxious. Here, Central Cee's toxic relationship with his girl is sucking his soul, and he's planning a trip to the clothing stores to make him feel better.
  • Elsewhere, Central Cee recalls how back in the day, he only had a single pair of trainers. Now, he boasts his "walk in wardrobe look like the stockroom."
  • The name "retail therapy" is an ironic term that satirizes the shallowness of modern consumer society. Though shopping hardly qualifies as true therapy in the medical or psychotherapeutic sense, if pressed, there are those who would admit to being psychologically lifted by a particular purchase. The first recorded use of the term was in the Chicago Tribune dated December 24, 1986: "We've become a nation measuring out our lives in shopping bags and nursing our psychic ills through retail therapy."

    Back in 2018, Ariana Grande was feeling depressed following her split from Pete Davidson. She decided to take a trip to Tiffany's for some retail therapy, accompanied by six friends. There, she bought them all matching rings, and later wrote the hit song "7 Rings" about the experience.
  • Nastylgia and Young Chencs produced the breezy drill cut using a sped-up sample of R&B jazz saxophonist Hank Crawford's 1973 track "Wildflower." Other rap greats who have borrowed the song's electric piano and saxophone include 2Pac on "Shorty Wanna Be a Thug," Kanye West on "Drive Slow," and Drake on "Miss Me."
  • The The DirByLKC and Kunography-directed video sees Central Cee and his crew hitting his local Shepherd's Bush's W12 shopping center and roaming the streets of central London.

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