Popular '01

Glad to see you’re back, Tom.

Ticked off six boxes…and all six were for Kylie…or would have been if that had been allowed. Instead my five other votes were for “Whole Again”, “It Wasn’t Me”, “Lady Marmalade”, “Gotta Get Thru This”, and er, “Uptown Girl”. All five just barely made the cut. Most mediocre Popular year since I started following it.

So was the USA any better? You decide:

“Independent Women Part I”, Destiny’s Child
– carryover from 2000

“It Wasn’t Me”, Shaggy & RikRok
– Already discussed

“Ms. Jackson”, Outkast
– I still can’t believe they’re unbunnnied.

“Stutter”, Joe f/Mystikal
– I think I’ve said before Joe is the most generic stage name ever.

“Butterfly”, Crazy Town
– One hit wonder. At least Limp Bizkit never had a Hot 100 #1.

“Angel”, Shaggy & Rayvon
– Already discussed.

“All For You”, Janet Jackson
– I love the video for this. If only real-life transit stations were so shiny!

“Lady Marmalade”, Christina, Lil Kim, Mya, Pink
– Too bad Missy Elliott didn’t get a credit here. Would have been her only #1.

“U Remind Me”, Usher
– Usher enters his “U” phase.

“Bootylicious”, Destiny’s Child
– Their last group #1, with an assist from Stevie Nicks.

“Fallin'”, Alicia Keys
– Her first appearance. She doesn’t have a UK #1 either, does she?

“I’m Real (Murder Remix)”, Jennifer Lopez
– OK, this was weird. “I’m Real” was released as a standard pop song earlier in the summer. I don’t remember where it peaked but it didn’t reach #1. Then at the end of the summer the “Murder Remix” was issued, but it was a completely different song. I think the chart points were somehow combined, but the Murder Remix was the official #1.

“Family Affair”, Mary J. Blige
– I think this is her only #1. I would have liked to see “No More Drama” at #1 since it inadvertently captured the national mood almost perfectly that fall.

“U Got It Bad”, Usher
– We get it, Usher. U like the letter U.

“How You Remind Me”, Nickelback
– Why do so many people hate Nickelback? I blame this song to start with, which was played over and over and over again, and would eventually become the top Hot 100 song of 2002. Being the last rock #1 on the Hot 100 for some time didn’t help either. Meh.

So what was the top Hot 100 hit of 2001 then? Well, peak position didn’t seem to mean much that year with only four of the year-end top 10 being #1 hits. So congratulations Lifehouse, as “Hanging By A Moment” becomes the third year-end number one (and second in a row) that never actually topped the weekly chart.

Have just voted using Tor. (But what a rubbish year! My list of 6+s contains one 10, one 8 and a lot of 6s.)

I’m surprised I upvoted about 5 tracks to bring it to 12 out of 30, but really, this was a poor year. Kylie was the stand out.

Re2: Yeah, as mentioned in passing in the Love Don’t Cost A Thing comments, the Jennifer Lopez business of releasing totally different songs that happened to have the same title as her current single but nothing else was an odd one indeed – I think it started as an accident with I’m Real when Irv Gotti and Ja Rule went a bit further in binning the original than expected, but was clearly deliberate with Ain’t It Funny. The Official Charts here seems to treat that as two different songs with the same name. And the second/Murder Inc/r’n’b track now seems to have become the ‘main’ song, with the flamenco-spiced pop original referred to as the ‘alt’ version on her Vevo channel. Ah, historical revisionism.

That’s what the stats say.

Personally, I’m surprised it was that many.

I think this may be the first year of the entirely Popular project in which I had never knowingly heard any of the performances that reached number one! (Actually I tell a lie – it applies to 1952 too but that’s a special case.) I’m familiar with several of the songs of course, but there’s not one of them that comes close to the original, never mind improves on it. In previous polls I’ve often wondered what kind of cynic votes for “None of them!” but 2001 makes me very cynical indeed about the pop business.

The Face singles of 2001
(I don’t think I voted in this one, but at the time would have voted for Ms Jackson, Witness, Has It Come To This and probably Ugly and maybe Let Me Blow Your Mind).

1 Missy ‘Misdemeanor’ Elliott – Get Ur Freak On
2 Kylie Minogue – Can’t Get You Out Of My Head
3 Roger Sanchez – Another Chance
4 Outkast – Ms Jackson
5 Solid Crew – 2l Seconds
6 The Strokes – Hard To Explain
7 Mary J Blige – Family Affair
8 Gorillaz – 19/2000
9 I Monster – Daydream In Blue
10 Squarepusher – My Red Hot Car
11 Roots Manuva – Witness (One Hope)
12 Ernest Saint Laurent – Clumsy Lobster
13 Eve ft Gwen Stefani – Let Me Blow Ya Mind
14 Sticky ft Ms Dynamite – Booo!
15 P.Diddy & The Bad Boy Family – Bad Boy 4 Life
16 The Streets – Has It Come To This?
17 Bubba Sparxxx – Ugly
18 Static Revenger – Happy People
19 Felix Da Housecat – Silver Screen (Shower Scene)
20 Mis-Teeq – One Night Stand

[From rocklist.net – had some typos etc, I’ve done my best to tidy]

And here is the Tsort.info chart of charts, not really keen on this one.

1.Kylie Minogue – Can’t Get You Out of My Head
2.Christina Aguilera, Lil’ Kim, Mya & Pink – Lady Marmalade (Voulez-Vous Coucher Aver Moi Ce Soir?)
3.Alicia Keys – Fallin’
4.LeAnn Rimes – Can’t Fight the Moonlight
5.Shaggy & Ricardo ‘RikRok’ Ducent – It Wasn’t Me
6.Shaggy – Angel
7.OutKast – Ms Jackson
8.Enrique Iglesias – Hero
9.Jennifer Lopez – Love Don’t Cost a Thing
10.Uncle Kracker – Follow Me
11.Destiny’s Child – Survivor
12.Janet Jackson – All For You
13.Mary J Blige – Family Affair
14.Lifehouse – Hanging by a Moment
15.Linkin Park – In the End
16.Afroman – Because I Got High
17.Train – Drops of Jupiter (Tell Me)
18.Enya – Only Time
19.Crazy Town – Butterfly
20.Dido – Thank You

(Re14 Oh, in my selection of favourites from that list, I missed Get Ur Freak On – almost as if it was too obvious to mention).

My 9 probably boosted a little by nostalgia (though we don’t reach proper nostalgia territory until 2003). Not being aware of much at the time (S Club was my jam at the time), I don’t have much wider knowledge, but I’ve been enjoying Amnesiac (Radiohead), Origin of Symmetry (Muse) and Melody AM (Röyksopp) since. Just a lot of remnants of an already stagnant boyband scene at the top.

I was surprised that, even as big as they were, Radiohead got a song like Pyramid Song to #5, which until recently, I would’ve called my favourite song.

Glad you made it over the 2001 finishing line, Tom – although waiting for a song called “Somethin’ Stupid” during this summer’s Wall of News seemed deliciously apt.

Only six out of thirty for me this time around, and only Kylie who got more than a six. Surely 2002 has to be better?

Here were Australia’s number one singles in 2001. Only a few in common with the UK this year, though a few of 2000’s UK number ones turned up too:

“Cruisin'”, Gwyneth Paltrow and Huey Lewis
“Can’t Fight the Moonlight”, LeAnn Rimes
“Stan”, Eminem featuring Dido
“Case of the Ex”, Mýa
“It Wasn’t Me”, Shaggy featuring Rikrok
“Me, Myself & I”, Scandal’us
“Lady Marmalade”, Christina Aguilera, Pink, Lil’ Kim and Mýa
“Angel”, Shaggy featuring Rayvon
“Follow Me”, Uncle Kracker
“Hanging by a Moment”, Lifehouse
“Can We Fix It?”, Bob the Builder
“Can’t Get You out of My Head”, Kylie Minogue
“Because I Got High”, Afroman
“Smooth Criminal”, Alien Ant Farm
“Get the Party Started”, Pink

2001 was a very weird year for me musically. I was burgled and lost my whole CD collection (hundreds and hundreds of them), and was before I had any of them digitised. All the music I had ever owned (bar a small number of cassettes and records). I was utterly bereft. A few days later I went into HMV to start buying some of my favourite records back but quickly ended up with a pile so big I couldn’t decide which ones to buy and put them all back. In the end it wasn’t until I discovered mp3 blogs in 2004 and suddenly found a source of exciting new music.

So without buying any records, or going to any gigs, the only music I heard was unavoidable chart music from the radio – so far more than most of these annual polls, this is the music from the year I’m most familiar with. And it’s clear it turned out to be not a bad year to miss out. It’s only Kylie & 21 seconds that are unmissable for me, with a small handful of other 6+s from me.

Wow, seeing it written down like that really makes it obvious how mediocre 2001 was. I voted for 4 songs, most of them because I remember quite liking them as a 10-year-old rather than because I’d actually listen to them now.

agreeing with Ed that with such an unprecedentedly high number there’s bound to be plenty of bad and, while there isn’t as much good as one would like, it still far exceeds the moribund years of the early 90s which will always remain the nadir for me, especially when there was so much great music elsewhere at that time

I think chart sales still weren’t anything to be worried about at this point – if there was a decline, the huge million sellers from HearSay, Shaggy and Kylie kept things numberswise pretty positive, and of course there was still a significant part of the country who hadn’t upgraded to that internet thing as 2001 ended (though rapidly getting odder looks), let alone heard about Napster and/or mp3s.

The first signs of worry came very early on in 2002 – about the second or third week – when Daniel Bedingfield returned to #1 on what was then a horrifically low number of copies, 25,000 or so, and not in all parts of the country – the #1 that week in Scotland was, of all things, Hermes House Band’s Europop cover of Country Roads. Things improved in the spring with some major “idols” shifting huge numbers, then by the second half of the year things were dipping again, but it’s 2003-04 when the “Oh shit, the market’s dying” panic really begins.

#22 – Rory, I’d happily repressed any memory of Alien Ant Farm’s Smooth Criminal until now. Being involved in radio at the time it was everywhere. Gah.

In our neck of the radio woods 2001 saw us in the middle of a 3 year cycle with Green Velvet’s La La Land. In my mind there was a housey cycle which spanned 2000’s Men Are Not Nice Guys until 2002 when David Byrne guested on Lazy. These are the songs which I remember most clearly from the era.

There was also the Strokes and post-Strokes going on.

Ms Jackson, though, was a winner that year for me. I also fondly remember Triple J’s Adam and Wil doing their own version about cricketer Matt Hayden.

18/30.

Hey Baby is definitely the worst of 2001. Overall, an OK year.

Only 2009 onwards are less than 50-50.