However, with well over
1200 number one singles since the charts unified in the late 1960s,
there's been more than a few songs that make you scratch your head
and wonder “how the hell did they become a hit?” and thus is the
topic of today's list. Ten of the most baffling songs ever. There are
a few caveats since this list is about being unexpected rather than
just being bad, or obscure, though both of those things come into
play. No, this is about songs that seemingly come out of nowhere and
make you wonder how the hell people could buy them in the hundreds of
thousands, so Charity singles are out and bad but conventional songs
also are unless there's something especially unique about their rise.
So with that, count down with me won't you?
10: Mambo No. 5 – Bob
The Builder (2001)
What?
Oh, where to start,
this one is very very easy. The second of two number one hits for the
cartoon star (and his voice actor, Neil 'Man Behaving Badly'
Morissey) sees the builder covering Lou Bega's number one hit, an
anthem for polygamy where Lou Bega sings joyously about sleeping with
pretty much every woman in the northern hemisphere. Of course the
lyrics are somewhat altered to be less about boinking everyone and
more about fixing every problem about the house. Although, put like
that it kind of poisons the childhood of pretty much anyone just
younger than me...
Most Ridiculous Part
The fact that someone
from CBBC (the children's wing of the British Broadcasting
Corporation who own Bob the Builder) looked at Mambo No. 5 and went
“That's a perfect song to do a tie-in with Bob the Builder! You
know how kids are all about pimping!”
Why did it happen?
The worst bit is that
it worked! The BBC had already scored a number one already with the
Bob the Builder theme song early in 2001. It helps that Morissey,
while hardly the best singer ever, has an interesting voice and can
hold a note, which made Mambo No. 5 and especially Can We Fix It
actually tolerable compared to the CBBC's other number ones, the
Teletubbies theme and especially Mr Blobby, both songs that aren't
listenable even if you're young enough to watch the shows. It's a
cash in and quite an embarrassing one, but one that makes a small bit
of sense.
Mull of Kintyre –
Paul McCartney (1977)
What?
I don't know either,
the list will contain some terrible inexplicably popular songs,
things from nichés that never broke free from that restraint or some
long forgotten tie-in, but this one makes no sense. Paul McCartney
has a spot of land called the Mull Of Kintyre, so he sang about it in
an utterly dismal acoustic ballad so banal and insufferable it made
one long for the days of the fucking Frog Chorus. And it scored the
Christmas Number One spot, an accolade that is hotly competed for
year on year and leads to some of the most creative (and occasionally
worst) songs of any given year.
And yet the Christmas
number one was this utterly irrelevant, pointless, dull as dishwater
acoustic ballad about how Paul McCartney owns a big bit of beautiful
land on a Scottish island, which is the 70s equivalent of those
endless slog of rap songs and rap verses proclaiming the amazing
wealth you have. That's the issue with it; strip the romanticist
imagery and you have not only an incredibly dull acoustic ballad, but
an implicitly egotistical one.
Most Ridiculous Part?
That the biggest hit of
the band who did Live and Let Die was this, although this is far from
the last time this is the case in the pop charts, and not even the
last on this list.
Why?
I can only assume purely based on McCartney's sheer hit-making power. Paul McCartney had a ton of hits after the Beatles, first with Wings and later as a solo artist, and most of them were if not outright terrible at least a little unimaginative, lacking the zest and energy that former bandmate John Lennon provided, or indeed the musicianship and vulnerability of George Harrison. And it is indeed each members' hits post-Beatles that shows the balance between the members, that sheer synergy that made them one of the greatest bands of all time...as well as the clear weaknesses in each member's solo work. Ah well, at least the Frog Chorus never got to number one.
8: Axel F – The Crazy
Frog
What?
Oh god, this one. This
horrible, putrid, unlistenable piece of pop music smegma that
polluted the airwaves and conversations of civilised society for a
large chunk of 2005. Trying to explain this one to the blissfully
ignorant is like explaining the odd popularity of slavery. Right, it
started as a Swedish student trying to copy the sound of a two-stroke
engine out of the comically awful Russian car, the Trabant. Six years
later, another Swedish student created a 3d animation of the creature
known as The Annoying Thing, using the sound to show off his ability
to lip sync and animate in time with a sound file. It was popular on
his site and spread out to Napster and other file sharing sites of
the time and thus it was at this time that the burgeoning mobile
phone ringtone company Jamstar! (at the time known as Jamba!,
RingToneKing and a zillion other terrible names) bought the rights
and started to blanket advertise the damn thing more than anything
alive. More people saw this than saw the Coronation, the Jubilee or
any sporting final, if only because it was absolutely impossible to
escape. This original clip eventually permutated into a big
merchandise grab to cash in on the surprise flash in the pan hit
which eventually led to an hugely successful album in 2005, Crazy
Hits.
The lead off single of
Crazy Hits, a cover of the main theme from Beverly Hills Cop was a
monumental smash hit, even with Frog's annoying gimmick polluting the
incredibly infectious beat getting to number one practically
everywhere in the world and staying there in the UK for a month, only
finally being ousted by the tag team of Tupac and Elton John.
Most Ridiculous Part:
As much as I want to
say the very fact the Crazy Frog exists as a pop culture artefact is
one, but I suppose the fact that the mobile phone-bait music video
was turned into not one, but two video games makes me want to flee
this planet as fast as physics will allow me.
Why?
It's really hard to
consider how the Crazy Frog phenomenon suddenly flashed into
existence and just as quickly went away. As much as I want to put it
down to horrible people being horrible and liking terrible things
then finally seeing sense, there must be more to it than that. Crazy
Frog was the symbol of a change that would very quickly sweep the pop
world: The use of ringtones, the internet and new media as a firm
marketing tool, as well as cross marketing in a very efficient way
(well other than the blanket marketing of the initial ringtone) that
kept the grey bastard constantly in the public's conscious, which
snowballed and meant once it was there it would not go away.
As much as we wanted it
to.
7: Ain't No Doubt –
Jimmy Nail (1993)
What?
If the Crazy Frog is
entirely plausible from a sheer cynical marketing perspective, the
huge and sustained success of Jimmy Nail is the complete opposite.
Typically the number one position goes to either something very
talented, very catchy or it fits a contemporary trend. Jimmy Nail was
never any of those things, and in fact there's a good chance you
won't have heard of him, since his last big role was in 2002,
reprising a role he hadn't done at that point for 14 years.
Basically, he was the Geordie lout from Auf Wiedersehn Pet, and yet
from that he had a pretty respectable television career in the 90s,
his biggest hit being the heartwarming comedy Crocodile Shoes.
And it is with
Crocodile Shoes that his television and music careers both converge
and peak simultaneously, the simple premise of a factory worker who
wants to live the dream of being a country music singer included a
tie-in album which went to number two at the tail end of 1994 and the
title track becoming another of Nail's many many chart hits. However,
while Crocodile Shoes makes perfect sense as a tie-in product, his
previous album, Growing Up in Public was the big hit, and its first
single, Ain't No Doubt inexplicably went to number one, the reason I
call it inexplicable becomes readily appatrent once you hear it.
From a production
standpoint the song is pretty much dead centre in terms of its sound.
It has a brass band, an admittedly awesome bass riff that powers the
song and muted synth chords creating a somewhat slow atmospheric
verse which comes to life in the chorus. Nail is also accompanied by
Sylvia Mason-James, who does very well with the three repeating lines
she gets. Those are the two good parts of the song, and really it
goes downhill the second Nail starts evoking the rhythmic styling of
William Shatner. The lyrics are about a breakup and the mistrust that
comes from that, done in a simplistic way and really simply demanding
honestly; the act of lying to save feelings after a breakup being a
contradiction in terms, leading to the eventual resignnation of
Nail's narrator as a liar himself, lying himself to both protect
himself and to try and hurt his former lover. The problem is Nail's
performance, acting like he's narrating the monologue in a bad
Geordie Film Noir, which could have worked in framing the lady as a
femme fatale and extending the metaphor. The problem is that it
becomes abundantly clear that Nail is not singing the verses due to
the limitations in his voice or the unwillingness of the hacks who
wrote the song to create a vocal melody, and so it stands to expose
his weaknesses in both lyricism and singing, weaknesses that got him
an Ivor Novello award nomination for excellent songwriting.
It should be noted that
“Bad Geordie Film Noir” seems to be the theme of the music video,
although the influences seem to be less “The Blue Dahlia” and
more “Bugsy Malone”, as the verse and chorus move between the
grim London streets in an intimidating cold grey, the overexposed,
almost deified light in the Pre-Chorus and the glitzy full on musical
colours of the chorus, relating a tale of the muted emotions of the
protagonist being tested by the forced platitudes of his former love,
eventually tipping over and forcing the protagonist to rhetorically ask "Why does she pretend?!" and burst out into the emotive, colourful chorus.
Yeah, that's about as
much Jimmy fucking Nail analysis as you can wring out of me.
Most Ridiculous Part?
The Pre-Chorus by a
mile, where Mason-James is interrupted by Nail's sardonic asides of
“she's lying!” which is nothing short of genius. If I'm ever in a
nasty horrible break up (um, again), I know who's sage advice I'm
going to follow to deal with it!
Why?
Nail was a fairly
respected actor, with most of his better roles, such as in Spender
and Crocodile Shoes being characters he created, and received five
BAFTA nominations and a Golden Globe Nomination that he created.
Perhaps his exposure and reputation with the BBC, a company known for
being better than most when it came to cross-promotion, as well as
his reputation for writing (though not really music) kept him in the
public picture, and thus people bought his music as a show of support
for his television persona, like they did later with Crocodile Shoes.
Or maybe people are
just suckers for bad break up songs, who knows?
6: Bring Your Daughter
To The Slaughter – Iron Maiden (1990)
What?
Oh hell yes, one of the gods of metal, Iron Maiden were so awesome they managed a number one hit in the early nineties, where metal had been shooed away into nothingness in the wake of the first wave of popular hip hop (or hip-pop as certain particularly humourless oafs will claim). Most metal that was still stocked was the increasingly out of control yet ever duller Hair Metal variety, and it would be a couple of years before its reaction would get big enough to confront it's decadent stablemate. Amid this chaotic landscape, and the utterly pathetic religious claptrap Saviour's Day making it to the Christmas top spot , Iron Maiden managed to score the number one single on the eve of 1991.
To a fan of heavy metal
this is standard, and actually for Iron Maiden unfortunately
redundant stuff, off their weakest album, No Prayer For the Dying,
although a different cut was used as the theme song for the slasher
flop Nightmare On Elm Street Part V: The Dream Child. Arguably a tiny
bit more accessible in terms of sound than something like To Tame a
Land admittedly, but really it's standard Maiden, and really it's
difficult to hate an Iron Maiden song if you're a fan of that kind of
music. And if you're not, then these words are going to slap you in
3...2...
Most Ridiculous Moment
The BBC banned the song
and its music video, if you can believe it, in late 1990 when it
started climbing up the charts on Christmas eve. I assume it's
because of the rather sexualised lyrics, or maybe that they thought
in the wake of the devil worshipping child abuse scare of the early
1990s (believe it or not, that was a real genuine moral panic), that
people would literally bring their daughter to the slaughter. Either
way, it was a bit sensationalist and I suspect the BBC were pushed
into it.
Why?
While I want to say
simply “Because it's awesome your plebian cretins!” I genuinely
am baffled by this one more than most of the ones on this list. Rock
and heavy metal really stopped being more than a fluke hit about a
decade before this, but even with the hits in the genre that came
before and after this, there was usually a reason for their success.
They were in the soundtrack a hit film, some kind of major media
event involved them, they got a rub from a popular star of the time
or more morbidly one of the members dies. Nightmare Part 5 was an
utter flop, so I doubt that Freddy had anything to do with its
success. It's not much simpler than most Maiden fare so it wasn't a
dramatic change in style like how Metallica and Megadeth got big
hits. The song got banned from the BBC, but how much that drove sales
I have no idea; while it got the Sex Pistols their only number one
hit, but that song was trying to get banned because being taboo was
the entire point of the Sex Pistols (not punk mind, before I get
complaints from punk bands, just The Sex Pistols themselves).
Personally, this isn't entirely out of nowhere, given their massive
success outside of the pop fold, perhaps a crossover hit was
inevitable. Also, Iron Maiden are awesome, that is all.
Thanks for putting Iron Maiden at the end, it definitely made being reminded of Bob the Builder and Crazy Frog more bearable :P
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