2009 December

First Movement

Consider this.

For seven successive weeks in mid-2004, the songs at the summit of the UK singles charts were entitled Fuck It and Fuck You Right Back.

“I loved a ho… Fuck you, you ho.”

“I’m glad I didn’t catch your crabs… Your sex was wack.”

Is this the world we created?

This perhaps explains in part why one of the least satisfying voluntary acts I have ever undertaken is to look at every UK Top 40 chart of the 517 weeks since 1 January 2000.

Fact: there has never been more pop music available to us.

Fact: there has rarely been so little pop music of lasting quality or worth.

Second Movement

The riff or hook has been at the heart of pop since Little Richard barked, “Awopbopaloobopalopbamboom!” and Chuck Berry scorched his Gibson to lay down the “borrowed” opening lick to Johnny B. Goode, though ordinarily as embellishment to a complete song.

And The Beatles (yes, them again) showed to devastating effect what could happen when you stuck two different songs together (cf. A Day In The Life) or even just a succession of half-songs (cf. side two of Abbey Road).

The first decade of the 21st century has seen these two supporting pillars in the pop pantheon take centre stage: some of the biggest and best singles of the decade have consisted of little more than a series of riffs tacked on to half-songs.

From the playground chant of Kelis’ Milkshake (or everything by The Ting Tings) through Mika’s never ending insistence that “Everybody’s gonna love today, gonna love today, gonna love today,” to Duffy’s “Yeah, yeah, yeah,” – didn’t The Beatles do that one a while ago…? – some of the most successful (if not best) pop of the “Noughties” has focused single-mindedly on burrowing its way into one’s subconscious in the shortest possible time.

For the record, I think most of the foregoing records were and are bobbins. The trick was performed with rather more style and substance by rather better artists.

Franz Ferdinand’s Take Me Out exemplifies the blueprint for singles success in the first decade of the 21st century: three riffs, two lyrical motifs and half-a-song melted together to create a glorious four minute-long earworm.

Beyonce followed the blueprint for Crazy In Love: starting with a blare of Chi-Lites’ horns straight into, “Uh-oh, uh-oh, uh-oh-uh-oh!” and a chorus consisting of nothing more than the repetition of the line, “Got me looking so crazy right now,” she and Jay-Z created another of the decade’s best aural confections.

And don’t even get me started on Outkast’s Hey Ya!

Perhaps there is simply so much music around us so often – despite the BBC’s unforgivable canning of Top Of The Pops – that the secret to commercial success is immediacy rather than songwriting, subtlety having largely gone the same way as the cassette.

Third Movement

This is merely one of hundreds – possibly thousands – of similar lists that have been and will be published to mark the end of the Noughties. Considering the sheer volume of music released during this arbitrary period of ten years, you might reasonably expect those lists to be filled with unknown gems and overlooked masterpieces.

Yet I contend that, such is the paucity of quality thrust upon us by the Selector-programmed radio stations and Cowell/Walsh/Fuller’s never-ending conveyor belt of anonymous hairless little boys and histrionic little girls, the number of genuinely classic pop singles to have been released this decade is tiny and their status is almost universally accepted.

Can’t Get You Out Of My Head; 7 Nation Army; Crazy In Love; Hey Ya!; Take Me Out; Mr. Brightside; I Predict A Riot; Dakota; Crazy; Umbrella; One Day Like This; Sex On Fire: these singles – all of which are genuinely superb and can hold high their heads among the best pop ever released – are going to be in every critic’s review of this decade (including this one). If you don’t love these records, you don’t love pop music.

But how sad is it that an entire decade has produced barely a dozen top-class pop singles when the likes of 1964 or 1979 or 1984 produced that many every six months?

The stranglehold on the Premier League tightens all the time. The rest are just making up the numbers…

The last time the charts were full of such dispiriting mediocrity was in the period between Elvis joining the army and the release of Please Please Me. We must hope a new Beatles materialise soon.

If they don’t, nostalgia is here to stay and the likes of Neil Diamond, ABBA, Bruce Springsteen, Bob Dylan, Barbara Streisand and Vera Lynn – all number one album artists in the past 18 months – will remain major chart forces in the next decade.

50= Rihanna – Umbrella

50= Outkast – Hey Ya!

50= Beyonce – Crazy In Love

Three of the best number one singles of the decade deliberately bracketed together because, however fantastic they may be to listen to, they are not full songs painstakingly crafted at a piano or guitar. They are instead wonderful-sounding records constructed on computers atop the flimsy scaffold of a hook (or two or three).

(Two, incidentally, feature contributions from Jay-Z. They represent my only conscious exposure to his oeuvre. Hence I believe Jay-Z to be a gentleman who wanders onto other people’s records to crank out the same-sounding, half-hearted verbal ejaculations time and again. Your Jay-Z mileage may vary.)

The other reason they have been bracketed together is because, though theoretically all dance singles, none of them actually make the Minister want to dance. However understandably grateful you may be to have escaped witnessing such an horrifying spectacle, dance music that doesn’t actually make you want to dance loses half a point…

http://www.veoh.com/collection/s535829/watch/e15798952ga5nmy

49 Madonna – Hung Up

…hence Madge finds herself half a point ahead for producing this excellent single – another number one – in the middle of what was otherwise her most disappointing decade.

Yes, it’s another hook record – this one being lent wholesale by Benny and Bjorn – but this one has an infectious undeniability I find lacking in the previous entries in this chart.

It remains the only record this decade to get the Minister’s toe tapping in the departure lounge of an airport. (No mean achievement for this nervous a flyer.)

At five-and-a-half minutes, Hung Up is too long but it proves that, whatever her other faults, Madonna retains her pop chops.

And Guy’s balls.

READER BEWARE: disturbing video of a leotard-clad woman of a certain age follows:

46= Scissor Sisters – I Don’t Feel Like Dancin’

46= Spiller – Groovejet (If This Ain’t Love)

46= S Club 7 – Don’t Stop Movin’

White Ministers can’t dance.

But if they could, they would dance to disco tracks like this trio of chart-toppers.

Ana Phalactic and the other Scissors never managed to worm their way into the Minister’s affections, even after he finally realised they were actually a Supertramp tribute band.

I Don’t Feel Like Dancin’ was the first single from their second album and a collaboration with Dame Reg Dwight. By a country mile it’s the best thing the band has ever done. A number one in September 2006, we’ve heard nothing from the band since and I for one don’t feel as though I’m missing out.

At the turn of the millennium Spiller (aided and abetted by Sophie Ellis-Bextor and, ahem, the ex-guitarist from Mud) took apart and reassembled a Carol Williams disco classic and transformed it into an, er, disco classic.

A year later – at the actual turn of the millennium – the first horseman of the apocalypse, Pestilence, appeared atop his white horse when S Club 7 released a brilliant single that deservedly won the Brit award for Best Single.

45 The Dandy Warhols – Bohemian Like You

It’s been appropriated to death by lazy directors and editors and the band seem like complete cunts (the Minister submits the movie DiG! as supporting evidence) but Bohemian Like You contains one of the best intros in pop. A #5 hit in 2001.

44 The Last Shadow Puppets – The Age Of The Understatement

I struggled with this. The Age Of The Understatement is effectively in this list representing Arctic Monkeys as well as this band’s three singles.

(For the uninitiated, The Last Shadow Puppets are a side project of Arctic Monkeys’ lead singer Alex Turner, with Miles Kane of The Rascals.)

Arctic Monkeys were a great breath of fresh air and Turner is the finest lyricist to have emerged this decade, but I find the band’s sound a little too samey for enjoyment.

While a million miles apart in style, I consider them alongside The Eagles as bands whose singles are great to listen to once in a while, but whose work sounds so similar that it’s impossible to enjoy more than one track at a time.

In teaming up with Kane, Turner has produced a wider, retro sound – at times their music sounds like it’s been shot in Cinemascope thanks to the contribution of the London Metropolitan Orchestra – that led to a rounder, more satisfying listen than the Monkeys’ two albums.

Elbow richly deserved the 2008 Mercury Prize, but few could have complained had The Last Shadow Puppets instead prevailed.

The Age Of The Understatement was the band’s first single and reached #9 in April 2008. Their album of the same name followed later that month.

43 Kirsty MacColl – In These Shoes?

I found the public reaction to the death of Diana, Queen of Hearts, risible. I had only returned to Britain a few days before after six months working and living abroad and felt that I’d moved not back home but to another foreign country. A tragedy for her sons, her family and her friends, it had nothing to do with The Masses.

My life has been far from tragic but I have lost a few people close to me – family, friends and colleagues – and I know the difference between grieving for someone you love, and simply feeling sad that someone you vaguely know or have heard of en passant has passed away.

So it came as something as a surprise that the news that Kirsty MacColl had been killed a week before Christmas in 2000 genuinely hit me with the force of a punch to the stomach.

I never met her, I didn’t know her; I liked her music and loved her voice but I was no obsessive fan – I owned just one of her albums (1989’s sublime Kite) – and three of her singles. Yet her death – shocking in so many ways – literally made me feel sick.

My subsequent immersion in her back catalogue has done nothing to suggest my initial reaction was anything other than merited.

Nine years on and, depending on the circumstances, the matter can still bring me to the brink of tears or – now that more is known about the scandalous circumstances – loud threats of violence against the Mexican establishment.

It’s sad that this country – and for once I include myself in my criticism of that discredited body’s failings – seems fundamentally incapable of recognising or honouring its national treasures until they’re dead.

And I’ve now rowed back a bit from my, “You camped outside Westminster Abbey for three nights? You fucking idiot…” comments.

In March 2000 Kirsty released her fifth album Tropical Brainstorm, marrying her love of Cuban and Brazilian rhythms and her own, very British, sardonically-laced humour. In These Shoes?, its second single, had reached the heady heights of #82 a month earlier.

The video for the single seems only to be available in very poor quality. Instead, this live performance is taken from Kirsty’s appearance on Later With Jools Holland in April 2000:

42 Johnny Cash – The Man Comes Around

When and where I grew up, Johnny Cash was what you put into the pub vending machine to obtain prophylactic contraception. But I digress.

American Recordings. Rick Rubin. You know the story.

By the time the song and album The Man Comes Around appeared in late 2002, it was obvious the 70-year-old Cash was seriously ill as a consequence of a degenerative neurological disorder.

If you want to gain an insight into mortality, all you need is this album, 50 minutes and a pair of headphones. If you are not sitting in a puddle of tears and a lake of regret as Cash’s version of We’ll Meet Again brings the album to a close, you’ve not been paying attention. In My Life, Bridge Over Troubled Water, Desperado, I’m So Lonesome I Could Cry and The First Time Ever I Saw Your Face – all songs written by relatively young men – take on a whole new meaning in Cash’s frail hands.

Yet the two opening tracks of the album – its two singles – remain its most powerful. (We’ll encounter track two later.)

The Man Comes Around was the album’s only new song, one of the last Cash would write. It’s an uncomfortable but compelling listen when a terminally ill septuagenarian takes a trot through the Book of Revelations.

No video was made for this single – which, perhaps unsurprisingly, did not chart in the autumn of 2002. The track did, however, provide a powerful soundtrack to the closing scene of HBO’s 2008 excellent series Generation Kill (though I concede the scene is more powerful still if you’ve sat through the series’ previous eight hours).

41 Mary J Blige – No More Drama

Some vocal performances simply cannot be ignored. If only more of her output was this strong. (Coincidentally or otherwise, this is one of Blige’s few tracks on which she does not receive a co-writing credit.)

Released in October 2001, the Jam & Lewis-produced No More Drama made #9 in the UK and #15 on the Billboard Hot 100.

I first became a fan of Blige’s voice following her performance of No More Drama on Later With Jools Holland in early 2002 (unlike the official video, it has the added advantage of no Puffy or Mariah cameos):

40 Rachel Stevens – Sweet Dreams My LA Ex

The Minister’s favourite Sclubber was never Rachel. I was always a Hannah man.

But Ms. Stevens’ solo debut single – turned down first by Britney Spears, when offered to her by the 80s-popstress-turned-whodathunkit?-hitmaker Cathy Dennis – began a reappraisal. It didn’t sound too much like else on the radio in 2003, and that always pleases the Minister.

Stevens went on to release a series of really good pop singles (such as Some Girls and So Good) and I somehow found myself buying – and enjoying – her second album Come And Get It.

In 2005, with I Said Never Again (But Here We Are), Stevens would achieve the mighty distinction of placing a song about anal sex in the Top 20.

Sweet Dreams My LA Ex reached #2 in September 2003.

Hannah’s still my favourite.

39 The Fratellis – Chelsea Dagger

Nonsense. Fluff. Throwaway.

But massively enjoyable.

Tubthumping with half-an-inch of brain, Chelsea Dagger was a #5 hit in September 2006.

38 U2 – Vertigo

¡HOLA!

No matter how bad the album, U2’s lead single is always superb*:

New Year’s Day from War
Pride (In The Name Of Love) from The Unforgettable Fire
With Or Without You from The Joshua Tree
The Fly from Achtung Baby
Stay (Faraway, So Close!) from Zooropa
Discotheque from Pop
Beautiful Day from All That You Can’t Leave Behind
Vertigo from How To Dismantle An Atomic Bomb

(* In formulating this hypothesis, I’ve naturally and legitimately ignored Desire from Rattle & Hum because that whole album’s shite. And No Line On The Horizon because Get On Your Boots is the worst thing U2 – and virtually everybody else, for that matter – has recorded since about 1982.)

For all the guff surrounding the band (or, perhaps more fairly, surrounding the band’s singer), they’ve always been a fantastic rock group when they really put their minds to it. This release nevertheless sounded fresher and more dynamic than any of their singles since 1991.

A number one in November 2004, and one of Edge’s best guitar tracks in years, I still genuinely can’t resist hollering “¡Hola!” in the chrous when I hear this record.

37 Damien Rice – The Blower’s Daughter

When I hear this song I think about Natalie Portman’s bottom.

When I put it like that, I’m amazed it didn’t rank higher than number 37 on this list.

The Blower’s Daughter, the second single from the album O, was a #27 hit in December 2004. (It features secondary vocals by Lisa Hannigan, whose fabulous 2009 album Sea Sew is one of my albums of the year.)

36 Beverley Knight – No Man’s Land

No Man’s Land was the first single taken from Beverley Knight’s fifth album, Music City Soul.

On its release in April 2007 it only reached #43, becoming Knight’s lowest-placed single in nine years. In typically perverse fashion, I think it’s her very best work.

Come what may, she’s the most soulful singer in Britain today.

35 Gareth Gates – Changes

Once he escaped Satan Cowell’s clutches, Gates confounded expectations by releasing Pictures Of The Other Side, a reflective and greatly enjoyable album of self-composed (or, more accurately, co-composed) material that suggested that, contrary to appearances, his balls actually had dropped.

It’s an album to which I still return and, despite all the scorn I poured on him in his Pop Idol days, it single-handedly changed my perception of the fella.

Lead single Changes was released in April 2007 and reached #14 in the charts. It’s not a demanding listen but I find it intriguing.

Gareth Gates | MySpace Music Videos

34 Oasis – The Hindu Times

As with the entries at numbers 49 and 38, this falls into the “Bloody Hell, where did this one come from after such a long period of stagnation?’ category.

For five years, excessive substance ingestion had resulted in stodgy output from a band that initially epitomised verve and edginess.

By 2002 Noel was clean and had wisley ceded some of the band’s songwriting duties. The album Heathen Chemistry sounded all the better for it, though The Hindu Times was solely composed by Gallagher, N.

Ironically, The Hindu Times knocked Gareth Gates’s repulsive version of Unchained Melody off the top of the UK singles chart in April 2002. It was Oasis’s sixth of eight number one singles.

33 Aqualung – Strange And Beautiful (I’ll Put A Spell On You)

Ah, car adverts. Music and (via Shakespeare) lyrics courtesy of Volkswagen…

Aqualung is the stage name of Matt Hales. A tale of unrequited love, Strange And Beautiful reached #7 in September 2002.

To me, you’re strange and you’re beautiful.

You’d be so perfect with me but you just can’t see.

You turn every head but you don’t see me…

32 McAlmont & Butler – Falling

The world needs Bernard Butler because the world needs BIG records. Commendably, in an increasingly anodyne musical landscape, Butler is gloriously unafraid to throw everything at the tape machine and see what sticks.

After acrimoniously splitting with David McAlmont in 1995 after they had released two of the best singles of the Nineties (Yes and You Do), Butler released two unsatisfying solo albums.

He eventually buried the hatchet with McAlmont and the two paired up again to produce a second album, Bring It Back, in 2002 – for which Butler co-opted the movie composer David Arnold to assist with the sumptuous string arrangements.

The album’s lead single, Falling, somehow contrived to sound even bigger than 1995’s Yes, which had itself sounded bigger than anything since before Phil Spector stopped taking his medication. Falling peaked at #23 in August 2002.

Sadly, the duo have not released anything further, Butler having since gone on to forge a successful career as a producer.

31 Stereophonics – Dakota

“Kelly Jones: one of Britain’s best soul voices, condemned forever to sing Stereophonics songs.”

(Not a Ministerial original, though I regret I can no longer remember where I read it.)

Stereophonics seem to have been around forever (though they first charted only in 1997) and have churned out a metric tonne of very average music.

In March 2005 they slipped out Dakota, stunned a herd of stampeding buffalo with four minutes of poptastic brilliance and found themselves with a number one single.

It was back to mediocrity immediately thereafter, but it was nice while it lasted.

A top rate driving song.

30 Elvis v JXL – A Little Less Conversation

“A little less conversation, a little more action, please,” should arguably have been the motto of the Noughties…

Tom Holkenborg is a Dutch musician and remixer who performs under the moniker Junkie XL.

Junkie XL remixed Elvis’s 1968 minor hit single A Little Less Conversation in 2001 for inclusion in Steven Soderbergh’s movie Ocean’s Eleven.

The following year, Nike used Junkie XL’s remix of the song in its World Cup advertising campaign themed around a secret, caged football tournament held upon a container ship and overseen and overacted by Eric Cantona. (Do keep up.)

Truncating his stage name to JXL to avoid the unfortunate juxtaposition of the words “Elvis” and “Junkie”, the remix was released and topped most European charts in September 2002 in support of the hugely successful compilation ELV1S: 30 #1 Hits.

29 The Temper Trap – Sweet Disposition

It’s too soon to know for sure whether or not this single – a #6 hit just two months ago, in October 2009 – will properly stand the test of time but I feel it’s one of only two singles released this year to warrant consideration for inclusion.

The song was originally a minor hit in The Temper Trap’s native Australia in September 2008. Through 2009 it featured in various commercials and television programmes, finally achieving prominence as a result of its use in Marc Webb’s splendid romcom (500) Days of Summer.

At the time of writing the record feels tiringly overfamiliar, but through the late summer and early autumn this airy, almost-diaphanous record just somehow felt absolutely right.

28 Sugababes – Hole In The Head

Revolving personnel notwithstanding, it’s arguable that Sugababes were Britain’s best singles group of the decade: the first draft of this list contained seven Sugababes singles, from their first number one, 2002’s Freak Like Me, to 2008’s Girls. I’m still not entirely certain how only two made the final cut.

October 2003’s Hole In The Head boasted both the classic Keisha-Mutya-Heidi line-up (I have no idea whether any of them are still actually ’Babes) and an astonishing eight co-composers. In the words of the song’s memorable lyrics: “Crazy shit.”

Hole In The Head reached number one in October 2003.

http://www.vidoemo.com/yvideo.php?i=QnFidE1pcWuRpbHJUMFk&sugababes-hole-in-the-head-video=

27 Jamelia – Superstar

I can’t even begin to tell you how much I love Jamelia.

She released (and mostly co-composed) a bunch of fantastic Top 10 singles in the middle of the decade (Thank You, Something About You, Beware Of The Dog, See It In A Boy’s Eyes), earning MOBO and Q best single awards in the process, and was rewarded by being dropped by the idiotic philistines in charge of her record-label-cum-private-equity-house, EMI-Parlophone-Terra Firma.

Superstar was the second single taken from Jamelia’s second album, Thank You, peaked at #3 in October 2003, was 2003’s 26th best selling single and was inspired by Liberty X’s 2002 number one Just A Little. You can’t have everything…

26 The Coral – Dreaming Of You

Scally alert: they even nicked the tune. (Allegedly. But do check out The Supremes’ My World Is Empty Without You and see what I’m alluding to.)

Scousers. Ridiculously young. Insanely catchy retro pop. Eponymous debut album nominated for Mercury Prize. November 2002, Dreaming Of You, a #13 hit.

25 Sugababes – Push The Button

Their last single prior to Mutya’s departure, and they co-opted writer/producer Dallas Austin, who had previously had huge success with TLC. The result was their best single and one of the catchiest choruses of the decade.

The single entered the chart at number one in October 2005 and received a nomination for Best Single at the 2006 Brits.

24 All Saints – Pure Shores

I didn’t see in the millennium (not that it was really the millennium) as I was off my tits on morphine at the time, but through the narcotic haze of early 2000 I recall seeing an interview with Shaznay Lewis in which she was asked what she’d done through 1999 while her bandmates took their clothes off in bad movies.

Her response: “Well, someone had to write the second album…” What’s not to love about the woman?

In fact, Lewis co-write Pure Shores with producer du jour William Orbit for the soundtrack to the Danny Boyle movie The Beach. (Not too many who paid to see A Life Less Ordinary or The Beach who’d have put money on Boyle winning Oscars a few years later…)

The single spent two weeks at number one in February 2000, their fourth of five chart toppers.

23 Rilo Kiley – Portions For Foxes

Rilo Kiley – a band led by two former child actors Blake Sennett and Jenny Lewis – have never had a hit single.

Portions For Foxes, an ode to an overwhelming but unhealthy relationship, is as close as they have come so far, receiving a stack of radio airplay on its release in 2005 as the lead single from the band’s third album More Adventurous. The album was one of the best of the year, and also featured a second fabulous single, It’s A Hit.

A sweet female voice singing about sex over jangly indie guitars. It’s like we’ve gone back to the Nineties…

cube da kcat | MySpace Video

22 Franz Ferdinand – Take Me Out

Awesome, as previously discussed. A #3 hit in January 2004.

21 Kylie Minogue – Can’t Get You Out Of My Head

If 2000’s Spinning Around had begun Kylie’s comeback, the following year’s Can’t Get You Out Of My Head capped it, catapulting her back into the Billboard Top 10 for the first time in 13 years.

Dance music for those of us who can’t dance, merely twitch, the song was written and produced for Ms. Minogue by Cathy Dennis and Mud’s ex-guitarist (Rob Davis), the single sold over four million copies worldwide.

It debuted at number one in the UK and topped the chart for four weeks in September and October 2001. It was the third highest seller of the year (and the most played track on UK radio), shifting more than a million copies, and sits at #67 on the all-time UK singles sales chart.

At the Birmingham NEC in 2002, the Minister and the Minister’s Wife witnessed (and participated in) the sublime and ridiculous spectacle of 10,000 people singing, “La, la, la. La, la, la, la, la. La, la, la. La, la, la, la, la,” over and over again.

Only exceptional pop can do that, which is why I love exceptional pop.

Part 2 (#20 to #1) will follow later in December.

Posted via web from The Ministry of Truth

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