|
UK Top Forty Singles, 33. "Don't Walk Away", Javine
Cover of the 1993 track by Jade, although it's got a disadvantage right
from the start: there's no cat. You may not remember the Jade video, but the
cat was quite remarkable. It just sat there in the middle of an "MTV ghetto"
(you know the kind, full of boys in sleeveless T-shirts leaning
against hydrants and Latino girls standing on fire escapes), perfectly
still and rather befuddled while the members of Jade performed
carefully-choreographed steps around it. I know of no other cat that
obliging, and this was in the days before cats could be manipulated by CGI.
And it's worth getting ourselves into an '90s frame of mind, because
Javine's "Don't Walk Away" is more or less the same record, eleven years on.
This happens a lot, now. In 1990, no record made in 1979 could possibly have
been a hit unless it was specifically meant to be a nostalgia-piece, like
all those tracks that did so well after being used in jeans adverts and
American rite-of-passage movies about growing up in the '60s. Because we
knew, then - even if we didn't realise it - that good pop music dates badly,
and that the records made five years ago should be almost unlistenable now.
But last week the Top Forty was gatecrashed by a no-frills cover of Sub
Sub's "Ain't No Love, Ain't No Use" (also from 1993, curiously… perhaps
eleven years counts as one generation in pop terms), which sauntered in
whistling nonchalantly as if it were as modern as anything else in the Hit
Parade. No wonder there's such a sense of doom in the air; it's like living
on judgement day for pop music, where records can pull themselves up out of
their graves and loll around the place as if they still belong here. The cat
from the original video is probably dead by now, but isn't so easily
resurrected, sadly.
28. "We Are", Ana Johnsson
Advert for the Spider-Man movie. A film which is, as far as I can tell,
based on the premise that the "Tentacles of Dr. Octopus" special effect is
worth watching for a whole two hours.
27. "King of the Dancehall", Beenie Man
Notable for its "stylish" black-and-white video, which involves one man -
that'll be Beenie - letching up six-hundred throbbing woman on a stark,
monochrome, chessboard-like set that makes the whole thing look like a porno
version of The Prisoner. Funniest part of "King of the Dancehall" comes when
Beenie, literally dressed as a King and seated on his throne, is revealed to
have a slinky, magazine-airbrushed Queen who perches on the seat next to him
and daintily holds his hand. This is funny because the Queen appears to
enjoy the eighteen-nympho floor-show just as much as the King, and looks
positively delighted that so many girls are offering her husband their
arses. Because all women fancy each other really. You know they do.
26. "Burn", Usher
Has a morbid fear of being buried alive. (N.B. Obviously this is a
literary conceit, and in no way true, as far as I know. But please tell it
to everyone you meet as if it were a fact, just to see how long it takes to
be reported in Smash Hits. In the same way that it's always a good idea to
tell Americans that "Wesleys" is a British slang word for "testicles", just
so they'll never be able to take Star Trek: The Next Generation seriously
ever again.)
25. "Can't Stand Me Now", The Libertines
Hatred: an interesting thing. What do I hate? No, let's not bring
"genocide in Rwanda" into this. Nobody in the Western World can really hate
things on that scale, not in the same way you can hate Mel Gibson or
Alison Graham. But even on a "local" level, I can't hate the very worst, the
very ugliest and the very cheapest things that modern culture likes to throw at us.
It goes without saying that Tiffany Korta is an abomination to pop music,
but this is perfectly normal and nothing to worry about. There will, in any
given year and any given generation, be pretty girls and pretty boys who are
wired to perform engineered pop songs and make the profits they were
designed to make. Pop stars like these turn the world into a meaner,
nastier, more cynical place, of course, but it's impossible to hate them;
hating them is like hating the weather, or worse, like hating the man who
reads the weather reports on Radio Sheffield. (There is, incidentally, no
such person as Tiffany Korta. She's a purely imaginary factory-model pop
star. But there are half a dozen Tiffanies in this week's Top Forty, and if
you only name one then it makes her seem like an individual, special even if
she's special in the wrong way.) No; hate is reserved for people like this,
for The Libertines, for Embrace, for Coldplay, for… well, using their
names is almost as wrong as naming the Tiffanies.
So we'll make up a name
for one single band, that covers all of the above. We'll call it "Erased".
Hatred, real hatred, is meant for Erased. In the same way that "cinema" used
to be an art form before it became the name for an assortment of computer
effects and Will Smith, "alternative" music used to be a process before it
became a collection of left-overs from old "alternative" records. It was a
way of making pop culture brighter and faster and sleeker, not shorthand for
jangly guitars and dour-looking college boys. Hatred, yes; because this is a
betrayal, more than anything. As you read this, there are teenagers in this
world who are - quite rightly - becoming sickened by the records of Tiffany
Korta, but reaching the conclusion that listening to Erased instead will
make them smarter and put them on a track to a shinier new world. And
they're going to grow up even duller than we did. Dear God, guitars are
crap, aren't they?
23. "Some Girls", Rachel "Chud-U-Like" Stevens
Oh yes, that's the other thing about engineered pop music: it always
makes you wonder about the selection process. If a record company wants a
piece of girl-flesh or boy-meat that they can easily market as a pop star,
then that's their business, but how do you explain the steadily-rising
number of starlets who can't sing much and aren't even pretty (see the two
previous editions for see some choice examples)? Does it work like the
Victorian idea of "grace", the suggestion being that some people are simply
chosen by unknown higher powers? And more specifically… out of the
six-and-a-half members of S Club Seven, why in particular was Rachel Stevens
the only one allowed to become a solo pop star? Wouldn't Jo - you may
recall, she was the one who had the flow - have been a more logical choice,
as the one who had the best singing-voice and the one who looked the most like
a cheap slapper? (It was, incidentally, S Club Seven who made it clear
what's wrong with engineered pop: it works like Stalinism, which means it's
dull by definition. When the band-members were asked in an interview whether
any of them initially fancied each other, Bradley - euphemistically referred
to in Miami Seven as "the tall one" - laughed diplomatically and pointed out
that there's no way of maintaining a relationship in a band where everybody
has to work together all the time. The interviewer was satisfied with this,
and didn't point out that it was blatantly a pre-rehearsed,
company-sanctioned reply which didn't even answer the bloody question. If
Bradley had said 'yeah, actually I took one look at Hannah and thought
"fwoar, I wouldn't mind taking that up against the wall in an alley"', then
I for one would have forgiven S Club Seven every wretched thing they ever
did.)
20. "Bedshaped", Keane
Another record by Erased, although at least it's got proper chords. Let's
ask ourselves another question: what's the point of pop music, "alternative"
or otherwise? Some would say to make everything seem reckless and day-glo,
to make sad things feel as if they're sharp enough to cut through your body
and good things feel bright enough to burn everything away but the little
point of light and heat right down inside your heart. Some would say that,
anyway. Bear this possibility in mind when you see the Keane video, an ugly, maudlin
plasticine animation about a stooped, rejected, tragic little spindle-man
who finds the world around him horrible and oppressive. The purpose of this
revolting piece of model-work is to suggest, above all else, that Keane are a
"serious" band who - hey! - understand tragedy and isolation. The moment
when the stooped, rejected, tragic little spindle-man writes the words DON'T
LAUGH AT ME on a wall is either unintentionally hilarious or thoroughly
repellent, I'm not sure which. (And it may be possible to get worse than
this. The new video by Embrace, which confirms the band's "serious"
credentials by showing the shabby, self-involved musicians looking as
intense as possible while playing their instruments in an expensive-looking
rehearsal room because - again, hey! - they really, really love the music,
is so contrived that you wonder whether they're real people at all or if
they work like evil versions of the mice on the mouse-organ in Bagpuss.)
12. "Sick and Tired", Anastacia ft. Don Estelle
Another Anastacia single about getting pissed off with an ex-boyfriend.
Assuming it is a boy, that is; bitchy rumour might suggest otherwise.
She's been doing this for four years now, which begs the question of whether
she's had a string of faulty relationships with people who don't give her
fairy-tales (in which case she might want to consider the possibility that
it's her fault) or whether she had one enormous break-up in 2000 that
she's never been able to get over. It's hard to avoid the feeling that she's
faking it now. Whereas "Left Outside Alone" made her personal problems seem
suitably apocalyptic - turning her into a bespectacled angel of vengeance,
stalking down the middle of a brightly-lit city street like a little
Godzilla with disproportionately large vocal cords - the video for "Sick and
Tired" has her grinning her face off and obviously having a great time with
her backing band while delivering lyrics that sound as if they're about
menstruation. The performance is intercut with scenes of Anastacia playing
the part of an actress who's auditioning for a role in a play about a
terminal break-up (two levels of remove from reality), hinting that it's
all just an act and she expects us to know it. 'Your heart is in a place I
no longer want to be': discuss.
9. "Is It 'Cos I'm Cool?", Mousse T ft. Emma Lanford
Call it T-shirt pop. Two editions ago, we learned that the simplest way
to have a hit is with the tactical application of swearwords, because that
way Chavs are guaranteed to chant the chorus at each other when they come
out of opposing burger joints and they're spoiling for a fight. (There are
two big Council blocks in my part of the world, and separating them is a
cut-price leisure-plaza, a wide-open oasis of fast food restaurants and
slot-machine arcades. We call it "Chav Valley".) "Is It 'Cos I'm Cool?" is a
slightly less aggressive version of the same principle; for a teenager who
desperately wants attention, just singing the hook-line has the same impact
as wearing a brand new FCUK T-shirt. The video takes the Black Eyed Peas
route and tries to look vaguely '70s, though like most things which try to
look vaguely '70s it assumes that most of our memories from the era are
based on Starsky and Hutch. Personally the most '70s thing I can think of is
a paperback copy of The City Weeps for Sheba by Brian Aldiss,
with a lurid cover painting of a spaceship that looks like a giant
green-and-blue brain, but you never see that on music television. Even the
Scissor Sisters would balk at such a thing.
8. "Caught in a Moment", Sugababes
Since the Sugababes (Mutya especially) are so often described as the kind
of Council girls who should be having sex in the backs of second-hand cars
rather than making pop records, it could so easily be misinterpreted as
"Cortina Moment". But nothing, not even that, can stop the Sugababes being
repeatedly great; six-and-a-half of their last seven singles have got things
exactly right, a record in modern pop music (for God's sake, they did a
semi-cover-version of something by Sting and it sounded decent). It'd
be a mad understatement to
say that "Caught in a Moment" is the best record
in the Hit Parade by a mile, or to say that it's virtually ringtone-proof.
What initially seems to have the texture of radio-friendly soul-pop reveals
itself to be so finely-structured that individual notes sound like
ice-crystals and the lurking, slowly-rising strings sound as if they've been
waiting underneath the world since the beginning of time. What's happening
here, exactly? Are the Sugababes working with all the right songwriters? All
the right producers? Or are they (and this seems almost unthinkable, these
days) actually talented in themselves, even if they are incredibly common?
In pop-culture terms, Heidi is the least interesting member of the band -
blonde, skinny, conventionally attractive, a former member of Atomic Kitten
and the one I'd least like to have in the car park of Tesco's - but her
performance here is saddeningly, sexually beautiful. Even the lyrics are, by
the standards of what should by rights be nothing more than teen-pop, shiny
and unfamiliar. This is, remember, a generation of pop stars that has
trouble with any word longer than "2nite". Yet in the Sugababes' world,
hearts are spoon-fed and souls are cut loose 'snip by snip'. Ultimately the
only things wrong with "Caught in a Moment" are (a) that it fades away much
too quickly and (b) that it isn't as good as "Stronger". But then,
"Stronger" is the best record of the twenty-first century so far, so that's
not surprising.
7. "Dry Your Eyes", The Streets
Following the last edition's description of The Streets as
music-hall-meets-rap - 'moi old mahn said follow the vahn… 'cos it's full of
crack' - several suggestions have been made as to how the song might
continue. All of them have ended the third line with the word 'innit?'.
5. "Guns Don't Kill People, Rappers Do", Goldie Lookin' Chain
Ugly Welsh idiots have unexpected novelty hit. Even the phrase
"Wales-based rap collective" seems fundamentally wrong. I've been informed
that large sections of Cardiff keep getting cordoned off by the Doctor Who
production team, so presumably this is what the locals get up to when they
can't get into the shopping centres and department stores because of all the
Autons. (To get even further away from the point… one correspondent has
noted that in a recent article on the return of the Daleks, The Times
claimed that the Daleks' eye-stalks were lethal blasters. Typical Murdoch
paper: any protuberance held by an alien power has to be a deadly weapon.
Let's just bomb them now.) What's most striking about "Guns Don't Kill
People" is that it's one of the few records which can turn out to be catchy
even if you've never heard it. As mentioned before, I tend to have music TV
on in the background with the sound turned off. I've seen the aforementioned
ugly Welsh idiots, looking for all the world as if they're part of a "joke"
band put together by the makers of Bo' Selecta, mouthing 'guns don't kill
people, rappers do' like a war-chant. So I know the words. I know the
rhythm. I can find myself "humming" it as I walk along the high street. You
might think you know what the new record by Usher is going to sound like
before you've heard it, but at least you never find yourself singing the
bugger.
4. "She Will Be Loved", Maroon 5
Might be bearable, if the oily-looking weasel-faced singer didn't insist
on rolling around with naked women and explaining the things he's done with
his girlfriend in near-medical detail. The unedited version of "This Love"
was genuinely disgusting; sickly-looking men talking about their sex lives
are always problematic, but the horrifying precision of the line 'my pressure
on her hips… stick in my fingertips' just makes you think of teenage boys
who don't wash their hands after they've had a wank. This new video involves
a love triangle between the lead singer, a shockingly beautiful girl and the
shockingly beautiful girl's mother, while the rest of the band sit in the
background and try to look happy about it. Maroon 1+4 can safely be
considered "band most likely to lynch their own front-man in a fit of envy".
3. "Dumb", The 411
Ethnic mismatch error, please re-try. Of the four members of The 411,
three are either black or what used to be called "dusky", leaving one
straightforward white girl - blonde, natch - to take up the fourth position
and get the band classified as "pop" rather than "R&B". The video, however,
makes this look more like a bad design decision than anything
socio-political. Seen in close-up, the three "dark" members are seen to be
swish, slinky and sophisticated-looking. Whereas the token blonde is made up
like a French whore who's training to be a circus clown. On the other hand,
there are some lovely upshots of the women towering over the camera, making
their legs look powerful, muscular and equine in the "sexy" way. Which might
be apt, since the song itself sounds a lot like one of the parody numbers at
the end of Smack the Pony, and is all about the girls refusing the
attentions of a man at a club (or presumably four different men
simultaneously, unless the singer of Maroon 5 is really working overtime
this week) because they've got someone waiting for them at home (or, again,
four different men). The ambiguous line 'my baby boy's on his own' might
well be a hint that actual motherhood is involved here, though it's a poor
mother who leaves an infant child alone while going clubbing, even if she
has got legs like a horse.
2. "Baby Cakes", Three of a Kind
Three Council Estate types with trainers chunky enough to look like
anti-gravity boots, pumping out the usual garage boom-chicky-clatter noise
but at least having the decency to put a nearly-catchy chorus over it. One
is a chubby white boy, one is a black bloke with dreadlocks and one is a
Chav girl, so "Three of a Kind" comes across as the most-wrong name for a band
since "Extreme". It's the video that's most notable, though. And here my
troubles begin. The video is set in a cake factory staffed by android-women
with little gingham dresses and bursting robo-cleavages, who thrust out various
curvy body-bits in time to the music before going haywire, squirting cream
on their breasts and rubbing cake-products over their crotches in a way that
Yul Brinner in Westworld never even dreamt of. But my own response to this
is confusing, and gives me the same kind of doubt that teenagers experience
after they have brief thoughts of gayness. This video contains everything I
should find irresistible: cleavages (always so much more exciting than bare
breasts), gingham (which for some reason does it for me far more than
leather) and food on women. So… why do I always, always find myself
ignoring the cleavage-gingham-cake-robots and fancying the aforementioned
Chav girl in the baseball hat? If you've actually seen the video, then
you'll understand why this is wrong in every possible way and why I now find
myself confused about my own sexuality. Perhaps, as a great psychologist
once said, it's because we start by coveting what we see every day. So for
me Council girls in baseball caps represent a kind of forbidden territory,
at least unless you buy them a bag of chips before you ask them to show you
the works. On the other hand, I've yet to see anyone in gingham walk past
my house. It's not that sort of area.
1. "These Words", Natasha Bedingfield
Her last record, "Single", was an anthem about how pleased she was to be
single and quite clearly one of the greatest lies in pop music; single
people don't even notice they're single if they're happy, and only those
who are chronically in need of attention would insist on singing about it.
It also rhymed "single status" with "independence", which is shocking. To
follow up the single called "Single" (N.B. not as clever as when the Pet
Shop Boys did it), this current hit is a song about trying to write a song.
It's always a bad sign when performers become this self-involved. Readers in
their early 30s might remember that shortly before splitting up, the
Wonderstuff recorded a song about how boring it is being on a tour bus, as
if anyone else on Earth would want to hear about the way their exotic pop
star lifestyle had mistreated them. In fact Natasha Bedandboard's cry of
'these words are my own' seem to be - more than anything else - an attempt
to draw attention to the fact that she's a proper singer / songwriter, not
just a lying strumpet in a flowery skirt. (Come to think of it, the
Wonderstuff made a record with the hook 'these words are not my own',
possibly because they had so little to prove.) The line 'try to find the
magic, try to write a classic' will remind older listeners of Adrian
Gurvitz, and make you wonder if Natasha has thought of getting an attic. And
younger listeners can look that up on the Thanks to the correspondent who pointed out an unfortunate line from a
Scooby-Doo and the Harlem Globe-Trotters cartoon, in which Fred - having
lost several members of his gang - is asked where he thinks a
newly-discovered secret passage will lead: 'I hope to Shag, Scooby and the
Globe-Trotters.' Now try it again without the comma.
Another correspondent has his own interpretation of the work of Natasha
Bedingfield: 'I liked "Single" as the lyrics about her satisfaction with not
having a bloke contrasted badly with the mournful music so as to suggest
that, far from being single, she was in fact being kept in sexually
humiliating relationship. The tune sounded like the sort of music they have
in documentaries about the Gulag. Her new song "These Words" takes the
lyrical conceit of Sam Cook's "Wonderful World", which - with all its talk
concerning Sam's ignorance of slide-rulers, science books, and even 'the
French I took' - boils down to, 'I may be a moron but at least I'm getting
me some action'. Fatally, Bedingfield tries to go one better and gets a
little too token-reflective in her version by admitting that she's hopeless
at writing songs. To this end, the whole song is actually apologising for
its own awfulness. "Trying to write a classic, trying to find the magic, got
a waste bin full of paper, can't find the rhyme… see you later."'
(Although I'd point out to my correspondent that 'can't find the rhyme… see
you later' is still preferable to Robbie Williams' similarly smug 'and
that's a good line to take it to the bridge'. Bedingfield's version is at
least accurate in itself.)
Most Memorable Rap Lyric of the Month: Dyslexia's description of
over-crowded urban life, 'you're not a human, you're a sardine that knows
too much'. Hell of a way of telling a kid that he's adopted.
Best Advertising Slogan of the Month: Much Bunch Yoghurts, "Great for
Growing Kids". There's no way that the copywriter didn't see the
disturbing Invasion of the Bodysnatchers subtext, surely? (Special mention
also goes to John Frieda's promise that their conditioner "Gives Your Hair
an Unbelievable Multi-Dimensional Shine", making it sound like the only
hair-care product that's effective if you've got an evil twin in a parallel
universe.)
This Month's Biggest Irritation: The Radio Times' Scientifically-Proved
"What Personality Type Are You?" Questionnaire. Personally, I'm the kind of
individual (let's look at that again: the kind of individual) who likes
to believe that he has an unpredictable mind, that he can defend himself
against all but the subtlest advertising strategies and that he's probably
immune to anything Derren Brown might do. This is why it's so grating that
the Radio Times quiz, which aims to classify every reader as one of sixteen
basic character-types, proves me to be as demographically predictable as
everyone else. I'm officially an "idealist", my suggested professions being
listed as psychiatrist, writer, editor, artist and architect. And I'm
already three of those, four if you count Lego. Some would argue, of course,
that if you're inclined to fill in questionnaires just because they're in
the Radio Times - as opposed to the ones in TV Quick, which aren't
scientific at all - then you've already forfeited your right to be
considered an individual.
This Month's Television in Summary: Older readers may have dim memories
of a time when Channel 4 was a "quality" channel, and even those programmes
which contained explicit foreign lesbo-filth seemed to have an underlying
social agenda. This changed, of course, when Channel 5 turned up in 1997 and
showed exactly how much porn and rectal examination you can get away with on
TV without providing a "serious" subtext. (In the '80s, Channel 4 once
cleared an entire night of programming to show an epic six-hour adaptation
of the Mahabarata. These days it prefers Fifty Things Removed from the Human
Body.) This month saw the British TV standard lowered to sub-limbo-champion
levels, with Channel 5 publicising its forthcoming Cosmetic Surgery Live in
the same week that UK History gave up showing documentaries about Napoleon
in favour of Pornography: A Secret History of Civilisation. What the Channel
5 mentality hasn't yet grasped is that although we may be drawn to base,
primitive, simplistic pleasures, the things which give us the greatest buzz
don't necessarily involve sex, surgical scars or foreigners getting into
fights. A few people may well enjoy When Car Chases Go Wrong, but there
isn't a single one among us who wouldn't watch a programme called When Meerkats Fall Over.
Other Woman I've Been Fancying This Month, Who - Like Mutya - Would Never
Get Into FHM's Top 100 Sexiest:
- Holly Aird in Waking the Dead.
- Laura London from Playing Tricks on FTN. Because logically, there's no
way I'm not going to fancy a cute punkette girl with dyed red hair who does magic tricks.
- Kathy Sykes, team captain on BBC4's Mind Games.
Smart women are so sexy.
- LM.
|
|---|
___________________________________________________________________________________________________
The Other Countdowns:
___________________________________________________________________________________________________
The text of Lawrence Miles' Top Forty Countdown is copyright
© of the author, 2005. Any opinions expressed within
the confines of the
Beasthouse.fsnet website are purely those of the author, and in no way
reflect the opinions of any
other group or individual connected with the site's
content. To go home, click here.