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It's very hard to dislike Pitbull. You have to give him points for trying. The performance at this year’s World Cup was vintage Pitbull, triggering media fascination and the Twitter hashtag “#Shitbull”. Emerging from a giant pod alongside J-Lo and Claudia Leitte, he mugged his way through the opening ceremony shouting “Ole!” and dancing like your dad, if your dad was fuelled by Voli shots and wore criminally tight white capris. There was also that time when Pitbull turned down a million dollars to perform at the Republican National Convention. Pitbull might just be a leftie. Is it OK to like him now?At best Pitbull’s music asks nothing of you: no emotional investment, no political agenda, only the earnest request to “feel this moment”. But at worst he has commercialised his own lyrical absence, because Pitbull’s presence is absence. It’s possible to unpack the contents of his lyrics, to RapGenius them to death, and still you will find nothing. Sometimes they feature deliberate voids, as with the missing word from his song "I Know You Want Me":"Label flop but Pit won't stop / Got her in the cockpit playin' with his (?) / Now watch him make a movie like Alfred Hitchcock"No version of the song has been found with the missing word left in. The absence is synthetic, because Pitbull will happily sell you an empty song. In this sense, Pitbull’s white suit signifies an absence of colour. He moves like an atonal spectre through a succession of feature spots. He is the Paul Auster protagonist of the international pop game. Adding “featuring Pitbull” to a song functions like an industry injoke, declaring “my song will be bad, but it will make a lot of money”. Behind those dark glasses are empty chasms, a Nietzschean abyss that stares back and whispers, “dale…”@RoisinTheMirror