RabbitFurCoat

At a festival over the weekend so two today and Monday instead... Moving on from ones where I'm more negative, we're now at the section (of two) of songs which I had no memory of, are typically fine but have no real desire to listen to again going forwards, after that we can start getting some positivity in here! 25. One Direction – Little Things 1 week at #1 (entered 18th November) 01-03-09-06-10-16-14{-17-29-36-47-53-36-59-66-74-53R(2)-67R(3)-71R(3)-67R(21)-68R(2)} (21 weeks) Kept off #1: Bruno Mars – Locked Out of Heaven Sales: 85,308 EOY: #65 It had been two years since One Direction were on X-Factor, they didn’t come close to winning, finishing 3rd and always being the 3rd or 4th most popular act each week, but went on to become probably the biggest act to come from it. The manufactured boyband was over two decades old at this point, and the way to success was proven – marketable, good looking young lads, a team of hit writers, releases close together… 1D hit each of them. Little Things was released on the same day as their second album, Take Me Home, and both entered the chart at #1. It was a slightly unusual strategy to have not released the single a week or two before, and it would probably have had a better sales figure had it done so, but it worked anyway. It was their 5th release as a group, and perhaps surprisingly just their second chart topper. The lead single for the album, Live While We’re Young, underperformed somewhat, entering at #3 and being almost out of the top 40 by week 6. I do find Little Things to be a pleasant enough boyband ballad, but ultimately quite forgettable. It’s fine, and they sing and harmonise well, and not too bad lyrically, just that from a genre where I like few songs, but the ones I do I tend to love, it blends in with many other acts and songs. For a song which is so perfectly ‘dull but fine to listen to’, topping the bottom third of entries feels about right. It was an all-new top 3 on the week of release, it comfortably won the X-Factor boyband vs girlband battle as Little Mix 3rd single DNA entered at #3, split by the first single from another second album behemoth, Locked Out of Heaven by Bruno Mars. It perhaps unsurprisingly had the most longevity of the three with 10 weeks in the top 10, by which point Little Things and DNA had fallen to #36 & #65. Locked Out of Heaven is definitely my preferred track of the three, but not to the point where I’m a big fan or would still listen to it, it would only end up a few places higher here had it won out in that week.

01 (01) Mystery Jets - A Hole To See The Sky Through I (01) (08) (4 weeks) 02 (06) Pond - Skyworks (02) (05) 03 (11) Palace - Dream On (03) (03) 04 (04) Radio Free Alice - Lunch Money (04) (05) 05 (03) Paris Paloma - Stem the Flow (03) (07) 06 (02) Yard Act - Redeemer (02) (10) 07 (09) Modest Mouse - Life's A Dream (07) (04) 08 (05) Blossoms - Joke About Divorce (01) (12) (5 weeks) 09 (13) FKA Twigs feat. Lil Yachty - On Your Mind (09) (05) 10 (07) The Itch - No More Sprechgesang (05) (07) 11 (18) Olivia Rodrigo feat. Robert Smith - What's Wrong With Me (11) (04) 12 (15) Angine de Poitrine - Sarniezz (12) (04) 13 (08) Boards of Canada - Prophecy At 1420 MHz (02) (11) 14 (19) Touring feat. Holybones - Ten O'Clock (14) (06) 15 (21) Phoebe Bridgers - Lost Boys (15) (03) 16 (10) BALTHVS - Shakedown Street (02) (11) 17 (25) Tame Impala - Hummer (17) (03) 18 (12) Angine de Poitrine - Mata Zyklek (05) (13) 19 (28) Boy Harsher - Jeans (19) (02) 20 (14) Hercules & Love Affair feat. Hips & Lips - I Get High (14) (07) 21 (33) The Big Moon - Gravity (21) (02) 22 (16) Ed O'Brien - Teachers (12) (08) 23 (29) Nina Simone - That's All I Ask (HAAi Remix) (23) (03) 24 (35) Yard Act - New Beginnings (24) (02) 25 (17) Antony Szmierek - Chalk (06) (10) 26 (**) Overmono feat. John Joseph Holt - Knight In Shining Prada (26) (01) 27 (30) Gener8ion feat. Yannis - Love & Tears (27) (04) 28 (20) Man/Woman/Chainsaw - Nosedive (01) (13) (1 week) 29 (38) BALTHVS - Liminal Stages (29) (02) 30 (22) JJerome87 - Mr. Alligator (12) (07) 31 (24) Nia Archives - Boys In Blue (21) (09) 32 (23) The Maine - Quiet Part Loud (02) (11) 33 (32) Jon Hopkins feat. Imogen Heap - Reckoning (32) (03) 34 (47) The Temper Trap - Runaways (34) (01) 35 (31) The Coral - Leave It In The Past (26) (05) 36 (26) Overmono - Lockup (10) (09) 37 (27) Orseno feat. KennyHoopla - Past Love (17) (08) 38 (41) DMA's - Killing Time (38) (01) 39 (37) Austra feat. Patrick Holland - Siren Reprise (30) (06) 40 (34) Mystery Jets - Black Sage (08) (10)

26. Rita Ora – How We Do (Party) 1 week at #1 (entered 19th August) 01-02-03-09-15-20-24-33-38-48-62-73-53{-57R(7)-66} (15 weeks) Kept off #1: None Sales: 100,436 EOY: #50 I’ve already discussed Rita Ora here, as R.I.P. was a few places lower than this follow-up single, How We Do (Party), but repetition of acts in this countdown is low. For a year consisting of as many as 36 number ones, there are very few acts I need to cover more than once which I do find quite remarkable, but poor Rita is the first of the acts with multiple entries to appear a second time, however all is not lost as she is the only act I’ll need to cover for a third time. Mid-February, mid-May, and now mid-August. Entering the chart at #1 every three months is remarkable consistency and does take me back to a previous era where singles were evenly spaced out in a way which they no longer are. She went for the quad but Shine Ya Light only managed #10 in mid-November, not helped by it coming after the release of her debut album, Ora. There are definitely positives to How We Do (Party), I think the production is great and elevates it beyond the last few songs, and I like Rita’s voice a lot more here than on R.I.P., but lyrically it’s pretty dire and completely unoriginal for the 2012 landscape, four minutes of describing getting drunk and falling for someone at the previous night’s party was incredibly tired as a concept by then. The sample of Party and Bullshit by Notorious B.I.G. for the main hook feels unnecessary too. Not the best of starts to Rita’s solo career, but she would go on to improve – her other biggest hits that came a few years later, I Will Never Let You Down and Anywhere, are much better than all I heard from her debut album Ora.

That's interesting about the Mario song, always quite liked that. I did think with its similarity of title and style to some of Ne-Yo's work, whether some would expect to hear from "Ne-Yo - Let Me Love You..."

27. Ne-Yo – Let Me Love You (Until You Learn to Love Yourself) 1 week at #1 (entered 9th September) 01-03-04-05-12-13-18-22-29-29-41-50-57-68{-63R(3)-71 }(16 weeks) Kept off #1: None Sales: 88,784 EOY: #51 There were a number of songs in this list that I’d forgotten about, some of which were easy to remember and a select few that brought back no memory whatsoever, and this Ne-Yo entry certainly fits the latter of those two. It was his fourth entirely solo number one (as well as his feature on Pitbull's Give Me Everything), hitting the top spot every two years – following So Sick in 2006, Closer in 2008 and Beautiful Monster in 2010, but it feels like Let Me Love You (Until You Learn To Love Yourself) is comfortably the least memorable of them. Each of Ne-Yo’s #1 singles sound fairly different, with each definitely being more in tune with what were the current trends of the time, So Sick a decent enough R&B song, Closer his best effort that had moved style with the likes of Rihanna, and 2010s Beautiful Monster being more for the dancefloors with more of an EDM influence. Let Me Love You (Until You Learn To Love Yourself) is very much of the 2012 trends with another upbeat dancefloor hit, with influential producers Stargate involved along with Sia contributing to some of the lyrics, but perhaps coming a little late in the context of this type of song, as it just kind of exists, it doesn’t offend in any way but there’s nothing to help it standout from the plethora of other similar sounding hits, whereas his contribution to Pitbull’s Give Me Everything a year earlier helped it become one of the deserving smash hits of this period. Let Me… I’d rank as the weakest of his number one singles, entirely forgettable.

Will be interesting to see how different our tastes are, and how much similarity there is towards the top - interested to follow yours. The final number one of the year (between James Arthur's weeks) is not on streaming platforms, so could be the one you're missing?

28. Jessie J - Domino 2 weeks at #1 (entered 25th December 2012, #1 15th January) {54}-34-08-01-01-03-04-04-06-06-10-11-11-14-13-11-15-25-27-31-38-42-46-50-32-44-43-45-38-29-31-52-{75R(52)-66} (34 weeks) Kept off #1: Rizzle Kicks – Mama Do The Hump Sales: 57.369 & 64.255 EOY: #8 (749,000) Jessie J reached the top of the UK chart on three occasions from 2011-14, and Domino is by far the best of them, the others would have dropped out long before the 9th song in their respective years. Whilst this is nowhere near as objectionable as her other #1s and could quite feasibly have been ranked a few places higher, its low position here can largely be summed up by the following quote from my opening post: "I started working properly in April in an office job in which a high repeat radio station like Heart FM or something equally rancid was on ALL THE TIME. As a result there are definitely a couple of tracks here that appear lower than they might otherwise have had, due to the memories of hearing them minimum three times a day, Monday to Friday, every single week, for what felt like an eternity." Domino ended 2012 in the UK as the airplay #1, with 8,500 plays and 200,000 audience impressions more than the second placed song, which was also enough to make it #5 on the decade-to-date airplay chart too. It’s the type of song that was by an act that was new, fresh and young enough to be played on the likes of Radio 1 and Capital, but also pleasant and inoffensive enough to be lapped up by the likes of Heart, Magic and Radio 2 (I haven’t fact checked that it was playlisted by each of these, but easy to imagine it was given the stats). It was probably in my top 5 most heard songs of the year despite having never chosen to play it, with Moves Like Jagger and Adele (general) the other main offenders for heavy rotation on an office radio station. My stance on Domino has definitely softened over the years, as a pop song it’s fundamentally fine, but that chorus certainly did wear me down enough that I still recoil at hearing it. Its follow-up, Laserlight with David Guetta, is probably the only song of Jessie’s that I’d prefer to listen to now. But I generally had a dislike for Jessie J since she debuted with Do It Like a Dude; annoying voice, annoying songs, annoying hair, annoying personality whenever I saw her on TV. A singer I’m more than happy to forget about. A look at the chart history for Domino is like something from a bygone era when looking through the current lens of streaming, a song entering the chart in Christmas week, with only 12 Christmas songs in the 53 positions above it, before being one of a few genuinely new hits to mark the beginning of the year. In its second week at the top it held off Rizzle Kicks with Mama Do The Hump, they’re something of a blast from the past who were popular for a period in time, it was comfortably their biggest song as lead artist, and probably their best too. It ended the year inside the top 20 sellers of the year, #17 making it the 5th highest seller to not make the top, with four previous charting weeks in 2011 too, so unlucky to have not made it at any point, though as it was only ahead of Domino when they were both new and climbing the chart so it can’t be claimed it deserved to have made #1 ahead of Jessie.

29. Tulisa - Young 1 week at #1 (entered 6th May) 01-02-05-10-14-21-27-33-36-37-43-52-62 (13 weeks) Kept off #1: None Sales: 121,694 EOY: #43 One look at N-Dubz and I knew that I wasn’t in their target audience. I probably heard some of their songs in passing, but don’t particularly recognise any and certainly would never seek them out, they were reasonably successful without being massive so I did fortunately find them incredibly easy to ignore. The obvious counter to this was Number 1, them featuring on Tinchy Stryder’s number one hit in 2009, which was a decent song. It felt like N-Dubz would be a thing for a short period and then quickly disappear, but that’s not what happened at all as their main members went on to do other things successfully. In 2011 Dappy launched a solo career and got a UK number one, whilst Tulisa replaced Cheryl Cole as a judge on the X-Factor, mentoring eventual winners Little Mix in her debut year, and would return again in 2012. The increased exposure meant it was the perfect time to launch her own solo career, and Young would kick that off in May, backed up by a performance on Britain’s Got Talent’s semi-final week. The promotion and increase in profile worked and its debut sale of 121k was the second highest of the year at this point. Young is an innocuous party pop song, lyrics about being able to make mistakes while you’re young, set to a reasonable beat in part created by the third N-Dubz member, Fazer. Her voice is decent enough – it received Katy Perry comparisons which I kind of get – and it’s not particularly offensive. To repeat the phrase I’ve used in Will.i.am’s entry, it is pure 2012 Capital FM fodder, sounds a lot like many other songs of this period, deeply inoffensive dance-pop unlikely for the then me to care about enough to listen to, and certainly not for the current me to give any thought to Tulisa after completing this undertaking. Unfortunately for Tulisa, Young made no real lasting impact, it fell from the charts relatively quickly and has barely been listened to since. It was only when looking at this list of number ones that I remembered “oh yeah, Tulisa was A Thing”. Streams on Spotify aren’t a perfect measure of popularity as they can come from anywhere in the world, and this was very much limited to being a UK hit, but its total of 18.3 million streams seems low for a song that was #1 just before the streaming boom, and it ranks 34th of 35 (one song, yet to be revealed, is not on Spotify) in this list, comfortably ahead of Gary Barlow but with barely 50% of the total of the #33 rank. There was very little chart success for her after either, album The Female Boss only charted at #35 in the Autumn, while follow-up singles only reached #11 and #18, and that would be it for the top 40, until 2022 when N-Dubz made a comeback and Charmer snuck a week in, though to be fair it was a hugely hyped and massive tour they put on, and fair play to them, I certainly wouldn’t have imagined it was possible.

30. Rita Ora feat. Tinie Tempah – R.I.P. 2 weeks at #1 (entered 13th May) 01-01-04-08-12-15-20-26-24-26-34-36-42-48-69-47-23-33-54-55-65-75-74R(5) (23 weeks) Kept off #1: None Sales: 104,592 & 57,434 EOY: #28 (453,000) 2012 was certainly the year of Rita Ora, she’d risen to prominence featuring on a hit earlier this year (more on that one later), and on the back of that it was deemed the perfect time to launch her solo career, some four years after first being spotted and signed to Jay Z’s Roc Nation label. A cursory look at those involved in R.I.P. it was always obvious this was going to get the push required to be a big hit, even for a relative unknown singer – Drake, Tinie Tempah and Stargate were all involved, and its main producers were Chase & Status who had their own big breakthrough in the previous year. Despite the involvement of a number of acts I liked and had enjoyed a lot of their work previously, I was never taken in by R.I.P., it was rumoured to have been written for Rihanna (denied by Ora), and it does have a feel of Rihanna cast-off to it (the “I, I, I’m ready for ya” in the bridge even makes Ora sound like Rihanna is on backing vocals), it’s fine but there’s nothing in the lyrics, production or delivery that makes me sit up and take notice or want to return to. The rapper featuring on a pop song / pop chorus featuring on a rap song was a well-trodden path by now, and various combinations of rapper/pop(pier) act made up at least 15 UK number ones in 2010-12. Tinie Tempah was the chosen one here, and he’d benefitted previously with Eric Turner providing the excellent chorus on his own 2010 #1 Written In The Stars. In some of these, the combination works well, both involved complement each other brilliantly and the added rap/chorus is excellent. On others, the addition feels completely pointless and this is one of those – Tinie was a huge star by this point and deservedly so from that debut album, but he was phoning it in here – a poor rap some way short of what he’s capable of and the song didn’t need it – without it I’d have placed R.I.P. above the next two which are both just solo female hits. This wouldn’t be uncommon for him though, he’d have four more #1s and a further four that all peaked at least as high as #6, but his best work was all released in 2010 and 2011. R.I.P. didn’t stop anything else from reaching the top, the previous and next chart toppers were both at #2 during these weeks, but at #4 in both of these charts was Too Close by Alex Clare, which finished the year inside the top 20 sellers, with over 100k more sold than Rita and Tinie managed, and a song I’d have definitely been up for having swapped positions – not a huge favourite but a good song and a would be comfortable top half finish in this ranking.

Delighted that Spain got there in the end, the right outcome for the tournament, definitely the best team in it. Don't think it's been a vintage tournament, certainly towards the bottom end of the ones I've watched. Too bloated, poor knockout stage, FIFA worse than they've ever been.

31. Will.i.am feat. Eva Simons – This Is Love 1 week at #1 (entered 1st July) 01-03-03-04-09-14-11-23-29-35-40-52-60-72 (14 weeks) Kept off #1: None Sales: 102,320 EOY: #39 (403,000) It almost feels wrong placing this directly next to Payphone, however there ended the section of the completely terrible records, we now begin a run of largely inoffensive but completely generic songs which sound very of the time when listening back 14 years later, that I didn't care for then and definitely don't now. In between Maroon 5’s two weeks at the top, will.i.am. got to the summit, with Is This Love becoming his second #1 as a solo credit (he’d go on to have three more), and 7th overall following 5 with Black Eyed Peas. Most of these had come 2-3 years earlier, where the Peas were huge for a time and he featured on Usher’s OMG. Up until this point, most of his solo credits were appearing on other people’s songs, rather than his own, but that changed in 2012 and he’d have four solo top 3s, all with the helping hand of someone else. It kicked off with T.H.E (The Hardest Ever) in February with Mick Jagger and Jennifer Lopez, and continued in the summer with This Is Love, featuring Dutch vocalist Eva Simons, which entered at the top spot. Produced alongside two-thirds of Swedish House Mafia, Steve Angello and Sebastian Ingrosso, you can tell their influence early on from the first instrumental drop and then the rest of the song – it sounds very SHM and that’s definitely the best part of the song, but even then they were capable of so much better. Will.i.am sounds quite poor which I often thought he had done in previous hits too, the lyrics are nothing to get excited about, generic descriptions of love and the song largely passes by without especially enjoying any of it but without hating it either, it is in effect the ultimate 2012 Capital FM fodder. Eva Simons was the singer to provide additional vocals to this and delivers the chorus, and fair play to Will for reaching out to a relative unknown to be part of this, given he was a superstar at the time and would attract fellow worldwide stars to appear on many of his other singles, though she wasn’t the complete unknown to BuzzJack prior to this – her song Silly Boy had comfortably won an edition of BuzzJack Song Contest and become one of many posters top discoveries from the contest. Her part is fine, but is just typical of the song really – it could be absolutely anyone singing it, and whilst there’s nothing especially wrong with a dull and repetitive chorus, “can you feel the love” “this is love, this is love, this is love” doesn’t really add anything to the song. This may not have appeared in the radio/video edits, but listening to the full version it should finish 30 seconds earlier – it sounds like it’s reached a natural ending but then begins again as Simons repeats “Can you feel the love” for the remainder and is completely unnecessary to be kind, but in reality rather annoying.

32. Maroon 5 feat. Wiz Khalifa - Payphone 2 weeks at #1 (entered 24th June) 01-02-01-02-02-02-04-06-12-14-18-20-25-29-25-28-34-40-43-44-54-66-44R(6){-61} (24 weeks) Kept off #1: Chris Brown – Don’t Wake Me Up Sales: 141,410 & 73,998 EOY: #9 (725,000) It felt like Maroon 5 had been and gone after their initial 2004 flourish with the Songs About Jane album and follow-ups that didn’t hit the same commercial or quality highs, but then they had the surprise smash hit of 2011 with Moves Like Jagger alongside Christina Aguilera, who I’d also have said was past that level of smash hit. It was completely unavoidable and ended the year as the UK’s second highest selling single. They were fully back in the public eye around the globe, and a brand new single was always likely to have huge exposure and a great chance of being massively successful, and so came to pass with Payphone, its sales tally as it entered at the top was only bettered four times over the year. You could tell it was a likely entry at the top, as in the previous week’s chart Precision Tunes were at #9 with their version of it, going back to the days when fake cover versions would chart from time to time whilst official releases were held back for so long. I thought Maroon 5 were alright in their early days. Harder To Breathe was a decent hit, This Love was a good song which showed their poppier side, She Will Be Loved is absolutely fine for the soppy MoR ballad that it is, I’d completely tired of Moves Like Jagger due to how much I’d heard it, but I did enjoy it a lot for a time and it was hard to disagree with it being the success that it was, however there’s always been a lingering problem with Maroon 5, and it’s that Adam Levine has a voice that can be really whiny and grating. And it doesn’t come more whiny and grating than on Payphone, kicking off with the worst intro since Nickelback’s Rockstar, immediately launching into “I’m at a payyyyyyyphone….” before you’ve had any chance to reach for the skip, volume or off buttons. There’s an element of Maroon 5 evolving over the years and Payphone is a song which was very in keeping with the pop sound of the early 2010s, it’s very radio friendly but ultimately quite boring and just plods along, but while feeling like it’s annoyingly sung. If this song was simply “Maroon 5 – Payphone” it’d be slightly less objectionable, but it isn’t… To prove the point that Payphone was in keeping with the sound of the early 2010s, the featured ‘rent-a-rapper’ verse on a pop song had become a popular thing over the previous few years, and few, if any, are as poor and pointless as Wiz Khalifa’s addition to this record. As the final verse it comes far too late in the song to make any impact, feels like it took minimal effort to write and record, a useless and terrible addition to make a poor song worse, I just don’t get why a super radio friendly band with a super radio friendly hit needed this inclusion other than it was the ‘in’ thing. I’ll end this on something positive to say about this song; as it returned to #1 for a second week at the top, it stopped Chris Brown from having a second number one single in 2012.

33. James Arthur - Impossible 1 week at #1 (in 2012) (entered 16th December) 01-02-01-{01-03-07-09-11-14-19-29-34-39-43-50-42-48-75-58R(30)} (19 weeks) Kept off #1: will.i.am feat. Britney Spears – Scream & Shout Sales: 489,560 EOY: #5 (897,000) The X-Factor winners single has become common in the bottom few positions of these rank countdowns, and 2012 is no different. This time, it was the turn of James Arthur, who beat Jamene Douglas and Christopher Maloney in the final. I’d never cared too much for X-Factor or its predecessor talent shows, as I found them all quite forced and I was rarely bothered about the type of music and singer that were pushed on the shows. I paid slightly more attention in the 2007-11 uni years but not to the point where I actively followed it. By 2012, I was back living with my parents who also couldn’t have cared less about this type of show, so it was never on and I was full on ignoring it by this point. I can’t say I recall the names of either of the other finalists, and a quick Polyhex search would suggest neither amounted to anything, a significantly weaker than usual final. But maybe it was just luck of the TV voting audience vs single buying public, as Union J, Ella Henderson and Lucy Spraggan all had some form of post-show success and career and I recognise who they were. Rylan too of course, but nothing to do with his singing abilities. The single itself is a cover (obviously) of Shontelle’s #9 hit Impossible from just a couple of years previous. The original was fine, passable R&B I’m happy to hear but would never actively listen to. Arthur’s version is comfortably weaker, sounds exceptionally TV talent show by numbers, the kind of thing that brings to mind some youth in tight jeans and a half-unbuttoned shirt oversinging with his acoustic guitar. Not the worst X-Factor winner single, but I'd definitely have it towards the bottom of the 9 there had been by this point. My biggest blind spot in following the charts and popular music is from mid-2015 to COVID. I'd noticed in the year prior to that there was a real lack of anything I was interested in being successful (from mid '14 to mid '15 I'd have Uptown Funk as the second best #1 and I don't even like it). I moved into my own flat in May 2015, was much busier in life and ended up spending hardly any time on this site anymore which continued for a while, and when I did it wasn't in the UK chart forum, so the charts and what was popular became easy to ignore. There are loads of big hits and number one singles that I wouldn’t be able to recognise or know happened – wtf is a Rachel Platten, a Lukas Graham, or a Lil Dicky – so I’m quite surprised to learn that James Arthur didn’t disappear without a trace but was (and maybe is?) really popular, a run of hits almost perfectly coinciding with this time period. Impossible has over a billion streams on Spotify which is about a billion more than I’d expect, and he has multiple others that hit that mark. Listening to his other number one now for the first time, 2016s Say You Won’t Let Go, it feels like a complete non-entity of a song and shows why I began to pay no attention to what was happening. Impossible held will.i.am and Britney Spears off the top with Scream & Shout, although it would go on to replace it in 2013. Post-2009 Black Eyed Peas success, it felt like will.i.am was continuously releasing some over-autotuned dirge, and whilst I don’t consider this particularly different it is at least better than almost everything else he was involved in as a solo artist, and Britney’s contribution definitely made it better.

Enjoyable to read everyone's comments, assumed these two would be more popular being placed towards the bottom. I can see why Turn Up The Music would've been a guess as a non #1, but I was more thinking of an act as well as the song for that! Also intrigued as to what @Iz様 🌟 thinks might be low that needs defending!

34. Chris Brown – Turn Up The Music 1 week at #1 (entered 1st April) 01-05-09-20-23-19-19-36-52-67-61R(5) (11 weeks) Kept off #1: Sean Paul – She Doesn’t Mind Sales: 83,777 EOY: #79 Occasionally, there are events that happen that make me weep for humanity. The continued successful career of Chris Brown following his pleading guilty to assaulting his then girlfriend Rihanna, and we’d all seen the pictures, is one of those events. To still have such significant promotion, and such a large fanbase, predominantly of younger women, is wholly disappointing. He’s not someone who’s music and career I’d have likely followed much anyway, as his style of music at its best is what I find ok or passable, but given who he is it’s a career I’ve actively avoided. As such, it’s quite frustrating to see he has 74 separate UK chart entries and has charted in 19 of the last 20 years. As for the Turn Up The Music itself, I think even if it had been performed by one of Brown’s contemporaries, a Ne-Yo or Usher for example, it’s hard to imagine that it wouldn’t still be taking a place in the bottom 5 here. It is typical of the trend which had been so prominent in the previous couple of years, a highly generic electronic-dance-pop-r&b club song, a David Guetta-fication of popular music mashing various genres together. A couple of years earlier this type of sound was everywhere and still sounded relatively fresh, even the most generic were still ok (jealous of Iz getting to be so positive so early in his 2010 countdown), whereas by 2012 it felt like performers and producers were phoning it in (“If you’re sexy and you know it, put your hands up in the air” – that’s quality there, Chris and the nine other men it took to write this). Sadly, plenty of this was still hitting the top of the chart. If Chris Brown had to get a number one single then it’s a shame it had to be with this dross (or maybe it’s not and it’s fitting?!), his biggest hits tended to be a lot better, and much more popular songs and I could at least understand their popularity. Even within 2012 follow-up Don’t Wake Me Up was much less objectionable as a song and finished the year 42 places higher in the best sellers of the year list. Of the 36 songs to reach number one in 2012, Turn Up The Music was the one that sold the least come the end of the year, which is something positive to share at least. The song it held off was another unlucky number two single, She Doesn’t Mind by Sean Paul spent three weeks at #2, behind three different songs, this was the second of those weeks. Sean Paul had a string of successful hits almost a decade earlier, seven consecutive singles from Gimme The Light in 2003 peaking at #5, #4, #1, #3, #2, #6, #2 over the next couple of years, but hadn’t managed to hit those highs since, #11 being the highest he reached in both 2006 & 2011, so She Doesn’t Mind became his biggest hit in a few years. It’s a good effort to bring the standard Sean Paul reggae to the early 2010s club banger sound – a decent mish-mash of the 2 – certainly preferable to the first 2 of the three songs that held it off the top spot, but nothing amazing, probably landing just shy of the top half here if it had snuck a week at the top.