clue me in, hipsters ptII
The Guardian newspaper website has run an article about how a pop single has been at the top of the UK pop charts for a record breaking 19 weeks, yet a large contingent of people in the UK claim not to have heard it.
The single in question is by Sam Fender and Olivia Dean and is called Rein Me In.
I'm one of those people who have not heard this song, so I just fired up YouTube and gave it a listen. It's a pleasant enough, guitar-driven, mid-paced song with impassioned vocals about a breakup or lost love or something.
The same chord sequence runs throughout - which kind of limits my enjoyment (I like my music a bit more adventurous and creative). It's over 5 minutes long and, honestly, by the fourth minute you've basically heard all you need to hear.
Looking at the credits, unusually for a modern pop song there's only one writer (Sam Fender), there are 4 musicians (plus Olivia Dean on vocals) but - more bafflingly - there are FIFTEEN ENGINEERS AND PRODUCERS credited.
That's blown my mind.
FIFTEEN.
I don't want to again be all "Old Man Yells At Cloud" here, but it's not Bohemian Rhapsody; featuring a dizzying array of multiple sections of thickly layered, multi-tracked operatic vocals knitted together to form a coherent piece; it's a repeated four bar loop of guitars and keyboards with vocals on top. Fuck, Sergeant Pepper was produced and engineered by George Martin and Geoff Emerick - TWO OLD BLOKES (and some studio tech guys/tape ops I guess). Pet Sounds was produced by Brian Wilson from his mind, just one fella (and a mountain of drugs - allegedly).
How can something so unadventurously, inoffensively, repetitively innocuous require 15 producers and engineers?
My guess is that they are mates of Sam Fender and Olivia Dean and maybe thay wanted to help them out financially with producer/engineer credits, or just pals they wanted to do something nice for.
Anyway. It's baffling that this has been 18 weeks at number one. Utterly baffling. Mainly because it's so beige - it's a musical magnolia painted wall. It's a blank sheet of paper.
Everything I Do I Do It For You and Love Is All Around stuck at number one for weeks because they were linked to Major Motion Picture Events. But this song? It's just a song. A song that's just there for 5+ minutes.
This is not even an old man saying "modern music is just a noise" here. This is an old man saying "how the hell is something this innocuous so successful?"
Honestly, I don't hate the song, I actually like the guitars on it, it's not bad. It's just not good, though. I just don't see the star quality in it that has sent it to the top of the charts.
The answer lies how the charts are run these days. No longer dependant on physical sales of 7 inch discs, internet streams are now taken into account and, according to that Guardian article, 60,000 streams can get you to number one.
So +60,000 people a week for nearly 20 weeks have been streaming this song. That's incredible.