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So as we come to the beginning of a new year, and media pundits attempt
to digest the final cheesy crumbs of 2004 by talking about Jordan, the last
episode of Friends, the affairs of David Beckham and various other things
which aren't remotely funny or interesting, it's time for the Countdown to
try to prove itself marginally superior by looking back over the Hit Parades
of the last twelve months without repeating any of the best bits from the
previous six editions. Personally I can at least report that I managed to
get all the way through Christmas without hearing either "Fairytale of New
York" or "Christmas Rapping" by the Waitresses, though I did get ambushed by
Wizzard in a supermarket.
(Note: this isn't the official sales chart for 2004's singles. Actually
it's based on TMF's "Ultimate 100 of 2004", which is a suitably meaningless
basis for an annual round-up as it's just as spurious as everything else on
TMF. In this case, provably so; the station's first "Ultimate 100 of 2004"
was shown on the 1st of January, but there was another one the next day and
the records were in a different order.)
71. "Dumb", The 411
Apart from the bits where all the 411s look like gigantic horse-women
(see the 29/08/04 edition), the video also features sequences in which the
girls are seen dancing on a strobing, flickering grid of white light, and
end up sprawling themselves across it in a display of formation sensuous
writhing. This grid is supposed to represent a kind of Platonic ideal of a
club dancefloor, but actually looks more like one of those things that zap
flies in school cafeterias. Now, here's an idea. As anyone familiar with the
work of Kylie Minogue or Justin Timberlake will know, the modern pop star is
trained to dance on anything that glows. So if we ever find ourselves in a
position where we need to "cull" some of our surplus pop acts - and some
would argue that we've reached this point already - we can do it most
efficiently with similar giant fly-killing devices. No normal person would
ever step onto such a mechanism (it's usually unwise to tread on electrical
apparatus), but pop stars would be unable to resist. All we'd have to do is
leave the things plugged in all night, then hire someone to sweep away the
smouldering husks of former members of S Club Seven the next day.
70. "What You're Made Of", Lucie Silvas
I'm confused already. Suddenly there are plaintive-sounding female
singer-songwriters all over the place, and they're all playing pianos, and
they've all got names that look like random collections of syllables, and
I've already lost track of which one's Lucie Silvas and which one's Delta
Goodrem and which one's… oh, you know… that other one. A while ago there was
a craze for coming up with formulae that let you work out your porn-star
name or your Star Wars name, usually by mangling together syllables from the
name of your first pet or the maiden name of your mother (my first pet was
called Hannibal, which is handy as it means that my Star Wars name is
guaranteed to begin with "Han"), so is a similar procedure now being used by
the record industry? Is there an easy system of deducing your Plaintive
Female Singer-Songwriter name? I've worked out that mine is Jess Veerwalt,
but I'm not telling you the system. It's private.
69. "Hey Mama", Black Eyed Peas
Speaking as the last human being on Earth who hasn't actually heard
"Where is the Love?" all the way through, and who knows nothing about the
Black Eyed Peas' origins… the makeup of this band puzzles me. There seems to
be a "core" of three members - the one with dreads, the long-haired gyppo
and The Girl - but most of the videos feature a fourth presence, the
angry-looking (and apparently prematurely-aged) man with the short hair and
the moustache who turns up and rants aggressively just before the end of
"Where is the Love?". The other members of the group appear to be vaguely
embarrassed by him, and he doesn't really make himself felt here at all.
I have to ask: is he honestly a proper member of the Black Eyed
Peas, or is he some half-crazed uncle who's come off his medication and now
insists on wandering onto the set whenever the others are trying to make a
video? The "Where is the Love?" rant is all about… oh, I don't know…
equality, or humanity, or something, but it sounds as if they cut off his
mike just before he starts saying: 'And then there's the CIA… the bastards
have got my 'phone tapped… they killed my pets, did you know that?'
66. "Tilt Ya Head Back", Nelly ft. Christina Aguilera
Taken from the album "Sweat". Why do all pop stars want us to know that
they smell, all of a sudden?
66. "Fast Love", George Michael
George Michael is a textbook specimen of out-of-whack pop star paranoia.
After the fiddling-about-in-a-toilet incident - which legally has to be
mentioned in any analysis of George Michael, according to the Obligations of
Cultural Critique (Popular) Act, drafted by David Blunkett shortly before
his resignation - George discovered that journalists at The Sun had broken
out a bottle of champagne to celebrate the event. Since then he's told
anybody who'll listen that the British press has been trying to "destroy"
him for years; that they thought they could finally ruin him after the
toilet affair; but that he confounded them all by bouncing back and
rebuilding his career, in spite of their best efforts to bring him down.
This is, of course, twaddle from start to finish. The journalists weren't
celebrating because they thought they'd "destroyed" someone (why kill the
goose?), but because they knew they had a story that'd shift craterloads of
papers and probably earn them all bonuses. Any idiot, even one working for a
tabloid, would have been able to tell you that press coverage of a "funny"
sex story was more likely to boost George's career than kill it.
And yet
George can't see things that way; he can't believe that people's reasons for
doing things might be connected with anything or anybody other than himself.
Pop stars, swaddled in PR and exposed to a lifestyle unlike that of any
"normal" human being, can never quite grasp this point. It's the same kind
of divorce-from-the-rest-of-the-world that led Michael Jackson to think it
was perfectly reasonable for him to perform a stage routine which showed him
curing cripples with a touch, or that led Jason Donovan - fifteen years ago,
now - to believe that miming the strumming of a guitar on-stage was a way of
'developing myself as an artist'. (We might also consider the movie Spiceworld,
in which a ruthless press baron clearly modelled on Rupert
Murdoch attempts to split up the Spice Girls in order to create a front-page
news story. That's Rupert Murdoch, who brunches with Prime Ministers and has
the power to swing US elections. And yet in the Spice Girls' world, he's got
nothing better to do than construct elaborate conspiracies against Ginger
and Sporty.) The sad thing about George Michael is that he really does seem
to care about the outside world, but no longer has the faintest idea how it
works.
63. "Red Blooded Woman", Kylie
This is the video where she climbs out of her car in the middle of a
traffic snarl-up, and starts striding between the other cars in a womanly
way while the drivers and passengers stare out of their windows looking lost
and lonely. So at some point in the future, I'd like to see the same
technology that inserted Jabba the Hutt into the original Star Wars used to
insert Kylie's image into the background of REM's "Everybody Hurts", and if
possible for her to get into a lightsaber fight with Michael Stipe. (You
have to understand… I see all pop videos as existing in the same universe.
Queen's "Bohemian Rhapsody" is often cited as the first "proper" video, and
obviously represents the black void at the centre of all space and time; a
historical null-zone where "futuristic" video effects meet Galileo, from
which all other pop videos can be accessed. I have no difficulty believing
that Kylie's traffic jam is the same one as REM's - the two videos are even
filmed in roughly similar-looking locations - or that Beverley Knight's
orbital space-station is just the beginning of a programme of cosmic
exploration which will eventually see Muse returning to a devastated Earth
in five-hundred years' time and gazing upon the blasted remains of
Westminster. More of this sort of thing later.)
55. "Babycakes", Three of a Kind
Now I'm really confused. Anyone who caught the Christmas edition of Top
of the Pops will have seen this performed "live" in the studio, something
which involved the three members of the band taking up a triangular
formation on stage; the girl in the baseball cap at the front, the two
blokes at the back. However, despite this attempt at forced perspective, it
became immediately apparent that the girl's tiny. Really, really tiny. Not
just short, but the kind of tiny which leads you to believe that at this
time of year she should be too busy in panto to appear on television.
Assuming that this is the same girl we see in the video, and they haven't
just switched her with a seven-year-old in order to disorientate us… is she
actually, technically a midget? And if so, then does this change the whole
tone of "Babycakes"? After all, the thing this Countdown found most
unsettling about the video was that the seemingly "ordinary"
Chavette seemed somehow more appealing than the android gingham-women. If it
turns out that she's not "ordinary" at all, but attractive in the same way
that dwarf-porn might be construed as attractive, then does that make things
more acceptable? If nothing else, the name "Three of a Kind" looks more
dubious than ever.
52. "Love Machine", Girls Aloud
In 2004, few things were as irritating as people droning on about The
Lord of the Rings as if it were a proper movie rather than just an X-Box
tie-in waiting to happen. However, if one entertaining thing can still come
from Peter Jackson's nine-hour lump of arse, then it's the thought that the
pop stars of the future will consider Tolkien to be a "worthy" source of
material. Early pop videos wasted no time in stripping down Alice in
Wonderland for its imagery (and Gwen Stefani's recent effort has shown that
some video-makers haven't come up with any better ideas since), but from
hereon in we can look forward to boy-bands dressing up as Aragorn. In 2004
we had to make do with videos in which Girls Aloud got drunk and flirted
with waiters. A year or two from now, we can look forward to groups
attempting to compress the entire Ring-quest into four minutes. There, now
you can spend the next few hours pondering the question of which Girl Aloud
would be which Hobbit. To start you off: Nicola is clearly Sam.
46. "Unwritten", Natasha Bedingfield
If you haven't seen the video, then it's basically just like "Coffee and
TV" by Blur, except with a walking book instead of milk. Actually, this also
ties in with the subject of the Five Rings to Bind Girls Aloud; the walking
book's epic journey to the top of the library, complete with evil
Balrog-sized books and computer-generated snowstorms, might be considered
the shape of things to come. Because 2004 was, in no uncertain terms, the
year that computer graphics ran amok and the population firmly decided that
the kind of animation used in films like Shark Tale and The Incredibles is
the "normal" kind. And are you, like me, disturbed by the CGI ads for Co-Op
that give us a variety of animals singing the praises of the shop's "no
genetic modification" policy? I find it particularly hard to deal with the
two camel-faced things who are obviously supposed to be "ethnic" characters
and have now started doing covers of Salt 'n' Pepa, even though they look
more like prostitutes from a '70s blaxploitation movie. Singing animals are
bad enough, but singing animals who deliver lyrics about the greatness of
"natural" and the evils of "genetically engineered" just lead you to wonder
about the creatures' own origins. If these ho'-beasts aren't themselves
genetically modified, then they can only have been created in a series of
"natural" forced couplings between other species, which in turn makes you
wonder about the commitment of Co-Op's staff and whether you really want
these people handling your cheese. Co-Op's slogan would seem to be "We Go
Further So You Don't Have To", though they seem to mean "go further" in the
same way that Doctor Moreau was "going further".
45. "Stop", Jamelia
The record which will, for me, always be "The Speed-Dating Song". Since
my comments on the experience in the last edition - and all the subsequent
fretting about whether I should go out with number 25, who was
obviously impressed by me but who also likes Robbie Williams - I've noticed
something which seems to suggest that I'm unfit for the entire speed-dating
process. To wit: out of my twenty three-minute partners, the woman who
interested me the most was the one I ended up arguing with. You can see the
problem here. Evidently I have a need for some kind of conflict in a
relationship, provided it's not the "no, it's your turn to take out the
cat-litter" kind. This makes it hard for me to know what to say as an
opening gambit. The website of the speed-dating company advises you not to
open every conversation with 'what do you do?', as this can get very dull
very quickly (then again, the website also advises you to "respect your
dates, dress well and above all be yourself", which I'm sure contains at
least one contradiction), but increasingly it seems as if my ideal
introductory question would be 'd'you want a fight?'. I suspect that few
women who go speed-dating would understand this.
44. "In the Middle", Sugababes
If we were living in the 1970s, then this would have been introduced on
every variety show on television with a Northern comedian saying 'and 'ey, I
tell you what, I wouldn't mind being in the middle of the Sugababes', but
sadly there are three of them so it doesn't work. (Incidentally, younger
readers might have difficulty understanding just how different '70s culture
was. You may think you know all about The Black and White Minstrel Show, but
a better example of the era involves the Nolan Sisters, an all-girl
family-based Irish vocal group that seemed to get bigger with every TV
appearance. In the late '70s, one old-school stand-up comedian spotted this
phenomenon and commented: 'Have you noticed, there's a new Nolan Sister
every time you see 'em…? Their dad must be knackered.' I'm fairly sure that
all of you can see the fundamental problem with this joke, but amazingly,
nobody did at the time. Or at least, nobody male, and why would any TV
comedian try talking to the women in the audience? That wasn't what comedy
did, in those days. I'm digressing.) "In the Middle" is a weirdly complex
record, with three different verses in three different styles, but further
analysis will have to wait until I get round to writing my definitive
Dissertation on the Sugababes in a future edition. For now, it's worth
pointing out that here Keisha also insists on talking about how much she's
been sweating lately, but due to personal prejudices I find this a lot less
unappealing than when Nelly does it.
43. "Let's Get It Started", Black Eyed Peas
This time the mad uncle's wearing sunglasses, as if he's unexpectedly
turned up at the younger band-members' party and wants to pretend he's a
teenager. The others nonetheless let him prance around the place shouting
about how good he is at "getting it started", presumably because it stops
him telling everyone about the way he keeps picking up secret radio
transmissions on his fillings.
42. "You Had Me", Joss Stone
Wouldn't it be scary if it turned out that we had all had her, but
forgotten about it?
39. "The Show", Girls Aloud
I've just realised why I like this so much: when I was a kid, this is
what I thought music would sound like in the future. But by now we're so
familiar with this record that we tend to forget the original question,
namely… what is the Show of the title? Is it, as the sort-of-chorus might
suggest ('nobody sees the show / not 'til my heart says so'), an allusion to
the female secret bits? Or rather, a reference to the sexual act itself ('if
it's not you, oh no / I won't do that'), using those secret bits as a
physical symbol in much the same way that "heart" is generally used to
suggest "love"? It's worth re-asking this question now, because this is the
song that Girls Aloud performed - or, more accurately, mimed very badly -
during the Royal Variety Performance, underneath a great big red neon sign
reading THE SHOW. If the title is explicitly a code for women's front
bottoms, then this is tantamount to flashing the word SNATCH right in the
Queen's face. This in itself would be entertaining, if there were any
evidence that any of the five Ho'bits of Girls Aloud had a clue what they
were doing.
32. "Naughty Girl", Beyonce
Features a cameo appearance from Usher, who obviously doesn't feel that
his face is on music television enough.
30. "Everybody's Changing", Keane
When describing the work of Keane, I find the phrase "caked in faeces" to
be particularly useful. I remember reading, a while ago now, a column by a
music journalist who claimed that the difference between Good Pop and Bad
Pop in the early 1990s was that Good Pop required guitars and Bad Pop
insisted on using synthesisers. This made sense, in the context of the time;
those who remember 1992 will recall an age when the Pixies and Nirvana
actually seemed exciting (well, for a bit), while at the same time Annie
Lennox was reaching the conclusion that the best way to make things sound
"moving" was to plug in an Emu and bury every track under a six-foot-deep
layer of string-pads. Now, though - now that Keane, Embraced and all the
other Erased bands are clogging up the Hit Parade like "bad" cholesterol,
but even Britney Spears can make a decent record using spiky, aggressive
electro-noises - the same opinion would seem odd and bewildering. First
thing we do, let's burn all the "real" instruments.
29. "Car Wash", Christina Aguilera ft. Missy Elliot
As is well-known, Missy Elliot goes by the nickname of "Misdemeanour".
But does anybody know why? Presumably it's part of the great American
pop-star desire to be treated like a criminal, the same desire which has
seen half a dozen R&B acts dressing up like gangsters this year, or at least
like bad guys from Dick Tracy. (One of Nelly's henchmen in "Tilt Ya Head
Back" is wearing a Phantom of the Opera mask, as if he thinks that '20s
Chicago and Gaston Leroux's Paris are more or less the same thing… in modern
pop culture, history is the story of the various reincarnations of Mel
Gibson.) But what exactly has Missy done wrong? What are these
misdemeanours? Her biggest crime seems to have been to prop up her career
with a series of contrived multi-million-dollar videos, full of exotic
computer graphics that would probably cause the kind of people who describe
Gollum as "state of the art" to come through their noses, which is a kind
of robbery but sadly not the sort for which you get a criminal record. The
only other offence she may have committed is false advertising; a while ago
she repeatedly offered me some free corn, and has yet to deliver it.
22. "I'll Stand by You", Girls Aloud
I've always got something else to say about Girls Aloud, have you noticed
that? This time I just want to point out that the slightly over-familiar
leg-stroke in "The Show" - see the 31/10/04 edition - is as nothing next to
the video for "I'll Stand by You", in which all five of the Girls Aloud (the
accepted plural… "Girls Alouds" sounds more familiar, but "Girls Aloud" is
accurate in the same way that it's "surgeons-general" rather than
"surgeon-generals") pile on top of each other for a long, luxuriant brushing
of hair and touching of thighs. Again, try to imagine Blue doing that. And I
don't know about you, but to me Kimberley's line 'I'm a lot like you' sounds
actionable. I know it's standard practice for pop stars to address the
listener as if he or she were the subject of the song, but in no way do I
resemble a cheap Northern pretend-lesbian.
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