TheWrittenTevs’ Top 5 Best No. 1’s of 2015

It’s time. My Top 5 UK No 1’s of 2015. I’ve run out of ways of introducing these lists. Let’s get to business.

No. 5 – “Sorry” by Justin Bieber

2015 has been the year where Bieber rose from being universally derided to surprisingly likable. Completely accidentally, his rise has been pretty accurately captured in microcosm on this blog: burnt out on this summer’s tasteless dirge of completely incompetent trash, I savaged Bieber in my first review of his work before giving it more of a chance and finding that actually his current work’s alright. For the first time in his career, it seems like Bieber is an actual living thing; it’s amazing how much being basically human will make people like you.

It does also help that Sorry has a pretty nice beat and an above-par set of lyrics. I even grew to like the line “Because I’m missing more than your body” which originally sounded like a standard singer-trying-to-be-emotional-but-unable-to-get-past-sex sentiment when in reality the sentiment’s closer to singer-wants-to-be-able-to-get-past-sex-but-can’t.

Wait a minute – Bieber’s dissatisfied with making songs about hollow sex and wants to make more fulfilling material about genuine emotions? Holy crap,  he’s a Reconstructionist. That’s how much the pop world is changing under our feet right now. Damn.

Full Review

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No. 4 – “Not Letting Go” by Tinie Tempah feat. Jess Glynne

Surprise!

I can’t stand Jess Glynne. If Bieber is representative of the best trends of 2015, Glynne represents the worst. Her lyrics are disconnected from any sense of real emotion, they barely manage to fit together, there is absolutely no variation between any of them, and she just doesn’t seem to care about anything she produces. Unsurprisingly then, Glynne is easily the worst element of this song: she comes in spewing a bunch of her own cliches, doesn’t care that they’re entirely disconnected from the verses, and largely serves to drag everything down.

Goddamn if I don’t love the verses though. Tinie Tempah raps about a girl he likes and he sounds like he means it: that is fucking rare at the moment. More than that, the person he describes has a personality: she likes records, she enjoys singing, she’s carefree and fun. She’s alive. We actually had a love song in 2015 which was about someone.

People keep telling me that I’m needlessly harsh on pop music. I’m not though; I just want it to be written with a bit of competence. If you’re writing a love song about someone, I want to know about them and what makes you love them. An ass does not a relationship make; an ass does not a girlfriend make. Tinie Tempah’s verses were the only ones in the charts this year which sounded like they were actually written about someone, and for that they got the No. 4 spot.

Full Review

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No. 3 – “What Do You Mean” by Justin Bieber

I’m as surprised as you are that Justin’s appeared twice on this list. When I started writing my essay on this song, claiming that it was a well crafted exploration of loneliness in the postmodern age, I was being a bit facetious: I thought I was taking the piss. Once I finished the essay though, I was actually convinced I was right. More than that, I actually grew to like the song the more I wrote about it. That essay is now my favourite post this year. It just goes to show, you can convince yourself to like something through concerted effort. Thanks Bieber, I’ve learnt so much from you this year.

Full Review

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No. 2 – “Love Me Like You Do” by Ellie Goulding

I have spent a lot of time on this blog complaining about how most pop music is just vapid men oogling women because they’ve got attention spans even shorter than their overcompensated dicks. I’m still a straight man though and I have to admit: this song is sexy. Ellie Goulding’s delivery is sexy. The production is sexy. The lyrics are sexy. Pretty much every song on the charts nowadays is about sex, but this is the only song released this year which I’d consider sexy.

And the amazing thing is that this song is pretty much fanfic based on Fifty Shades of Grey, a deeply unpleasant book which tries to romanticise a man who is clearly a sociopath and borderline rapist. This song is aware of the problems with it’s source material though and is able to negate them while still staying true to the book. That is an astoundingly hard thing to manage. Every word has to have the exact right connotation to avoid sending the entire piece directly to Problemville: the control has to be immense. Yet Ellie Goulding pulls it off. The fact that she’s actually able to make the lyrics sexy too is just the icing on the cake. Out of all the No. 1s this year, Love Me Like You Do is the easily best written by far. It’s not quite my favourite though.

Full Review

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And finally, my favourite No. 1 of 2015:

No. 1 – “Black Magic” by Little Mix

It’s a feminist magick trick designed to change “wanting sex” from being a predominately male thing to something that both genders can do (without shame and all!). That should be genuinely enough to justify it’s place on the list. How many songs can be summarised as a “feminist magick trick”? If the answer was more than one, we’d live in a much better world than we do now.

I’m not even really sure what to say about this: I just really like it. Much like I Really Like You, it’s joy is infectious; it just makes me happy to be alive. I love Little Mix’s Love Me Like You too, and their album Get Weird is pretty damn good. I just love that there’s a group aimed at teenage girls who are telling them that they can be as strange as they wish, as long as they’re happy. I love that they’re telling them that they can be weird and individual, yet still can have friends, love and sex; that they can still be accepted as functional members of society even if they decide to do their own thing. In a world featuring You Don’t Know You’re Beautiful and Nick Jonas’ Jealous, we have a band who are telling teenage girls to be proud of themselves and to live full, enriched lives which are defined entirely on their own terms. Little Mix are important. They’re a shining beacon in a world of shit. I love them.

I just hope that more people take their lead. At the very least, I definitely want more Little Mix in the charts as we head our way into the vagueness that is 2016.

Full Review

Best No. 1 Hits of 2014 – No 1 “Blank Space” by Taylor Swift

I decided that I was going to review every song to make it to No. 1 in the UK charts. I managed to review about four. Instead, I’ve organised the songs into a list and will review the ones I liked and disliked the most. Here’s the one I particularly liked:

In my Worst No. 1 Hits of 2014 list, I technically broke the rules by including Shake It Off, a song that only got to No. 1 in the US despite the fact that I predominately focus on the chart in the UK. Well, I’m doing it again: Taylor Swift’s Blank Space wasn’t a UK No. 1 but was a US No. 1 and I am letting that count because I love this song. There is just no competition, this is just the best pop song of the year. For me to put anything other than this song at No. 1 would be wrong.

Hell, Taylor Swift is the artist of the year. She became the first woman ever to be knocked off the US No. 1 spot by herself; she started a one-woman crusade against Spotify; she had the fastest selling album of the year – whether you think she’s good or not, you have to admit this woman deserves respect. And 1989, the album she released: Jesus Christ is it good. I could literally write a series of essays taking each song in turn and discussing how they fit into Taylor Swift’s discography overall, what they have to say about her relationship with the media, what they have to say about modern romance narratives, what they have to say about being young in the 21^st Century, what they have to say in terms of post-subcultural theory, so on, so forth, etc, etc. While Ed Sheeran is writing vague platitudes about nothing in particular and Jason Derulo can’t get halfway through a pick-up line without being distracted by an ass, Taylor Swift is meanwhile producing the type of work I could write a dissertation on. There is just no contest: she is the best person working in pop at the moment.

But enough general platitudes: what about Blank Space itself. Like much of 1989, Blank Space is about Taylor Swift’s increasingly antagonist attitude towards the public persona put on her by the press. Unlike Shake It Off though which just straight refuted that persona, Blank Space takes the much more interesting route of being written from that persona’s perspective. What Blank Space is is thus a character study written by Taylor Swift about “Taylor Swift”, asking what it would actually be like to be the person everyone says she is. From the perspective of someone fascinated by postmodern identity construction, this song is already fascinating.

Where the song stops being interesting and starts being great in it’s expert evocation of that persona though. Swift takes the components of her public persona and develops it into someone genuinely dangerous and scary. “Find out what you want / Be that girl for a month / but the worst is yet to come.” “So hey, let’s be friends / Dying to see how this one ends / Grab your passport and my hands / I can make the bad guys good for a weekend.” The character invoked is just forceful, demanding and sadistic. “I can make the bad guys good for a weekend” is basically her saying that she can control men. More than that, the man she’s saying she can control in this song is you. Note the use of the second person in this song; “grab your passport and my hands” are demands made at the listener. If you are a man listening to this song, then Taylor Swift (the persona) is saying that she’s going to single you out, seduce you, rip you apart, “leave a scar”, “keep you second guessing” but always keep you “com[ing] back” for more. Taylor Swift (the persona) is a maneater who will brainwash you and leave you her bitch. She is the person Hall and Oates sang about. She is Tammy 2 from “Parks and Recreation”. You have been fucking warned.

And this is one of the few threatening maneater songs which actually feels threatening. Katy Perry sang about exactly the same topic in Dark Horse but was it in anyway believable? Of course not. The problem was with Katy Perry herself; Perry is a bubbly, hollow pop diva whose songs about being burned, hurt and dismayed by men greatly outnumber the songs of hers written in spite of them; as such, her spiteful songs always come off as rather fake. They just don’t fit in with the Katy Perry persona. But Blank Space is entirely about Taylor Swift’s persona. If Taylor Swift was to come up to you and tell you she was going to seduce, bed, fight and discard you, then you would believe her because that’s what she does (apparently). This song isn’t just about Swift’s persona, it uses that persona to enhance it’s themes and effect. This song is in control of elements most other songs don’t even consider. It’s very clever stuff, .

Of course, how far removed the real Taylor Swift is from the character presented in Blank Space is up to debate. Ultimately the only way of telling where one character begins and one ends would probably be to date Taylor Swift. This song does not make that sound like fun. Of course, the fact that I would still do it if ever got the chance means that I’ve probably been brainwashed by her already. Ladies and gentlemen, the new Queen of Pop is in town. Her name is Taylor Swift and she wears the trousers around here.

Best No. 1 Hits of 2014 – No. 2 “Uptown Funk” (and Special Mentions)

The fact that “Uptown Funk” is my second best No. 1 of the year shouldn’t really be a surprise, considering how I revealed that way over a week ago in my review of the song. And I pretty much just stand by what I put there; if you want to know my thoughts on the song, read that post. Spoiler alert: I like it.

Considering how this entry is pretty empty at the moment though and how my next post is going to be about my No. 1 favourite chart topper of 2014, let’s instead take this opportunity to slow down a bit and look at some special mentions which almost featured in my Top 5 of the year but just missed out:

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Timber – Pitbull feat. Ke$ha

This was actually the first song I ever reviewed on this blog. I am so close to disowning that review. I had no real idea what tone I was going to use for my blog at the time and pretty much picked one I’d never use again. The result is that my Timber review really sticks out like a sore thumb when compared to everything else in blog and I’m really worried that people are going to keep reading it and think it’s representative of my work.

It also doesn’t help that Timber has grown a lot on me during the last year. Yes it’s stupid, it’s sexist, it’s just Pitbull doing the same crap he always does, blah blah blah blah – my original review got all that right. But when the summer came and the charts were awash with EDM that all sounded the same and was all about nothing, blah blah blah blah, Timber became something I really looked forward to listening to because it became one of the few electronic songs of the year that actually had a personality to it. Say what you want about the combination of club music and country; there was no other song like it released this year.

Really flawed but admittedly different – count it as my pick for so-bad-it’s-good song of the year.

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Happy – Pharrell Williams

A really well made song: minimal and tight with Pharrell showing full control over his craft. It was overplayed to hell though and, considering how the main attraction of the song is how little there is to it in the first place, it didn’t take long for me to just get bored. One of the best written songs of the year, but not one of the songs I want to listen to the most.

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Kiesza – Hideaway / Bang Bang – Jessie J, Ariana Grande & Nicki Minaj

Both songs that I really like, though I’m not entirely sure why.

The title Bang Bang just makes me think of Bam-Bam from The Flintstones, something quite fitting considering how it’s noisy aesthetic makes it sound like a toddler hammering away at all the instruments it can find. There is just something justifiably brash and noisy about it though – it’s three people staking their claims down on the dance floor and they’re going to make an event of it, goddammit.

Hideaway meanwhile is just a completely standard EDM club song. I have nothing to say about. Yet I just really like it. I don’t have overthink every song I listen to, do I?

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New Romantics – Taylor Swift

This one’s my favourite song of the entire year. It’s just a shame that it wasn’t applicable for inclusion on the list. Never mind not being a No. 1, it wasn’t even released as a single. Hell, it barely counts as an album track: it’s one of three bonus songs included at the end of special editions of 1989. There are thousands of copies of that album available now that don’t even have it on the setlist. It’s damn good though and is a perfect conclusion to the album; anyone who has a copy of 1989 without it has an incomplete product.

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Oh hey, speaking of Taylor Swift…

[to be concluded]

Best No. 1 Hits of 2014 – No. 4 “Nobody to Love” by Sigma

I decided that I was going to review every song to make it to No. 1 in the UK charts. I managed to review about four. Instead, I’ve organised the songs into a list and will review the ones I liked and disliked the most. Here’s the one I particularly liked:

Long time followers on my blog (assuming they exist) will know of my theory that we’re currently in a transitory stage towards the Post-Club Age of Pop and that most songs at the moment are purposeful modifications/critiques of club music trying to make the pop scene more interesting again. If I’m not hating on a song, I’m probably arguing it’s a Post-Club song and, well, time to add another Post-Club to the pile.

I think the subtext of Sigma’s “Nobody to Love” is pretty obvious. Considering that club music has for a long time been focused on anonymous sex with strangers, that the song’s main lyric is “I know you’re tired of loving, of loving / With nobody to love. Nobody, nobody!” and that the actual beat of the music is pretty traditional club fare, what this song basically is is a club song saying “I’m bored of mindless sex, I want an actual relationship” or, alternatively, “I’m bored of dancing to the same meaningless club shit; give me something actually worthwhile”. It’s basically the same message that I argued Zedd’s Stay The Night delivered.

Of course Nobody to Love is a much better song than Stay the Night. While they both share the same problem of having intensely repetitious lyrics (Nobody to Love basically being minor variations on the same two lines shouted over and over again), Stay the Night was ultimately weighed down by Hayley Williams who just did not want to give it all to her performance. Meanwhile Sigma’s singer just sells it. He sounds genuinely heartbroken and desperate, yet never devolves into histrionics – it’s weak desperation but with force behind it; he really wants someone to love. This song shows exactly the type of vocal control that Ed Sheeran’s Thinking Out Loud desperately needed – the singer only has two lines to work with but he runs with them.

The song is ultimately this far down on the list because there’s really not much to it: I’ve mentioned pretty much everything worth mentioning about it in this review already and have barely amassed 350 words. What is here is quality though and amounts to one of the better songs of the year.

Best No. 1 Hits of 2014 – No. 5: “Sing” by Ed Sheeran

I decided that I was going to review every song to make it to No. 1 in the UK charts. I managed to review about four. Instead, I’ve organised the songs into a list and will review the ones I liked and disliked the most. Here’s the one I particularly liked:

Music critic Todd in the Shadows described Ed Sheeran as a “dork who writes embarrassingly clumsy songs about subjects that are way out of [his] depth” and I think pretty much sums up my opinion on him too. That’s certainly what I said about him when I put “Thinking Out Loud” as my Worst No. 1 of 2014 (in a tone that was admittedly overly aggressive but still) and that’s what I’d say about him if I ever reviewed The A-Team, etc. I find this a bit of a shame though because, the more I think about it, the more I think I want to like Ed Sheeran. I do have to admit, he is at least trying. He fails more than he succeeds but he tries. And I do also have to admit: when he does deliver, he delivers well.

Presenting Sing, his No. 1 from last year that isn’t Thinking Out Loud. In all areas of substance, Sing is basically a club song featuring a man hitting on a woman at a bar so as to enter her inside places, as per usual. It has such contemporaries as Blurred Lines or Jason Derulo’s Wiggle, some of the most hateable pop music of the past few years. What makes those songs so detestable though is that they’re songs about women written without any respect for women at all. Robin Thicke doesn’t care if you don’t say no to sex with him because he knows you want it really and he’s not leaving you alone til you give it to him, goddammit. Sing though: “I need you darling / Come on set the tone / If you feel you’re falling / Won’t you let me know”. Holy shit, it’s a song about a guy who wants to get it on with a girl but is waiting for her permission before going for it. It’s a song about how he wants sex but is willing to not have it if she doesn’t. It’s a song that respects the decisions of the person it’s aimed at. Wow. Why are songs like this so rare at the moment?

Add to that a really funky guitar riff and the “oh-oh-oh-oh!” sing along bit and you’ve just got a really good little crowd pleasing dance song. I can imagine it being wonderful live at concert; it’s one of the few Ed Sheeran songs I actually understand the mainstream appeal of. I’m not sure who he’s telling to “Sing!” in the chorus or what the “oh-oh-oh” bit actually has to do with anything but screw it, it’s funky enough and is written with enough heart that I’m willing to just accept it. Please note that this was not a luxury that I afforded Thinking Out Loud.

Ed Sheeran should just not be writing heartful polemics on the nature of love; it’s completely outside his grasp. A small jaunty dance song about love though; yeah, he can manage that. Indeed, he can do it well. This is the Ed Sheeran I want to hear more of – he keeps delivering songs like this, I could one day actually like him.