Popular https://popular-number1s.com Every UK#1 reviewed Fri, 01 Mar 2024 10:58:13 +0000 en-GB hourly 1 https://wordpress.org/?v=6.4.3 JENNIFER LOPEZ – “Get Right” https://popular-number1s.com/2024/03/01/jennifer-lopez-get-right/ https://popular-number1s.com/2024/03/01/jennifer-lopez-get-right/#comments Fri, 01 Mar 2024 10:58:10 +0000 https://popular-number1s.com/?p=33553 There is a 2005 single, a huge hit, and many will tell you it’s producer Rich Harrison’s masterpiece. On that record, cut-ups of funk breaks are rearranged at oblique angles in a 21st century update of James Brown’s rhythmic modernism, building an abstract sculpture of bone-rattling beats and slivers of jagged keys and horns. And the singer, turning in her own career-best performance, turns that beatspace into a jungle-gym, her song finding the gaps in the arrangement and filling them with micro-hooks before the chorus locks in, like a twist in a metal puzzle that magically turns a mess of points and edges into a perfect cube.

This is not that single. “Get Right” is, at best, the shadow Amerie’s “1 Thing” casts on the cave wall of pop. At worst, I can’t believe it’s by the same producer, it sounds so much like an adequate knock-off of Harrison’s deconstructed-funk style – the kind of reasonable imitation you’d guess a somewhat unfashionable superstar could fix up when the real thing turned her down. But “Get Right” is Harrison, it is the real thing. It’s just a bit second-rate. The car-alarm horn sample from Maceo & The Macks that drives the beat is insistent but compared to “Crazy In Love”’s fanfare it’s nagging rather than ecstatic. And compared to “1 Thing”’s thrilling rhythmic play “Get Right”’s beat feels linear and ordinary.

Of course, there’s a considerable distance between “not as good as two of the greatest R&B singles of the decade” and “bad”. “Get Right” is in the same broad region as “Goodies” and “Flap Your Wings” – enjoyable tracks which disappoint mostly because you know the people involved are capable of much more. But there’s a weaker link here than in either of those – even if Rich Harrison had conjured a beat as startling as “1 Thing”, J-Lo is surely not the singer to handle it. Her performance on “Get Right” does nothing to rescue the track – in fact it’s at its best for the 25 seconds or so before she turns up. She sounds overpowered by the production, her voice weak and her singing hemmed in, restricted to a cluster of high notes.

So we don’t even need to compare “Get Right” to Amerie or Beyonce – standards it was never going to meet. We can compare it to the best of J-Lo’s own material – “Jenny From The Block”, with Lopez in a more confident lower register and some of the strain being taken by Jadakiss and Styles P, is a track in the same area as “Get Right” but hugely more likeable and successful, even if you think J-Lo’s claims to realness are silly.

And yet, even though Jennifer Lopez is the worst thing about “Get Right”, the beat doesn’t spark to life when a more commanding singer handles it. Usher’s “Ride”, using the same production, leaked online in 2004 having been left of the singer’s LP. Usher can deal with the Maceo sample’s hustle better, but he still has trouble imposing himself on the track and it’s easy to hear why “Ride” didn’t make the Confessions cut. Perhaps there’s just not enough space in the beat for anyone to manage it well – one of those musical ideas which a producer can’t quite make work no matter who he uses or what he does.

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U2 – “Sometimes You Can’t Make It On Your Own” https://popular-number1s.com/2023/11/30/u2-sometimes-you-cant-make-it-on-your-own/ https://popular-number1s.com/2023/11/30/u2-sometimes-you-cant-make-it-on-your-own/#comments Thu, 30 Nov 2023 13:13:35 +0000 https://popular-number1s.com/?p=33545 While I’ve been writing about 2004 and 2005’s pop music I’ve also been helping my wife sort out her mother’s memorial service, so a song about a parent dying is – unfortunately – Relevant To My Interests right now. Not that I realised, until I looked it up, that this is what Bono’s singing about here. “Sometimes You Can’t Make It On Your Own” hides its specific emotional content behind a veil of more general emotional content – i.e. it sounds like U2 doing a big U2 Ballad, a cloud of vague yearning upon which a listener can project their own particular concerns.

We almost always get U2 in upbeat rocking mode on Popular, but it’s unquestionable that these impassioned mid-paced slower numbers are critical to their popularity, especially as an arena-filling touring band: search for “Bad”, their first real success in this mode, and you’ll be offered multiple live versions before you get to the LP mix, including the extraordinary Live Aid performance which was the band’s chrysalis moment as a stadium force. From “Bad” on through “With Or Without You”, “Who’s Gonna Ride Your Wild Horses?”, “One” and the last LP’s “Stuck In A Moment”, these intense rock ballads are the spine of U2’s appeal.

It’s interesting to go back to “Bad” in light of the – apparently typical of this phase of U2 – tortuous genesis of “Sometimes You Can’t Make It On Your Own”. The newer song, written as Bono’s father was dying of cancer, had been sitting in the band’s pile of not-quite-working songs for several years before someone pointed out that it didn’t have a chorus. Bono worked out the “it’s you when I look in the mirror” hook and bam, problem solved. An inchoate cluster of emotions had become a big U2 ballad.

But listen to “Bad” and you’re hearing a song which takes a similar emotion – impotence and frustration in the face of another’s pain – and makes it work exactly because it never offers the resolution of a chorus. It just keeps building and writhing in its tension, a tension which makes Bono’s words (woeful on paper) crystallise into something powerfully expressive. Expressive of what, it’s hard to say, but that’s why the song works.

And “Sometimes” is a kind of sad inverse of that. The lyrics, when I strain to listen, or even read them, are some of Bono’s most direct and painful in context. “If we weren’t so alike / You’d like me a whole lot more”; “I know that we don’t talk / I’m sick of it all” – understand these as the words of a guy in his 40s trying to get through to a stubborn, dying, beloved old man and they’re rough and heartfelt. But they don’t sound like that on record – they could be sung to anyone, a lover, a child, a friend.

U2’s great gift – not invented by them, but their way of doing it has been imitated by dozens of rock bands since – has been to use ballads to create intimacy at scale, a sense that the wider the canvas, the more cathartic it is for the secrets of the heart to be painted on it. But not all intimacies, not all moments, properly survive the transfer to universal scale. After doing my homework on it, I can poke myself into feeling something about “Sometimes You Can’t Make It On Your Own”, some sympathy for Bono, some reflection on my own parents and my own sons. I appreciate what he’s struggling with on the record. But I’m bringing all that in myself – the record’s not calling anything forth unbidden, because how could it? It’s just a big U2 ballad, and by now we all know what those are for.

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EMINEM – “Like Toy Soldiers” https://popular-number1s.com/2023/11/27/eminem-like-toy-soldiers/ https://popular-number1s.com/2023/11/27/eminem-like-toy-soldiers/#comments Mon, 27 Nov 2023 20:56:51 +0000 https://popular-number1s.com/?p=33541 I’m not sure how rap grudges and running battles came to be called beef but I love it as a word for them – juicy, red meat with inescapable macho connotations. The actual minutiae of rap beefs are strictly fans-only in most cases, playing out on album tracks and mixtapes often involving arcane or petty counter-accusations. The most famous ones – like Jay-Z vs Nas, which Eminem references in this song – leave tracks which are touchstones of a rapper’s discography (and the most infamous ones leave people dead). But this is the first time a track centering on a hip-hop feud has hit No.1 here.

“Like Toy Soldiers” is an unusual take on the genre, though – very much Eminem having his beef and eating it. The track is an extension of two quarrels – one with Ja Rule and his Murder Inc. crew, which was itself an offshoot of Ja Rule’s beef with 50 Cent, but which Eminem took personally after Ja Rule brought up his daughter; the other with Benzino, whose magazine The Source gave an Eminem album 2 mics, leading to an ongoing feud between Eminem and the publication. (Benzino himself was well below Eminem’s weight class as a rapper but The Source was still significant). Not content with that, “Like Toy Soldiers” also digs into a third major beef, the long-running (and deadly) quarrel between Dr Dre and Death Row’s Suge Knight – this one a vendetta Em wants to join through personal loyalty to Dre but has been warned off from. (“Suge” is the word censored from the track)

If all this sounds exhausting, that’s the point of the song, which is Eminem counting the cost of all this strife, asking “how did we get here?” and answering the question in loaded terms that are half descriptions of his fights, half counter-blows. It’s certainly not, as I’ve seen one commentator claim, Eminem walking away from his beefs – for one thing it’s from the record with (according to Rap Genius) the largest proportion of personal attacks in his whole career. But it is him regretting them, regretting the outcomes, and generally fretting that he’s damaging hip-hop not elevating it with this nonsense.

It’s a sentiment that’s agonised over at length in the verses and much more pithily expressed in the chorus, a big repurposed chunk of Martika’s 1989 hit “Toy Soldiers”. The last Eminem hit to centre so prominently on a sample was “Stan”, and in both songs the sample works as punctuation between tense, knotty verses – but where “Thank You” was an ellipsis, “Toy Soldiers” is an exclamation mark, the catharsis for the tension the verses build up. It’s also far more pointed – whatever Eminem’s regrets, hypocrisies and anger over the feuds he’s involved in, the “Toy Soldiers” chorus puts it plainly: rappers are beefing, fighting and ultimately dying in what amounts to a game played for other people’s entertainment.

Big, familiar samples were in fashion, too. “Toy Soldiers” is a direct response to Ja Rule et al, but it also feels like an indirect response to Kanye West, whose productions for Jay-Z and others often made heavy, expensive use of old hits, and whose own early singles mixed borrowed hooks and choruses with West’s thorny, self-conscious musings on his own life, art and beliefs, to enormous critical acclaim. Eminem’s recent big hits rode on strong but simple beats which worked like gym equipment for his verbal displays and persona-shuffling: they stood or fell by what he was doing. Here he’s letting the sample do most of the hook-bearing work while the verses tap out an ominous, martial rhythm.

I think it works extremely well – the verses showing Eminem hurt, angry, self-justifying but also trapped in a situation; the chorus acting as a summary and a sweep of the sword to cut the emotional Gordian knot. The fact that Eminem’s continuing the beefs even as he’s supposedly renouncing them could tangle the song up but it stops it being merely pious: the whole idea is that this stuff is tempting to get into, and difficult to get out of. It’s also just better to hear him rapping in storytelling mode than the more rigid punchline-dispensing style of “Just Lose It”.  The specifics of the feuds drag the song down a little – even if you really enjoy hip-hop beef, and I don’t, these aren’t compelling examples. But the Martika sample blasts through the details and reminds me that they aren’t the point – “Like Toy Soldiers” works mostly on vibe.

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ELVIS PRESLEY – “It’s Now Or Never” https://popular-number1s.com/2023/11/26/elvis-presley-its-now-or-never-2/ https://popular-number1s.com/2023/11/26/elvis-presley-its-now-or-never-2/#comments Sun, 26 Nov 2023 11:25:31 +0000 https://popular-number1s.com/?p=33537 It’s an American trilogy! My original plan for the Elvis entries was to do them as a high concept piece inspired by (ripping off) Borges’ “Pierre Menard, Author Of The Quixote”. Since, in their wisdom, the Official Charts Company decided these were new singles not re-entries, I would write three pieces about an artist in 2005 who had arrived, note for note, at the same recordings as Elvis Presley in the late 1950s.

This treatment didn’t survive contact with a blank page but the conceit worked best for “It’s Now Or Never” – writing a blue-balls ballad around an interpolation of an ice cream ad is the sort of thing 21st century acts wind up doing. The odd thing is, the fictional Menard-Elvis’ decision to nick “Just One Cornetto” for his third single – two bangers then a slowie, the traditional formula – is actually fairly close to what the Elvis-Elvis really did with “O Sole Mio”, the late 1890s smash which eventually reached him during his army service in Germany, in another English-language version. The tune captivated him, he decided he wanted one for himself, and commissioned a new set of lyrics.

My original “It’s Now Or Never” entry was desultory, but unlike the other two Elvis tunes I got the basics right – Elvis’ reading of his song is odd to the point of feeling creepy: belting choruses and ludicrous hammed-up delicacy on the verses, like this fancy new style he’s trying out is Dresden china.

For me, everything good about the song comes from the band, whose easy Nashville swing puts some life in the recording and means “It’s Now Or Ever” avoids the orchestral tar pit that sucked in the likes of “Cara Mia”. If in 1960 “It’s Now Or Never” looked like a bet against rock’s longevity, with hindsight it’s jumping to a sinking ship: it’s a late flowering of the Italophilia that helped define 50s pop culture and which endured in fashion and food.*

If Elvis had to have yet another No.1 (and he really didn’t) then I guess it’s fitting it’s with one of his genuine signature tunes, which kicked off the post-Army era and ignited the phase of his career which brought him most UK success. As a career move at the time it must have been fascinating, shocking even – Elvis as Mario Lanza! The results delighted him – both Elvis and Priscilla Presley described the track as his favourite, further evidence that artists’ opinions on their own careers are fascinating but not always trustworthy.

*(Including ice cream! Walls’ “Just One Cornetto” ad, with a gondolier serenading a young woman as an excuse to snatch her ice cream cone, reintroduced “O Sole Mio” to my generation of kids in 1982. Obviously the version of the song it’s riffing on is “It’s Now Or Never” – “give it to me!” cries and all. By this point the semiotics of European sophistication were remarkably tangled. The ad is treating the romance of Italy and Venice as a cliche to have a bit of over-the-top fun with, but the same year Walls launched Viennetta, whose sensual ads (equally corny now) dripped with masked-ball chic and touch of the gothic. And Cornetto was originally an Italian brand, acquired by Walls around the time Elvis raided the German pop charts for “It’s Now Or Never” – but the intriguingly Austro-Italian sounding Viennetta originated in Gloucester. Oh, and the gondolier turned out to be Renato, who sold millions that year with his own absurd take on the pop aria. “O Sole Mio” is a wild fractal of a song – the more you look, the more stories you can turn up.)

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CIARA ft PETEY PABLO – “Goodies” https://popular-number1s.com/2023/11/21/ciara-ft-petey-pablo-goodies/ https://popular-number1s.com/2023/11/21/ciara-ft-petey-pablo-goodies/#comments Tue, 21 Nov 2023 13:28:57 +0000 https://popular-number1s.com/?p=33529 The singles market was weakest in January even in those happy times when Number 1 hits outsold model railway magazines – it’s one reason the Presley scam was successful, letting a fanbase of a little over 20,000 push their boy to the top when nobody else cared. But enterprising labels could always try their New Year luck with less necrophiliac projects. Launching a new American R&B singer, for instance. “Goodies” had already been a huge US summer hit – a proven performer, even if Petey Pablo had no profile in Britain. The LaFace and Sony execs timed their release right. Nice scheduling, high fives all round on the golf course.

At the time I was mostly relieved that it wasn’t Elvis. “Goodies” sounded just fine, but it was totally overshadowed for me by follow-up hit “Oh”, a hazy, bassy, swamp of an R&B tune with Ciara stepping through the murk with cool authority. Even the guest verse was better – a turn by the ever-dextrous Ludacris. “Oh” marked Ciara out for me in the expanding field of post-Aaliyah R&B starlets. But it’s “Goodies” that’s her only No.1*

Your opinion of “Goodies” is probably going to rest on how well you cope with the whistling kettle hook that runs through the song with no quarter given. I like it, but I don’t always like it, and I could easily see why it would infuriate someone. It also pulls Ciara up into her higher register, which she can deal with but it’s breathier and less charismatic than the lower voice she uses on “Oh” or the album’s other hit “1,2,Step”. She’s up there having to compete with the whistle and the keyboard riff in the chorus, and on “You might talk slick, tryin’ to hit”, her shrillness is fighting for space, and an assertive moment in the song feels like a struggle.

In fact the whole production seems more suited to guest rapper Petey Pablo than Ciara: his gruff, amiable, unflashy flow works fine against the whistling. And there is a lot of Pablo on the record, two full verses and plenty of background chat. The entire concept of the song – this was lost on me as a UK listener, so it doesn’t actually matter much – is that it’s an answer record to Pablo’s “Freek-A-Leek”. Pablo’s record is about him bedding a roll call of women over a Lil Jon beat (originally intended for Usher’s “Yeah”, but Pablo nicked it, and Lil Jon gave Usher a better one). Ciara’s response on “Goodies” is “not so fast, buster”.

This isn’t a bad idea for an answer song at all – Pablo’s a smooth, enjoyable rapper to listen to and “Freek-A-Leek” is catchy, but it’s pretty charmless in tone. The concept that as soon as this lothario’s on a track with an actual woman she shuts him down is a strong one. Pablo plays along – rapping in the persona of an overconfident player but with little glimpses of insecurity in there too (“Ask anybody”). Ciara’s dismissal is firm but it isn’t mean.

But “Goodies” still doesn’t rise above good-ish, though there are enough ideas that almost work – the beat; the scenario; Ciara’s singing – that I end up liking the whole thing anyway, even if it’s not as much as I want. It’s ironic to criticise the track for a lack of chemistry between the leads, but I do think that’s the problem here. If you’re framing the song as a duet, and Pablo is so prominent it’s hard not to take it as one, there needs to be some kind of connection even if that’s going against what the track actually means. Without it, the lid on the goodie jar isn’t just closed, it’s stuck.

*It’s hard to say if she could have had more. Ciara, more than any other singer, is the star I associate with the extraordinarily frustrating leaks era of R&B in the late 00s: tracks unofficially dripfed to fans and media, surfacing in forum threads or briefly flaring up on the blogs, with nothing ever quite getting the wider heat to trigger an actual release, leaving major talents in a limbo of scrapped albums and direction changes. Or at least that’s what it looked like from the outside. At least Ciara had a career, and the best of her hits – “Oh”, “Work”, “Body Party”, “Level Up” – are terrific.

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ELVIS PRESLEY – “One Night” / “I Got Stung” https://popular-number1s.com/2023/11/18/elvis-presley-one-night-i-got-stung/ https://popular-number1s.com/2023/11/18/elvis-presley-one-night-i-got-stung/#comments Sat, 18 Nov 2023 13:34:28 +0000 https://popular-number1s.com/?p=33524 “The things I did and I saw / Would make the earth stand still” – Smiley Lewis

In the early days of Popular lack of research was part of the Method. Context was the enemy: the text was the text. My job was to see what, 50 or so years later, I could get out of it. Not much, in the case of plenty of the 1950s singles. Did I know “One Night” was a cover of Smiley Lewis’ “One Night Of Sin”? I did not. So I did not know what a great record “One Night Of Sin” is. In the last entry I wrote about the “how-seriously-do-we-take-this?” trick as something Elvis introduced to Rock, but he imported it from Blues records like “One Night Of Sin”, where Lewis, blessed with a rich, fruity, froggy tone, walks an extremely fine line between formalised regret for his night of sin and deep appreciation. The words tell one story, the delivery another, but subtly, making for a very funny record: I cannot help but grin at the over the top humility Lewis brings to “I’ve lived a very quiet life”. (An infinitely sleazy horn solo settles the debate, if there was still any doubt.)

Elvis loved the song but it was too raunchy, so he recorded a cleaned up version. So history tells us, but history in that case hasn’t actually listened to “One Night”. Changing the lyrics from “One night of sin is what I’ve been paying for” to “One night with you is what I’ve been praying for” gets Elvis off on a technicality – the night hasn’t actually happened yet – but it pours sexual gasoline on the nudge-wink embers of the Lewis song. The intended audience now isn’t fellow sinners familiar with the contours of such nights, it’s women who’ve likely given a good deal of thought to one night with Elvis and its particulars. The vocal is at the more mannered end of Elvis singing, a collection of Kingly tics, which make it feel offhand on first blush, but listen to how he absolutely bites at that opening “One night” – he knows what bombs he’s setting off.

(Also come on – “I need your sweet helping hand / My love’s too strong to hide”? That’s dirtier than anything in the original.)

Keeping up the fiction that this is an organic 2005 hit rather than one of a series of souvenir Toby Jugs, the contemporaries of “One Night” are obvious – Usher and Nelly’s R&B slow-burners, snapshots of seduction and/or regret. But what about “I Got Stung”? I would say Busted – in their jumping form – or McFly – fast, fun, youthful jives about chicks and their crazy ways. “I Got Stung” is a fine, minor specimen of piano-driven rock and roll, bumping and shaking like a jalopy speeding down a stretch of bad road while its teenage driver happily runs his mouth about a girl he’s fallen for. Elvis’ vocal is making even fewer concessions to legibility here, the rhythm’s the thing, he knows by this point that the punctuation – uh huh huh – is as much a draw as the script.

Context, my old foe, reveals that this is Elvis’ last song of the 50s – his last recording before his mother died and he left for service overseas in Germany. The ministrations of Colonel Tom meant that Elvis’ chart history smooths over the military years, particularly in the US – there’s always some new Presley Product available, “I Got Stung” included. But they’re still a tear in his career, and it’s a bit of context that can make you hear things in the recording that you surely wouldn’t otherwise – turn it into a rushed last blast of original King energy before the army, the amphetamines, the karate, Priscilla, the whole grand pantomime of 60s Elvis. Before decline.

Why did I avoid context so much? Because I’m lazy and wanted to get things done quickly, but the deeper reason is that context begets narrative, and narrative is one hell of a drug. Start writing about one song and you could easily end up writing about everything (there are people who do this extremely well; there are people who happily descend into bottomless riffing – I worry I’m the latter). Still, metaphorical stretches are part of the joy of writing about Number 1s – pretending, often to the point where you aren’t pretending, that there’s some grand linkage in the content and the circumstances of hits. Sometimes almost everybody joins in: “Ghost Town” wasn’t written about the 1981 riots it coincided with, but it became about them on some unbreakably profound level.

The story of Elvis is the pure stuff, the fish scale cocaine of narrative. He’s the ur-myth of all pop stories, a Golden Bough of rock. When they called him the King, they weren’t fucking around: he is the Sun king of youthful vigour; he is the wounded king of Graceland, an double avatar of brilliance and decline. Raw talent, youthful flowering, the compromises of fame and money, a late rally if you’re lucky, a squalid end. You can rhyme this Elvis myth with so many things, vary the scale from micro to macro. The descent into nostalgia of middle-aged fans contenting themselves with decorative souvenirs. The decline of 20th century pop culture itself into bloated repetition. 

How can an Elvis reissue be the 1000th No.1, I asked myself when it happened, but perhaps it had to be. Here he is, in the twilight of the singles chart, to set his lands in order. Would the last Elvis to leave the building please turn off the lights?

(For more on the context of the 1000th No.1 and its significance to Popular, read Part 1 and Part 2 of a 3-part piece on the topic over at Freakytrigger)

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ELVIS PRESLEY – “Jailhouse Rock” https://popular-number1s.com/2023/11/16/elvis-presley-jailhouse-rock-2/ https://popular-number1s.com/2023/11/16/elvis-presley-jailhouse-rock-2/#comments Thu, 16 Nov 2023 13:24:53 +0000 https://popular-number1s.com/?p=33520 (You might also like to read Part 1 of a 3-part piece loosely about the 1000th No.1. I should probably say that piece contains SPOILERS as to the identity of the 1000th No.1, my apologies if that had been a source of pleasurable suspense for you.)

I fell for “Jailhouse Rock” thanks to writing Popular, ironically since I gave it a desultory 7 and one tossed-off paragraph first time around. But when we started doing club nights playing only No.1s, I learned something important. “Jailhouse Rock” goes off. It might not be the best No.1 of the 1950s – though, honestly, it might be – but it’s supremely danceable. It’s paced as a series of freezes and relaxes, those strike-a-pose guitar chords puncuating the song juxtaposed with Bill Black’s jovially frugworthy double bass.

This is party music in more than one way – it’s the basic structure of a musical statues or pass-the-parcel game played by children, which reinforces a sense that “Jailhouse Rock” is a fundamentally silly record, in the most positive possible fashion. In a way the pause/resume structure also mirrors the song’s setting – one of the most reliable jokes in comedies about institutions like schools or prisons or workplaces is the one where the “inmates” are up to something and assume a tableau of contrived innocence when the boss, teacher or warden takes a look.

Elvis liked to make funny records. His “Hound Dog” keeps some of the raunch and anger in Big Mama Thornton’s version but switches her harsh comedy for something more playful – his “dog” might bring to mind some faithless two-timer but it might as easily bring to mind Goofy or Spike. He’s performing Black music and selling it to white audiences but he’s also performing a version that teaches those audiences how to listen to it without him entirely sanitising it, and comedy is a big part of how he does that. (This is part of the deeper way in which Elvis and Eminem mirror one another – Elvis is a guy, but he’s also a character, instantly understandable by kids at the level of look and gesture)

As even the song’s Wikipedia page admits, “Jailhouse Rock” works because Elvis takes Lieber and Stoller’s comedy song and snarls, yelps and sings it entirely seriously. But that’s not because Elvis is a serious artist ennobling silly material – it’s because selling a joke by not breaking character is what good comedians do. The title of “Jailhouse Rock” gives away that this is a sketch – what if rock and roll, but in jail. Elvis, the consummate entertainer, understands that for the sketch to work the rock and roll needs to actually rock and actually roll, not be a winked version of itself.

In doing so, he’s introducing something to rock, a kind of kayfabe which outlasts the double-bass/guitar/drums line-up and the shaking rhythms he’s using, which is still in the music now. The question, how serious is this person? recurs again and again across the hundreds of hits between Elvis’ appearance and this unasked-for resurrection. We’ve been asking it of Robbie, of Frankee, of Eminem, of Bono. The answer remains the same, how serious do you need them to be? “Jailhouse Rock”, at least, is a 2005 record.

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STEVE BROOKSTEIN – “Against All Odds” https://popular-number1s.com/2023/11/14/steve-brookstein-against-all-odds/ https://popular-number1s.com/2023/11/14/steve-brookstein-against-all-odds/#comments Tue, 14 Nov 2023 20:35:51 +0000 https://popular-number1s.com/?p=33516 The 24 Number 1s between Sam & Mark and Girls Aloud are the longest Popular has been Reality TV free since Hear’Say’s first hit. You might have been fooled into thinking its heyday was over. You would have been quite wrong.

The X Factor is probably the reality pop show British readers know best – it had the success here that American Idol had in the USA, and was slow to peak and to decline. At the start of 2005 we’re still years off its point of maximum impact and its most successful legacy acts. Simon Cowell’s brainchild, it made him even richer and even more of a pop-cultural villain – a position he clearly adored.

Cowell took the Pop Idol format of wannabe singers and public votes and made two major changes. He formalised earlier rounds, adding a second layer of the competition where each judge took charge of one particular tranche of contestants (Steve Brookstein, for instance, was one of Cowell’s “Over-25s”; his vanquished rivals in the final, operatic boyband G4, were in the “Groups”, managed by the ever-hangdog Louis Walsh). And he added a second weekly show, in which the lowest two public voted contestants would sing for their survival, and the judges alone would deliver a final verdict.

The changes made the contest a more lucrative proposition for everyone involved – except, initially, the competitors. At first the X Factor’s biggest stars were its judges – Sharon Osborne and Louis Walsh became household names, but not on the scale of the show’s high-waisted ringmaster. A “Judges’ Houses” section – lasting two full weeks – gave contestants and viewers an OK Magazine style taste of the Cowellian high life, the camera lingering on heartbroken hopefuls as each judge raised and crushed them. The rules for the live shows also gave the judges imperial power – the public could save their favourites, but until the final could not damn them.

These format shifts didn’t entirely guarantee the judges a desired winner, but did give even more power to the show in shaping a narrative and outcome. And these hadn’t changed one bit. For all that the X Factor claimed to be hunting genuine, lasting stars (and did eventually find some), the arc of the series was still a pumped-up rags-to-riches story with a winner’s single at the end of it. One final safety-first change here: no more original songs – the X-Factor winner would be sent on their way with a cover version.

And despite all the changes, the first winner isn’t too far outside the McManus mould. Steve Brookstein was a 30something soul man, the star turn in his local pub, with a likeable grin and no genuine prospect of long-term success. This last was obvious to anyone except Steve Brookstein, whose career never even reached a second single, as he turned out to be truculent and awkward from the get-go, cavilling even at getting up the morning after winning to go on breakfast TV.

Brookstein himself tells a different story, one of dark media forces conspiring to hamstring his career and creativity because he wouldn’t toe the Cowell line. It’s hard to pin down exactly what creative freedom he wanted – the way Brookstein tells it, the label wanted more cover versions and Brookstein wanted to go in his own direction, so a parting of the ways seems like the best option for both. Whatever the case, he was out of his “million-dollar contract” before the year was up, and embarked on his second media career as a man dedicated to rubbishing Simon Cowell and the X Factor at any opportunity before spiralling off into wider, uglier, more familiar conspiracies as even that fame dried up.

Certainly his winning record – withdrawn from streaming services – has no hints of thwarted creativity. It’s a competent, inert cover version of a good song, which on video at least has to build a sense of momentum from tacky X Factor snippets (“Steve! Steve!”). Even by the later standards of X-Factor winning records, it’s a colourless effort.* In his final performance on the show he broke down with emotion, forgot the words, and was angrily accused of faking it all by Sharon Osborne. Not one shred of that drama survives in this pointless release.

*G4’s winning single would have been a cod-operatic version of Radiohead’s “Creep”, which I’m both sad and deeply relieved to have dodged.

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BAND AID 20 – “Do They Know It’s Christmas?” https://popular-number1s.com/2023/11/13/band-aid-20-do-they-know-its-christmas/ https://popular-number1s.com/2023/11/13/band-aid-20-do-they-know-its-christmas/#comments Mon, 13 Nov 2023 19:35:24 +0000 https://popular-number1s.com/?p=33511 “The 2000s remakes all got a bit too clever”, sniffed SAW’s Mike Stock years later. A touch of bitterness there perhaps – the people involved with this were as likely to rep for Pictures Of Starving Children Sell Records as Band Aid II – but the man had a point. The Band Aid 20 remake is an overstuffed mess, groaning as it tries to cram everything it can think of about British music and Band Aid itself into five tedious, pompous minutes.

This bloating is one of its two big differences from the 1984 and 1989 versions. Those records were vocal lucky dips but the sound of each kept closely to a then-dominant style: moody synth rock or tinny drum machine pop. On this version producer Nigel Godrich makes the record suit its BPI highlights reel cast, a song which opens with sad pianos and Coldplay’s Chris Martin detours via rock, pop, grime and metal and winds up in an extended Jools Holland’s Hootenanny style jam.

Some of this is correction for previous neglect – whatever its merits as a record, back in 1985 “We Are The World” put Band Aid to shame in terms of integration. A record about Africa by an almost entirely white British cast raised questions (and eyebrows) even then, and by 2004 they couldn’t be brushed away by an angry Geldof. But when people commented that there were almost no Black musicians on the original “Do They Know It’s Christmas?” the point was that the UK pop establishment of the mid-80s was unthinkingly, reflexively racist, not that the song itself required Travis’ producer to find room for a rap and a gospel finish.

But the scale of this version is also a tacit acknowledgement that there isn’t a centre to UK music any more, no dominant pop sound to celebrate. This single sold a million at a moment when most number 1s barely shifted a tenth of that. You could certainly look at the Band Aid 20 line up and argue that there’s a shared sensibility to Dido, Coldplay, Travis, Lemar, Will Young, the Bedingfields and others, and if you were mean you might suggest that sensibility is one of unproblematic, export-ready mediocrity. But to its credit the line-up finds room for some trickier characters – the guys from Radiohead are genuinely unexpected additions, The Darkness’ cartoonish bonhomie doesn’t fit the coffee-table vibe either, and then there’s Dizzee Rascal.

At the time this charted I assumed most of this entry would be about Dizzee – it seemed impossible he’d ever be at No.1 again, Mercury Prize or no. After years – decades! – of the British music industry neglecting homegrown Black talent, the speed with which they embraced Dizzee Rascal seems astonishing. “I Luv U” was a bomb-burst of noise, invention, attitude and spite – people who’d been following the underground evolution of grime for years were shocked by how new, how hard, how fully realised it sounded. And for once the sclerotic biz actually recognised a major talent, and within 18 months he’d won the top award and was fast-tracked into a studio with Paul McCartney and Bono? Impossible. But here he is.

Dizzee treated Band Aid as a half hour’s work – they called him up, told him what they needed, he wrote some bars, wrote a few more on request, job done. And while he wasn’t a household name, his presence on the record, the way he was allowed to update its hallowed text, was vital as proof this wasn’t just a nostalgia exercise. The truth was, Band Aid 20 needed Dizzee Rascal a great deal more than Dizzee Rascal needed Band Aid 20.

It helps that his simple contribution is the best thing about the record by a distance. His spot is crassly inserted – everything pauses for a Representative Of The Youth to have his say – but his casual London squawk cuts through the rest of the swaying and mic-hugging anyway. And there’s a harsh clarity to the question he asks – “if the tables were turned, would you survive?” that gets straight to one of the reasons humans are drawn to help one another. It has a similar weight to the famous Bono line but it’s better, managing to not imply this is a zero-sum game.

Who got to sing the Bono line was a minor, but illuminating subplot. The two men slated to do it were Robbie Williams and Justin Hawkins, the participants keenest on tongue-in-cheek, performative rock-star-ness. To me this say Team Band Aid knew that “tonight thank God it’s them instead of you” was a bit of a liability, and planned to lean into that notoriety (Band Aid II had palmed it off on a Goss). Either singer would surely have been taken by Bono as a deliberate insult – in any case, he insisted on doing it himself, got his way, and oversang it anyway.

This miniature brouhaha does point up the second major difference between Band Aid and Band Aid 20. In 1984 the motley group were recording a song. Now they’re covering a classic, making Band Aid 20 as much like the charity run-throughs of “Let It Be” and “Ferry Cross The Mersey” as its own original. But more than that – as is clear watching the video, Band Aid 20 is a cover version not just of a song but of an event. Everything about it feels rehearsed – the sombre faces of pop musicians as they’re shown videos of famine victims; the in-performance mugging for the camera; the laughs and smiles of friends made and remade; even Justin Hawkins’ pelvic-thrusting his guitar.

It’s pop as historical re-enactment, stars doing the kind of things stars do in a Band Aid video and hoping for some of the original enchantment to rub off. But just as in 1989, “Do They Know It’s Christmas?” is too gothically strange a song – and Band Aid too tied to its hubristic, passionate moment – for that to work. As a one-off, it was remarkable. As a tradition, it feels increasingly hollow.

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GIRLS ALOUD – “I’ll Stand By You” https://popular-number1s.com/2023/11/12/girls-aloud-ill-stand-by-you/ https://popular-number1s.com/2023/11/12/girls-aloud-ill-stand-by-you/#comments Sun, 12 Nov 2023 22:03:26 +0000 https://popular-number1s.com/?p=33507 Girls Aloud were two bands uneasily sharing one career. They were the TV competition winners who kept one foot in the light entertainment paddock, reliably putting out a cover version whenever a telethon required it. And they were the pop band – what a pop band! – who teamed up with Xenomania to treat ‘manufactured pop’ as a raid on a lego factory. That Girls Aloud smashed bright-coloured pieces together in combinations which couldn’t possibly work but somehow always did and topped them with a flurry of impressionistic one-liners, cut-up postcards and magpie gleanings from the mess and delight of modern living.

Pro-pop critics – me included – liked to pretend that the modernist pop Girls Aloud was the only one who counted, quietly and collectively agreeing not to let a “See The Day” or “I’ll Stand By You” spoil the band’s parade. But when it comes to a project like Popular, that isn’t possible. After three of the group’s most sparkling, startling pop singles stalled at No.2, it’s “I’ll Stand By You” that goes one better.

That might be because of the extra marketing muscle that came with a charity song – it was the 2004 Children In Need single. It might also be because it was almost Christmas and the public just liked a big, cosy, familiar ballad more than whatever five-chorus electro-skiffle oddity was under the Xenomania tree. On this conservative reading, the remarkable thing isn’t that “Love Machine” or “The Show” failed to hit the top where this did, it’s that they came so very close.

And it’s also quite possible that the division I’ve outlined just isn’t one most of the group’s fans or single buyers would have even recognised – for them the dinosaur ballads and the robot pop were all part of the same enjoyable package. (One thing to be said for this is that a pop band’s label will demand ballads, and they weren’t Xenomania’s strong point as writers and producers – why wouldn’t you outsource the slow numbers?). So let’s try and treat “I’ll Stand By You” as not a tiresome aberration, just the next Girls Aloud single. How well does it work?

Brian Higgins’ production team reportedly toyed with a dramatic reworking of The Pretenders’ power ballad before deciding that a straightforward version would do the job better. They were right: the original already has everything you could possibly want from a huge, end-of-year, charity weepie. Even in 1994, in the waning glory years of the power ballad era, “I’ll Stand By You” was notably stately, its pledge of support without limit brought to somewhat gruelling life by its unending tramp of piano chords.

But “I’ll Stand By You” gains a degree of stature from who’s making it. Like “Everybody Hurts”, it finds a veteran songwriter and alternative darling taking on the stadium ballad form like it’s a personal challenge: what of herself can Chrissie Hynde find in a sound this huge? Her answer was what it’s always been – that voice. World-weary even on her debut, by 1994 she could manipulate her flows of exhaustion and strength with easy precision. “I’ll Stand By You” is a showcase for Hynde as her own interpreter, selling the grit in the song, finding a twist of conversation where another singer might just find bombast. The bits that stick in my mind, unusually for a song with such a juggernaut chorus, are the parts in the verses which feel most personal – “if you’re mad get mad”, “I’m a lot like you”.

This means Girls Aloud have the same issue Westlife did on “Against All Odds” – the song doesn’t just happen to be written for a solo singer, it draws a lot of its emotional weight from the sense of that singer taking on this burden by themselves. But unlike Westlife’s song, the meaning here doesn’t break entirely when five voices step into the place of one, it just shifts. The Girls Aloud choruses are soothing where The Pretenders are obdurate, turning the song into one of more simple comfort.

The problem is more with the verses. Girls Aloud can sing – it’s why they exist in the first place, and in a way “I’ll Stand By You” is them going back to their competitive roots, splitting the song’s verses up across the band in a relay. It’s a pleasant thing, this reminder they could still do that original job. But there’s no line reading here as interesting as the original, no sense that the group have got into the bones of the song.

And that’s the real difference between Girls Aloud the metapop poster girls and Girls Aloud the dutiful balladeers – even if they aren’t a group you go to for individual showcases, collectively, on their best singles, they do inhabit the songs, sharing in the material’s delight in its own panache. Yes, they could have fulfilled their 2002 brief, but they didn’t, and every time they’re forced back to that world they sound ordinary.

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