A No. 1 Review – “See You Again” by Wiz Khalifa feat. Charlie Puth

This year, I’ve challenged myself to write a review of every song that manages to get to No. 1 in the UK charts. Here’s the latest one:

This year is a good one for film soundtracks: first we had a February dominated in the charts by Fifty Shades of Grey (with the soundtrack outclassing the film in a way only previously seen by Space Jam), and now we’ve got a No. 1 which comes from The Fast and the Furious 7*: Wiz Khalifa and Charlie Puth’s See You Again.

It’s also a good year to be Sam Smith: you can always tell a singer’s doing well when people start trying to sound like them, and the chorus of See You Again is Charlie Puth trying to sound exactly like Sam Smith. The only problem for Charlie Puth is that he isn’t as good as Sam Smith. Sam Smith is a wild thing who careens over an immense range of notes in order to sound as confused and out-of-control as possible; Charlie Puth tries to mimick this but never goes as far to either end of the scale as Sam does. The result is a performance which is like Smith’s but lesser. It’s an inferior copy. If you want to listen to a Sam Smith song, listen to one by Sam Smith.

It does make sense for the song to rip off Sam Smith though. It’s a tribute to Paul Walker, an actor who died in 2013 and whose last film performance is as one of the leads of The Fast and the Furious 7: “Damn, who knew? All the planes we flew / Good things we’ve been through […] I know we loved to hit the road and laugh / But something told me that it wouldn’t last […] Those were the days / Hard work forever pays / Now I see you in a better place”. It’s a sad song. There’s a lot of emotion there. Sam Smith songs are emotional, sad affairs. It all fits.

Which can’t be said for Wiz Khalifa’s performance in this song which is almost personality-less. This comes through most in the noises he makes during the later choruses – he does the standard “Woah” and “Yeah” stuff but delivers them in a flat monotone with no effort put into them at all. If I was lenient, I’d call his performance low key and dour, but really what I hear in his voice is boredom. He walks into the song, delivers his lines with little to no embellishment, does a few half hearted chants during the chorus and then walks out. He’s never seems truly invested in it. If he does truly fees sadness and loss at the passing of Paul Walker, it doesn’t come through.

Indeed, there doesn’t seem to have been much effort put in this song at all. A slow piano riff is used in the chorus because slow piano bits are what pop music uses when it wants to sad nowadays. The rap bits use the same drums and synths that very rap song use. There’s no true attempt to connect the choruses and the verses together, turning them into two separate pieces on the same subject which the song flicks between. The lyrics are quite good but nothing else has had the barest of thought go into them. Again, I can’t help but think that no-one making this song truly cared.

The result is that this isn’t a song that gets an emotional reaction from the work itself but instead gets it from the context it’s in, which is a roundabout way of saying that this wouldn’t be a No. 1 if it hadn’t been attached to a Fast and the Furious film. And in many ways, that’s actually quite insulting: that a song sung in the memory of a dead actor was partly sung by someone trying to be someone else, partly sung by someone who sounds bored, and then attached to the advertising for a major film because the end result couldn’t stand on it’s own. It’s a heartfelt tribute without the heart. I can’t truly call it bad – it’s crime is ultimately being bland as opposed to ineffective – but I can’t truly say I like it. It could’ve been better and frankly deserved to be.

* Even though the film calls itself Furious 7, I’m calling it The Fast and the Furious 7, if only because Furious 7 sounds like it could be anything and The Fast and the Furious 7 sounds like the 7th film in The Fast and the Furious series. Seriously, Furious 7 is just an terrible title.

A No. 1 Review – “Lay Me Down” by Sam Smith feat. John Legend

This year, I’ve challenged myself to write a review of every song that manages to get to No. 1 in the UK charts. Here’s the latest one:

I have talked about Sam Smith before. In particular, I’ve talked about how he isn’t as good as Ellie Goulding. “Sam Smith,” I argued, “warbles over his songs like he’s broken a leg during recording, only serving to distract the listener from the song at hand (something which can be fatal for songs like Like I Can which rely on you having an emotional connection to them)”. I then concluded this by saying that “Sam Smith makes singing with emotion seem like such hard work [while] Ellie Goulding makes it look effortless.” Harsh words.

My problem with Sam Smith is that, at heart, I’m a minimalist. This comes from my view of writing: anyone can spend thousands of words spinning a sprawling yarn in order to create one singular effect, but anyone who’s capable of using less words to achieve the same effect must be the better writer because they’re the ones who can use the tools of their trade more effectively and efficiently (thus implying a greater understanding of their craft and the greater ability to put that understanding in action). The same goes for singers: a singer who can communicate a emotion in three notes is better to me than the singer who needs ten notes. Sam Smith warbles all over his songs so as to communicate the idea of a man who’s torn, confused and hurt by love (punning on the idea of instability; his vocal style being all over the place to imply the idea that he can’t keep himself together), but Sting was able to communicate the same ideas in the chorus to So Lonely and he did that by just shouting the words “I’m so lonely!” over and over again.

And of course some would argue that a singer who can sing all the notes under the sun one after another is the better singer because they have a high technical ability and extended range. A good point, but that position seems to assume that all is needed for good art is raw materials. Good singing isn’t being able to hit every note under the sun, it’s knowing which emotion you want to communicate in a song, which note will communicate which emotion and then how to deliver that note so the needed emotion gets said. You could know every word in every dictionary in the world, but if you don’t know what word will improve your sentence, then you’re a bad writer. The same goes for music and notes.

The thing is, Lay Me Down proves that Sam Smith can take a more minimal approach and absolutely nail it. Take the way he sings “Can I lay by your side?” by just shouting all of the words in one note one after the other. Usually the multitude of notes that he’d have used would have distracted from the emotion in his voice but here it just comes pouring out; with nothing to hide behind, the emotion is forced to reveal itself, raw and naked, just like emotion should be. He does do some multi-note twaddery in the “Next to you, you” line, yes, but it’s actually really small and refined in comparison to how he usually sings; it reads more as him covering himself back up after his big reveal, doing so in preparation of revealing himself again during the next chorus. It’s honest, it’s raw, it’s real. It’s everything Sam Smith should be to me. It’s great.

The problem is that I’m not reviewing the Sam Smith version of the song; the version of the song I am reviewing is the re-recorded version featuring John Legend which was released for Comic Relief 2015. And the problem is that the inclusion of John Legend makes the song no different: the way he sings in this song is too close to the way Sam Smith does, making it difficult to actually tell who is singing in certain bits at all.

But actually, John Legend’s inclusion does make the song different. It makes it very different. Because the original song is about one man’s desire to lie with another person; it’s about intimacy and personal space. And this sense of intimacy and personal space gets utterly destroyed once you include a second person into it. Just how is this version of the song supposed to work? Are they singing about the same person? Are they in competition for that person’s affections? Do they want that person to lie with both of them at the same time? Are they singing about different people and are alternating lines which just so happen to luckily sum up both of their positions? This song just stops working when two people sing it; you can’t have an intimate love song between a narrator and someone else when that narrator is two separate people.

So yes, Lay Me Down is a good song. I’d call it the best solo song that Sam Smith has ever released. But the Comic Relief version with John Legend doesn’t work: Legend’s voice adds nothing to the track, and his inclusion overall just confuses it. Stick with the original.

A No. 1 Review – “King” by Years & Years

Yes, this review is late. So late that the song in question isn’t even No. 1 anymore. But why did it take me so long to talk about this track? Well, the answer’s simple: I’ve got barely anything to say about it.

I’ve heard this song done so many times before by so many different people. It has a R’n’B crooner singing about his crush over some techno club beats; it has a verse-chorus-verse-chorus structure which repeats a few times, followed by an extra-emotional slow bit involving just the singer and a piano which eventually rebuilds into a repeat of the chorus; it has the same synth presets most pre-EDM club songs used years ago; etc, etc. Musically, there is nothing in this song that doesn’t sound like every other song that was released in the charts five years ago.

In fact, this song just seems out of place in general. Again I have to invoke my general theory that we are currently in the post-club era of music: tired of making the same club shit over and over again, most modern hits are now reactions against club music which are designed to combat against various outdated parts of the genre and generally make pop music more interesting to listen to. Rather Be added a large sense of control and a few violins in order to make club music sound classier; Ed Sheeran writes club music about girls that treats their opinions with respect; Mark Ronson and Burno Mars decide to leave our decade completely and go back to the 70’s; while Rihanna and Hozier just do whatever they want. The charts have outgrown King by now; it currently sits in the Top 10 surrounded by songs that actively hate it.

Maybe there’s something in the song’s lyrics that justify it. The song is about a man who has a crush on someone but can’t act on it because they don’t know if it’s reciprocated. They’re thus stuck with a conundrum: do they move on and try to find another relationship elsewhere (and thus risk missing out if she is interested) or do they carry on trying for this relationship (with the risk of ruining the friendship if she isn’t). Or in the song’s words, “I dreamed you dreamed of me, calling out my name / Is it worth the price?” And actually, yeah. I can’t argue against these lyrics at all. Much like the pre-mentioned Ed Sheeran song, this is a club song about a women which actually cares for the woman’s opinion. If the woman says that nothing is happening between the two, then nothing is happening between the two: that’s the narrator’s central dilemma. So at least it’s vaguely progressive. It’s a worthwhile sentiment left untainted by the delivery. I’m not complaining.

But does the music reflect these lyrics? Does it sound like the plight of a man wrestling with his conflicted feelings? Does it really sound that emotional at all? Unfortunately, no. It just sounds like hundreds of other songs in the world; the music really isn’t about anything here. And again, this is the context of a Top 10 list which includes FourFiveSeconds (which does fascinating things regarding the joining and separation of it’s component parts so as to tell the story of people’s joinings and separations) and even songs like Earned It (which, for all it’s flaws, at least managed to sound as classy and dominating as it believed it’s main character to be). When compared to anything else going in the pop world at the moment, this song is just a massive disappointment. Put another way: this song did not deserve to be a UK No. 1.

And that’s all I really have to say on the matter: it’s a waste of time and is inferior to almost everything around it. Next song.

A No. 1 Review – “Love Me Like You Do” by Ellie Goulding

This year, I’ve challenged myself to write a review of every song that manages to get to No. 1 in the UK charts. Here’s the latest one:

Uptown Funk’s gone down: after seven weeks at the top, we finally have a new UK No. 1. And it’s by Ellie Goulding. I love Ellie Goulding. More accurately, I love Ellie Goulding’s voice. She sings as if she’s breathless, like she’s lying on a pillow and is whispering coyly into your ear – her vocals are just really intimate and thus really engrossing. More than that, she just sounds like she has complete control over her voice. This, for me, is what separates her from the other heavily stylised voices in pop at the moment. Sam Smith, for example, just warbles over his songs like he’s broken a leg during recording, only serving to distract the listener from the song at hand (something which can be fatal for songs like Like I Can which rely on you having an emotional connection to them). Compared to some of her peers, Ellie Goulding is a very minimalist performer but she performs without sacrificing what makes her voice special and she always works in service of the song itself. Sam Smith makes singing with emotion just seem like such hard work; Ellie Goulding makes it look effortless. She’s just the better performer.

And it’s a good thing that she’s as good as she is, because Love Me Like You Do should be intolerable to me. The reason for this is basically because it’s the theme song to the Fifty Shades of Grey movie, Fifty Shades being a deeply worrying phenomenon which purports to show a romantic BDSM relationship but in actuality shows a deeply abusive one. The problem really lies with Christian Gray: the guy’s not a BDSM dominator, he’s just a controlling sociopath. He uses his riches to stalk the object of his desire; he threatens her if she ever decides to say no to him; he lets her know that he’ll basically just kidnap and rape her if she doesn’t want to be with him anyway: he’s a highly dangerous, law breaking arsehole*. And any love songs written related to Fifty Shades from the female perspective are going to be tricky to pull off because they’re fundamentally going to be sung about this horribly unlikable man in a way that will be almost impossible to manage unproblematically. So how does Love Me Like You Do – a Fifty Shades of Grey love song from the female perspective – try to manage it?

It’s main attempt to remain palpable is to basically sand off all the corners of Christian Gray’s character and reduce him from a Chris Brown tribute to a much vaguer type of dick. As such, the type of love interest that Love Me Like You Do describes isn’t so much an arsehole as much as he is a ‘bad boy’. “You’re the light, you’re the night / You’re the color of my blood / You’re the cure, you’re the pain / You’re the only thing I wanna touch”, You’re so good for me but you’re so bad, You’re multifaceted and mysterious and deep, blah blah blah, etc. Lyrically, the song’s actually a surprisingly bog standard entry in the “Bad Boy with a Soft Side Love Song” genre, but, that said, I don’t think any other type of approach would have actually worked as well. It walks a good line between reflecting the character from Fifty Shades and creating someone who you can understand the attraction for. Against all odds, it actually works quite well.

There are some surprisingly clever subtle touches to the lyrics as well. “Love me like you do”, when taken in the context of Fifty Shades, is quite obviously a reference to BDSM – touch me like no-one else does, i.e. presumably with a leather strap, etc. The lyric also works when removed of the BDSM context though – “you touch me like no-one else does” is still a pretty romantic sentiment in it’s own right. The song thus works both as a soundtrack and on it’s own right. Indeed, the song works much better on it’s own right without the Fifty Shades baggage being added to it: Fifty Shades’ presence on the track only serves to introduce the potential subtext of abuse to proceedings but, once removed of that subtext, the song does basically lie upon a genuinely romantic sentiment. It’s Fifty Shades of Grey itself which is dragging the song down and not vice versa; Love Me Like You Do excels beyond it’s source material in pretty all ways it can.

That said, I do actually really like the way that song treads the lines between the themes of submission and dominance. Ellie sings the lyrics “Yeah, I’ll let you set the pace / Cause I’m not thinking straight / My head spinning around I can’t see clear no more” but then immediately follows them with the line “What are you waiting for?”, a surprisingly forceful and direct question that demands an answer. “Yeah, I’ll do whatever you want. So fuck me, now.” Musically, I also love the contrast between the quiet orchestra music and the chorus’ pounding drums: light and heavy, good and bad, submissive and dominant – this song is just an exploration of polar opposites through and through. This song is entirely about unions and the breaking of boundaries from one thing to another – it reflects it’s source material, it works as it’s own piece of art; it is just extremely well put together all around.

Ultimately my opinion of Love Me Like You Do is that it’s very well considered and that everything in it has been written with intelligence and tact. It’s pretty much as good and romantic as it could’ve ever been given it’s limitations. Can I call myself a fan of it though? Not really, but that’s just because of its Fifty Shades connection which changes the song in ways it fights desperately against. It’s fight is a valiant one though and it punches above it’s weight in every way it can. It’s a good song; a very good one indeed.

* And don’t tell me “But he gets better as the narrative goes on; Anastasia Steel manages to negotiate the relationship more the further into the books you get and eventually everything becomes workable” because, if anything, that makes things worse. It just falls into the common narrative of abusive relationships where the abused goes “Yes, so-and-so beats me and is horrible but they’re actually really sweet and if only I could bring out that side of them more, everything would be perfect”. No, if someone is abusive to you, get out of the relationship. They are not a nice person. They are unlikely to change. Get out, anything else is just going to be dangerous. Don’t do it. God, the fact that this book seems to be seen as romantic terrifies me.

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]

Worst No. 1 Hits of 2014 – No. 1: “Thinking Out Loud” 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 disliked:

I hate this song. I hate it. It doesn’t work. It’s meaningless. It’s pretentious. It’s hollow. It’s boring. It’s awful. I hate it. I hate it. I hate it. I hate it.

Big Problem #1: listen to how much effort Ed Sheeran has to put in in order to make the song sound earnest. He’s tries so hard to make the song sound sincere, which therefore means it can’t be sincere because, if it was, he wouldn’t have to try so hard to make it sound as such. By having to go through the lengths he does to make this sound truthful, he thus reveals that this song isn’t the truth at all. This song is a con, ladies and gentlemen; a overly designed, self-defeating con. It’s a lie. Ed Sheeran doesn’t love the song’s focus at all.

Big Problem #2: it’s called “Thinking Out Loud” but all of the lyrics are him telling someone how much he loves them: the lyrics of the song thus can’t be thoughts because we don’t think directly at people. If they were thoughts, the first lyrics wouldn’t go “When your legs don’t work like they used to before / And I can’t sweep you off of your feet”, they’d go “When her legs don’t work like they used to before / And I can’t sweep her legs off of her feet”. These aren’t thoughts, these are quotations. Also: “I’m thinking ’bout how people fall in love in mysterious ways”. No you’re not. Even if you accept the idea of this song as being comprised of thoughts, none of this song is about how people fall in love. It’s about how the narrator’s already in love and about how he thinks the love will last, but none of it – none of it – except for that one line is about how people fall in love. Do you even know what this song’s about, Ed Sheeran? Because it’s about falling in love, no it’s about being in love, no it’s about thinking about love, no it’s about confessing your love – WHAT IS THIS SONG ABOUT, ED SHEERAN?!? PICK A TOPIC AND FUCKING STICK TO IT!

So a summary so far: the song is patently insincere, the register is completely wrong and it doesn’t even seem to be able to decide exactly what it’s talking about (thinking about? Oh who cares?). But hey, maybe there’s a couple of good lines in the song. Maybe there’s a few moments where it’s not entirely incompetent?

NOPE.

“Well, I’ll just keep on making the same mistakes / Hoping that you’ll understand” – The whole point of a long-term relationship is to learn from your mistakes and become a better person through your love for your partner. The relationship Ed Sheeran apparently is envisioning here is one where he’s a horrible idiot who never learns anything and his wife puts up with him just because. He’s basically imagining being The Simpsons. Such emotional investment he has with this relationship.

“I fall in love with you every single day” – In order for Ed Sheeran to fall in love with his partner every single day, he’d have to fall out of love with her every single day too; you can’t fall in love with someone you’re already in love with.

“Your soul could never grow old, it’s evergreen” – Evergreen trees grow old; they just don’t lose their leaves in winter. The actually accurate lyric would be “Your soul could never be bald; it’s evergreen” – ridiculous yes, but only slightly more than the original.

“Baby, your smile’s forever in my mind and memory” – A valid enough sentiment, if it wasn’t for the fact that four lines ago, Sheeran mentions the time “when my hair’s all but gone and my memory fades”. So what he’s basically saying is “You will always be in my memory, unless my memory of you goes”, or “You will always be in my memory until I eventually forget you”. What a great observation.

“Will your mouth still remember the taste of my love?” – That doesn’t sound like you’re talking about kissing, that sounds like you’re talking about blowjobs.

And I could carry on. None of this song works; not a single line, not a single note, not a single word. It’s completely incompetent. It’s sub-teenage poetry level bad. This is a song written by a man who does not understand metaphors, syntax, register, voice, the way two lines contrast against each other, how to write, or seemingly anything at all. It’s not sincere, it’s not romantic, it’s not clever, it’s crap. In every single way, crap.

AND IT’S FUCKING EVERYWHERE.

I watched Christmas Top of the Pops this year; he performed the song on that. I watched Jools Holland’s Annual Hootenanny; he performed it on that. I listen to the radio; they appear to just be playing it on repeat. He’s received several awards for this song. It’s one of the biggest selling songs of the year. Why doesn’t anyone seem to be able to see that it’s terrible?! It’s just not good, yet we’re treating it like it’s the next Bohemian Rhapsody. Why? How? When will it end?

One last song lyric: “When my hair’s all but gone and my memory fades / And the crowds don’t remember my name”

Oh how I await that day. “Thinking Out Loud” – Worst song of the year.

Worst No. 1 Hits of 2014 – Special Mentions

I’m currently counting down the 5 worst No. 1 hits of the year. Before we get to No. 1 though, here are some which just managed to avoid ending up on the final list:

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Talk Dirty – Jason Derulo

Count this as the 6th worst No. 1 of 2014. Sexist and not-quite-but-definitely-close-to racist, this song openly basks in it’s own ignorance and expects us to do exactly the same. It’s offensive on almost every level it’s possible for a song to be. It’s saved from appearing on the list because it’s saxophone riff is actually pretty damn funky sounding (as much as I hate to admit it) and it does at least work on it’s own terms, puerile as those are. You got lucky here Derulo; you got lucky.

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Wiggle – Jason Derulo

Now this disgusting, disjointed, moronic pile of sexist crap would’ve been my worst No. 1 of the year had it actually reached No. 1 anywhere. Thank God it didn’t.

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Do They Know It’s Christmas? – Band Aid 30 / All About That Bass – Meghan Trainer

Both try to do decent things but both do so extremely problematically to the point of almost being self-defeating (particularly “All About That Bass”). I couldn’t truly justify putting them on the list though; it’s always better to try something important and fail than become successful through laziness and complacence (hence why Something I Need and I Don’t Care are on the list instead). I can respect something without liking it and that’s what I do with these songs.

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Crazy Stupid Love – Cheryl Cole feat. Tinie Tempah

Stupid is right. This song features all of Cheryl Cole’s worst qualities – the ripping off of other successful sources instead of coming up with any ideas herself*, the deeply boring lyrics about topics everyone in pop has been revisiting for decades, the bland club music which everyone else in the industry has desperately trying to move beyond for a year now – this is the whole package. It was ultimately saved from being on the list because Tinie Tempah’s section is actually quite good (at least it’s better than everything around it; the song at least does elevate when he appears) and because her other song, I Don’t Care, somehow managed to be worse. Cheryl Cole is one of the worst performers in British pop at the moment and the fact that we keep giving her success is ridiculous.

* The name of the song comes from a vaguely successful rom-com released about 3 years ago

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Right then, that’s it. Time to stop dilly-dallying. It’s time for what I consider to be the worst song of the year. The song which is worse than Ben Haenow’s utter forgetability, Magic!’s utter hateability, Cheryl’s plagiarism and Jason Derulo’s vile offensiveness. And boy do I have a lot to say about this song…

To be concluded…

Worst No. 1 Hits of 2014 – No. 3: “I Don’t Care” by Cheryl

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 one of the ones I particularly disliked:

You know who I don’t care about: Cheryl Cole. And this is easily one of the worst things she’s ever done*.

Firstly we already have a song where a female singer shouts “I don’t care!” over a synth beat: it was called “I Love It” by Icona Pop and Charli XCX and it was released only two years ago. This makes Cheryl’s song at worst a complete rip-off and at best surplus-to-requirement. Plagiarized or pointless: take your pick.

Secondly, the song just doesn’t work. If you’ve been inflamed by something so much that you had to dedicate an entire song to shouting about it, you’ve failed to show that you don’t care about it. “I Love It” negates this problem by having two singers shout “I don’t care, I love it!” at each other; no-one else comes into the equation, they do only care for themselves. Cheryl meanwhile is on her own, shouting directly at the audience, using the f-word at us just to make sure we’re really paying attention. She sure cares a lot about letting us know she doesn’t care.

This basically makes the song into the audio equivalent of that person who posts about how terrible their life is on Facebook only to say “it doesn’t matter” when anyone asks her what’s wrong: it’s passive-aggressive, insincere, weak, lazy, unimaginative, unbelievable and just crap. I don’t care for it at all.

* And she’s been done for assault.

Worst No. 1 Hits of 2014 – No 5: “Something I Need” by Ben Haenow

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 one of the ones I particularly disliked:

This is the winning song from X-Factor; that’s pretty much the only reason I need to include it on this list. The X-Factor has nothing to do with music, it’s instead just a series of rags-to-riches stories which happen in parallel with each other. This is why so few people winners of X-Factor are ever heard from again: once they’ve won the competition, their narrative arc is over; they’ve gone from rags to riches, they’re over.

The song itself is boring: it’s a cliched, by-the-numbers TV tie-in sung by someone I’ll never hear from again as long as I live. There’s not one single reason to care about it; it’s utterly useless. I feel like I’m wasting my time while listening to it. Now I just have to wait until it inevitably disappears from the public consciousness and then recycle these words this time next year when the next X-Factor song is pushed out the sausage factory into the charts and reveals itself to be exactly the same shit all over again.

A No. 1 Review: ‘Rather Be’ by Clean Bandit feat. Jess Glynne

This year, I’ve challenged myself to write a review of every song that manages to get to No. 1 in the UK charts. Here’s the latest one:

Trying to run a blog about UK No. 1 singles has proved to be harder than I thought, if only because every review so far has presented itself as an complete challenge that somehow needs surpassing. Pitbull’s Timber was me starting the blog and therefore having to figure out exactly what type of reviewer I was going to be and from what perspective I would write my work. Happy then appeared and proved to be a challenge because it was in fact a song I actually liked, striking somewhat against the overly sardonic tone I had used for Timber. And now we have Rather Be, the UK’s latest No. 1, which has provided my most greatest challenge yet:

I hate this song. I should love it. And now I need to justify my hatred for this song without rendering my other reviews as hypocritical and rather obsolete. Oh the ever present joys.

OK, so why should I like this song? The intro is fascinating and the mixing of classical violins with a purposely toned-down club beat is a really interesting idea. This is then backed-up by a topic that isn’t about sex or dancing but is instead about love, and about actual healthy life-affirming love at that. “We’re a thousand miles from comfort, we have travelled land and sea / But as long as you are with me, there’s no place I’d rather be.” That’s a great sentiment which elevates love without glorifying it, admitting that love isn’t perfect, that the most important effects of love are emotional rather than physical, and making you feel as if the singer is genuinely talking about a relationship rather than singing a standard love song because love songs sell. There’s an importance to the song’s subject – they aren’t just someone you met at a club earlier that night – and therefore there’s an importance to song itself. There’s actual emotion here and something to become actively invested in.

If Putbull’s Timber represents club music at it’s most base, vulgar and meaningless, Rather Be thus represents club music that’s heart-felt, intricate and meaningful. It takes all my problems with club music and remodulates the genre so as to fix those flaws: it’s a song with a strong beat that you can dance to, yet it’s also a song with meaning and interest that you can listen to. In short, it’s the type of club music that I’ve been asking for for years. So the next question: if this song is so great, why do I hate it so much?

Answer: because it’s shit. Utter idiotic crap. The vocals at first sound distinctive but soon turn out to just not be very good. As nice a sentiment as the chorus is, the words are so messily crammed into the tune that it renders the song’s center piece chorus as “If you give me a chance, I would take it / A shot in the dark but I will make it / Knowwiturlsdfhsdfdfgndfiarr you can’t shame me / When I am with you there’s no place I’d rather be”, something which rather flies in the face of a song that, up until that point, has mostly relied on using a purposely low-key sound to deliver a simple emotional statement as directly as possible. This is compounded by the fact we get literally no information about the song’s love interest at all. The one thing we’re told about him is that, when compared to the narrator, he’s “different and the same”. Which tells us nothing. Indeed, the lines directly after that one seems to be talking directly about how formless a character he is: “[I/We] gave you a different name \ Switch up the batteries”. I don’t even know that means on a literal level but it just gives the impression of a character who’s outward characteristics are completely interchangeable and therefore rather pointless. And the “switch up the batteries” line just gives me the impression of a man who’s dead. As far as I can tell, this song is sung to an Energiser Bunny. Why couldn’t it be: it’s not like we’re ever told anything that denies that.

And because the entire song is based on just how much the narrator loves this man, who I must stress is no-one in particular, we never get to see who the narrator is either. All we get is that she’s extremely dedicated to this one person for no particular reason, and all I can extrapolate from that is the narrator therefore just seems to be extremely, excruciatingly needy. I’m sorry, did I say that “Rather Be represents club music at it’s most heart-felt, intricate and meaningful” two paragraphs ago? No, I was wrong. This song is still meaningless. In fact, I think this song has less meaning for me than Timber is, and half of Timber‘s lyrics are Pitbull endlessly repeating the word “Timber”.

Timber at least knows that it’s mindless shit. It never tries to be anything but mindless shit. You walk into it expecting mindless shit, you leave having heard mindless shit. In this way, at least Timber can be described as honest. That song is what it wants to be. Rather Be meanwhile is downright deceitful. It uses classical violins and a down-key beat to give eratz class to a song that is as shallow and vapid as any other club song of the past decade. It’s my exact definition of pretentious: a piece of work that apes the tropes of greater works without the talent or intelligence to back it up. It’s like covering a vacuum in glitter; it’s a complete and utter waste of your time.

Despite that, I’m glad the song is a success. More than that, I hope it proves influential. It represents a move in the buying public towards more intelligent sounding songs and towards more interesting music drawn from a wider range of influences. We’re sick of one-night stands and are finally showing signs of looking for an true relationship. Now that this song has proven that “smarter” work can sell, hopefully it’ll convince people with actual intelligence and skill to throw their hands into the ring and therefore hopefully we’ll get some pop music actually worth looking for depth in. Rather Be is the first step towards a new era of hugely superior pop; I just hope that will eventually be remembered as an awkward first step as opposed than the all-encompassing piece that actually set the trend.