i am part 13 of the chart project and i would like to say hello

#11
Mantovani and His Orchestra, 'Moulin Rouge'
1953
If cinema has taught me a few things it's that Moulin Rouge is a place of sexual thrills and exploratory hallucinogenic weirdness in basques and stockings. And if cinema has taught that then it is therefore true, so why is Mr Mantovani attempting to insinuate that Moulin Rouge is actually a place of dreamy but ultimately quite staid intrumental orchestration featuring a Gitanes-smoking accordionist to replicate the feel of France on heroin? Why would he lie like that?

Seriously, why?
(4)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sUF0Pf4ZAiw
  

#181
Supremes, 'Baby Love'
1964
Oh wow the lyric 'why you do me the way you do'! I thought that relative grammatical quandary was recent but here it is in 1964 on this totally amazing record by Diana Ross, Florence Ballard and Mary Wilson and written by the lawyers over at Holland-Dozier-Holland and musically backed by the irresistable Funk Brothers. There are only a few stories in pop but ultimately I think Goethe had it right when he said "everything has been thought of before. The problem is to think of it again" because there is, in reality, infinite mileage in the 'crummy boyfriend' lyric. A fine example of that thing we call 'humans doing music' all around.  
(9)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=23UkIkwy5ZM
 

#597
Rick Astley, 'Never Gonna Give You Up'
1987
Newton-le-Willows is a town whose identity is based on confuson. A small town that sits in historic Lancashire whilst acting as a commuter town for the Greater Manchester workforce, though its proximity to St Helens (which identifies with Liverpool and Merseyside) and Warrington (which is at the northern gateway to Cheshire and her rolling fields and footballer homes) means that the burgh is eternally confused about its civic identity and position in the world.

The town proved too confused for its most single-minded native, one Mr. Rick Astley. He is NEVER going to give you up. He will NEVER let you down. No fingers in several pies for Astley. He knows what he likes. Music? Pop with an RnB lilt to showcase my voice please. Lyrics? Earnest and memorable. Style? Noir insurance salesman. Hair? Jet age. Who better to solve Newton-le-Willows existential geo-crisis? A man of such hard-headed direction - and diction - surely could weigh in at tables of international diplomacy, such is his statesmanlike appeal. But have the townspeople asked him to do anything other than switch on their Xmas lights? Have they fuck.

Also this song used to make Bill Hicks phenomenally irate because he doesn't understand music in a more relational and less hierarchical manner, the dead idiot.
(6)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dQw4w9WgXcQ

#259
Mary Hopkin, 'Those Were The Days'
1968
Quite a bold manouevre to render a Russian folk song in the Western pop idiom, but one that paid off given its featuring in this round-up, the dream of many a Welsh pop singer in the 1960s. Laced with folksy strings and lamentations in the verses before shifting into Full Cossack dancing mode in the choruses. An entertaining and enduring novelty, approaching almost 100 years of ubiquity.
(6)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2KODZtjOIPg

#671
George Michael and Elton John, 'Don't Let The Sun Go Down On Me'
1991
An element of mantle-handing in the pantheon of sophisticated UK popular music here as Michael updates John's 1974 hit; a ballad writ of despair and rejection that cleverly/annoyingly can appear as if an appeal to the listener's sense of charity: the pair originally duetted this at Live Aid and then renewed their musical association for this version which benefitted ten organisations in education, health, etc. As a song it doesn't press all the buttons, rather waiting gamely for the giant chorus of renewal and hope for everyone on earth to sing along. Status of sun: not gone down on either some 21 years later. A victory then.
(5)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RsKqMNDoR4o

#1139
Flo Rida ft. David Guetta, 'Club Can't Handle Me'
2010
Inferring wildly I may be but I think that the title means "I am currently looking so physically excellent and feeling so jolly sprightly that other people in the night spot I will be visiting will be impressed, jealous and desiring of sex with me" rather than "I am quite literally in a state of being unable to be handled by a building that has no hands or perhaps a defunct UK pornographic magazine or a biscuit that was a staple of most children's lunchboxes in the 1990s". The song: dated and anemic dance fare untroubled by wit or anything to say.
(2)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SgM3r8xKfGE

#125
Shirley Bassey, 'Reach For The Stars' / 'Climb Ev'ry Mountain'
1961
As much as I find Ms. Bassey an entertaining and endearing presence in the world of light entertainment for over half a century, it is songs like these that make me feel uninspired. Side A is a treacly orchestrated ballad written by an Austrian. Side AA, culled from Sound of Music - famously taking place in Austria, is an orchestrated treacly ballad. Bassey gives it the Full Bassey on both; wonderful enunciation and clarity and control with no shortage of power. A technical masterclass, if little else.
(4)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tJ1dSesX4tc


#861
Sonique, 'It Feels So Good'
2000
Coffee-table music: music exhibiting similar qualities to coffee-table books, works which gain their aura from recently hip phenomena but packaged as a sophisticated high-end mass appeal product designed not so much for the engagement with but the utilisation as a status symbol and signifier of cool; soon to be forgotten, artless, stilted, dated, contextualised incorrectly.
(3)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fYW1YmfOHIM

#638
Band Aid II, 'Do They Know Its Christmas?'
1989
Maintaining this blog's policy of not rating singles conceived for charity here. Hard to believe that people bought this the second time around, though it does update the roster of singers and offer a light programmed drum machine.
(n/a)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i_oz1-2mq14

#922
Gareth Gates, 'Unchained Melody'
2002
For two months in 2001 we, the British nation, were hooked on the Gareth Gates story. A nascent talent show - Pop Idol - had arrived to seek that one future unit shifter in chief in the wake of a successful group-search format named Popstars (which gave us Girls Aloud, lest we forget). Gareth Gates was the show's curio and star, if not the eventual winner: a boy in transition to manhood who could not articulate himself in speech owing to a particularly troubling stammer, but able to command articulation beyond the mere construct of words with his melancholic singing voice. It was gripping stuff with a very British ending: he became famous but saddled with piss-poor material (or, like this, songs we've heard a million times over and NEVER need to hear again), his affliction was fought, he had sex with many famous women before appearing in musical theatre. Whilst hardly the greatest triumph, it must be viewed by Gates as an ascent.
(4)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A0EBj68dlak

#435
Gloria Gaynor, 'I Will Survive'
1979
Can I take this moment to apologise to my friend Jude for playing this at his wedding? So carried away was I on its promise of floor-trembling disco hi-hat and waves of soaring strings that I forgot all about its generally dour and post-relationship sentiment.

One of my earliest memories regards this song. My dad used to work in a care home and would organise the Xmas entertainment for the residents (usually himself singing a few ballads for the oldies). On a year which I, for some reason, attended (being some 65 years short of the mean age of the audience) they had two girls doing baton-twirling to this song. As a wee nipper desperate for attention I became so blindly annoyed that my parents and the old people were watching the girls with their amazing skills and not me with my adorable Will Sergeant fringe that I projected 18 years of piss and vinegar against this song and all baton-twirling related activities.
(8)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZBR2G-iI3-I

#1112
JLS, 'Everybody In Love'
2009
Of all pop music from the point where I stopped paying close attention (let's say 2007 onward) I think that JLS are in my top three artists. And it's not because one of them has a tattoo of Peterborough Cathedral and another one takes time out to talk to young people forced into the position of caring for an aging or ill parent based on his own personal experiences, but entirely on merit. Sure, they're overstyled and edgeless and could rightly be accused of being a bit bland in the persona department. Regardless, whoever supplies them with material knows exactly what they're doing writing fat-free pop structures, as the group flip between unshowy unison vocalising and some crafty minor-key harmonies.
(7)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tSryWcRD_tw

#178
Herman's Hermits, 'I'm Into Something Good'
1964
The human ability to recognise pattern and structure and intent and then replicate it in a multitude of languages is unparalleled, surely: no sooner was the pleasing template of good time rock music laid down by Muddy Waters and Chuck Berry and then later Buddy Holly and The Beatles that the entirety of contemporary pop music was trading on this currency alone. Memorable and derivative from nose to tail, though enjoyable.
(6)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zxDh2sYQRpo


#529
Flying Pickets, 'Only You'
1983
By my estimation only two a capella songs have gone to #1 in the UK and they were both by bands publicly espousing hardline leftist views, making it a more successful genre for getting under the skin of the public consciousness than punk music. This, a cover of Yazoo's debut single, is an entertaining piece which expands the tightly wound electronics of the original into an expansive, ethereal ocean of melody and calm.
(7)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F139hh2LPz0

#478
Bucks Fizz, 'Making Your Mind Up'
1982
A song more about visual impact than musical: anybody who knows this song remembers the famous Eurovision-winning set piece where, upon singing the lyric "and if you wanna see some more", the two gents would rip off the skirt of the two females - who were thankfully wearing an extra skirt, which strikes me as wholly impractical on paper but a well-judged decision in practice. Up-tempo E-number pop that doesn't outstay any welcome but doesn't change the course of any history.
(6)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h4-lKMGII_k

CHART PROJECT RETURNS FOR PART 12 THIS IS IT PART 12

#637
Jive Bunny & The Mastermixers, 'Let's Party'
1989
Can't remember if we've explained the Jive Bunny 'thing' but he was definitely a rabbit with a 'thing' and that 'thing' was that he was not actually a rabbit but two men, a father and son team no less, who made party fodder medleys out of existing records that for a period in 1989 were all the rage. Whatever your take on the art of sampling and its position upon a tentative venn diagram of art and crime, it's quite apparent that the Mastermixers were none-too-subtle exponents of this technique. This is the Xmas edition of their 'thing': sleigh bells coat everything, and every segue features stock oompah music sped up to a tempo ideal for sherry-fuelled merriment with your aunt.
(2)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=77JEC0CnSh4

#587
Mel & Kim, 'Respectable'
1987
Whilst not liking the majority of the Stock Aitken and Cough Spit Fuck Off Pete Waterman and their corpus of arid brutalist dayglo pop interrogation techniques, sometimes, akin to Clarice Starling in the denouement of Silence of the Lambs, they will happen blindly upon the trigger of their gun and aim it square at the psychopathic skin-farmer chasing them through the dark.

Arguably it's the personalities of Mel and Kim that sold this one as much as the remorseless and familiar musical underpinning; they were bright, relatable, unapologetic and fun in a pretty understated way. 'We're never gonna be respectable', they sing in untruth. Credit to the producers for that awesome mangling of the vocal for the main hook, they 'tay-tay-tay-t-t-t-t-tay-tay' though
(6)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ykDsmAqExH8

#596
Michael Jackson, 'I Just Can't Stop Loving You'
1988
It's high time that I faced up to the 'man in the mirror' (lol guys) admitted to myself that Michael Jackson is not an artist that I have much time for. Certainly [redacted] plays its part but what am I supposed to do with a man who has - at best - four pretty cool songs that I hear more often that I hear artists that I'm really into simply because of their cultural saturation? The man was a purveyor of schmaltz outside of these songs, smooth risible schmaltz, which this song epitomises. As a sucker for sincerity in music (stupidly, you might counter) it gives me pause to hear the title lyric sung; given what we know of the man, whom, or what could he simply not prevent himself from loving? It's a chilling thought.
(3)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tai2j3dVSUQ


#237
Englebert Humperdinck, 'The Last Waltz'
1967
Leicester's finest crooner with half-truth song title (it is in 3/4). My uncle is a bit of a crooner, he loves songs like this: smooth orchestration and a restrained vocal that progressively becomes a bellow to give the impression of climbing the musical scale.
(3)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B0fQHSqoD9Q

#67
Elvis Presley, 'Jailhouse Rock'
1958
If I had been alive in the 1950s I would have thanked the lord above for Elvis Presley. Of course in retrospect his songs lack the musical sophistication of Slade or the sexual suggestivity of a Rick Astley but he was a vindaloo in the age of meat and potatoes three times a day, a Maserati in an Asda carpark. This playful rockabilly number recasts a prison as the centrepiece for a sudden outbreak of musicality, inaccurately I'll wager, but nonetheless cute and antic.
(7)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gj0Rz-uP4Mk

#358
Sweet Sensation, 'Sweet Sad Dreamer'
1974
A new one on me and yet crushingly familiar; a British approximation of the Philly soul sound of the time. Problematically, the soul sound of the time was beginning to sound corny and anathema to the things that made soul & RnB so vital, making the full transition from the edgy youth clubs to the supermarket intercom, otherwise known as 'The Feargal Sharkey'.
(3)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=788BOtx_-Nw

#1019
Sugababes, 'Push The Button'
2005
It says in my manual that we're sort of supposed to like Sugababes but the rationale section is curiously absent so I'll have to guess my way through this review. It's pretty clear to me after reading back a few of my reviews that I have hang-ups about production, structure and vocals: this song just about meets likeability in all three aspects; it sounds like a demo (I like things that sound like anyone could have done it), it's tightly packaged and wound (no section sticks around long enough to become boring) and the vocal run in the bridge ('after waiting patiently for him to come and get it' is really well phrased and done in a way that pays attention to the momentum of the song, rather than the technical ability of the singer) is exemplary. However, it's by no means a total banger: the last time it was heard was at its original time of landing, and if 7 years pass until the next one I won't mind.
(7)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oJDGcxAf9D8

#706
Tony Di Bart, 'The Real Thing'
1994
My mum, as a fairly constant smoker, used to get these free CDs as a reward for maintaining allegiance with one brand of self-murder, though to facilitate this exchange she had to cut out the front of the package and send them back to the manufacturer. What did the cig companies used to do with all those cig packet fronts? Stick them on the wall?

Anyway, this song was memorably on one of those CDs, nestled right next to 'Love City Groove' by Love City Groove from the album Love City Groove. The song has Di Bart warbling about his desire to mate with only one person only and if that person is unavailable or unwilling then he shall depart from the sphere of physical encounters forthwith. Entirely appropriately, he chooses to voice this kind of tense dramatical situationism over a light Korg M-1 house piano and a very mild break.
(4)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MI4apNznQ4U

#1013
2Pac ft. Elton John, 'Ghetto Gospel'
2005
Though I'd never be accused of being the world's biggest fan of Mr. Shakur, I certainly have a great deal of respect for i. his predicament as a sensitive man cast in the world of machismo, a role in which he possibly acquitted himself only too well ii. his acting iii. his prolific output that not even his untimely death could halt iv. the following lyric:

And since we all came from a woman
Got our name from a woman and our game from a woman
I wonder why we take from our women
Why we rape our women, do we hate our women?
I think it's time to kill for our women
Time to heal our women, be real to our women
And if we don't we'll have a race of babies
That will hate the ladies, that make the babies
And since a man can't make one
He has no right to tell a woman when and where to create one
So will the real men get up
I know you're fed up ladies, but keep your head up

which pretty much cuts through all the bullshit (counter: lyrics for 'Hell 4 A Hustler') and why when I read Pitchfork I'm incredibly disappointed when they're all like "check this Tyler guy out" and I do and hear "Punch your bitch in her mouth just for talkin' shit / You lurkin' bitch? Well, I see that shit / Once again I gotta punch a bitch in her shit / I'm icy bitch, don't look at my wrist / Because if you do, I might blind you bitch" - and okay this could be a character or a portrait of a scene - but the lack of self-reflexivity in the lyrics around it make me think 'oh okay this is just idiotic' and furthermore those words don't even scan.

So this song by 2Pac featuring a sample of Elton John from 1971 when his voice was a little more reedy and thin, but his melodic ability was at its height, is a nice reminder that Big Rap doesn't need to be Personally Troubling Rap even though it strays into Formulaic Rap, as Tupac pleads for the end of street violence and the futility of intra-community conflict.
(5)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o4nLzG7fsRM

#823
Backstreet Boys, 'I Want It That Way'
1999
'Poptimism' is this douchey recent quasi-doctrine in which people (casual observation: those whose major musical concerns actually lie in left-field) can hold out hope and seek joy in the giddy thrills of the pop sphere generally pitched in opposition with rock that declares itself to be authentic (which is stupid and someone needs to have a word with rock music but only in the way that a teenager needs perspective to become adult). There's nothing wrong with that in a sense except for the insincerity of the applied intelliectualism: eclecticism isn't for everyone and nor should it be. There are no prizes for liking everything or only one thing. It's okay to not move on as much as it is to embrace the zeitgeist. Both 'rock' and 'pop' are real and fake and stupid and smart. Everything is permissible and it doesn't need a name.

That paragraph has sidetracked me somewhat. This is the most popular and famous song of the Backstreet Boys canon, a lilting pop-meets-RnBallad, all gently swung drum machines and dreamy harmonies and nonsense lyrics. It touches upon these unspoken universals of western pop music even when set aside from the sexual aspect of how boybands sell records: everything is invisible, you never sense the hands of construction within, the song as a canvas to project desire upon, nothing too specific to be sung. It's feintly charming and completely functional and shall outlast the group as it is built upon the very DNA of pop music.
(6)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4fndeDfaWCg