1999 Westlife: Flying Without Wings

'If it ain't broke, don't fix it' as they say, and that's certainly a reliable tenet to live by as far as Westlife are concerned; 'Flying Without Wings' is another chunk of soft rock balladry, though perhaps it's fairer to say it's more refined from the wailing excesses of the past rather than 'fixed'. Too refined maybe - for me, 'Flying Without Wings' is a piece better suited to older lungs. A Joe Cocker or a Bette Midler could bring a certain Rushmore gravitas to the proceedings to take the edge off the song's spiralling and predictable passage from hushed opening to hand wringing finale. In the hands of Westlife, it feels like trying to deal with the policeman who turns up to investigate your burglary when he's thirty years younger than yourself; it doesn't feel 'right' does it? Which means that whilst 'Flying Without Wings' is a decent enough example of what it is, Westlife themselves add nothing to the mix and instead let themselves be carried along by a bluster that's probably best accompanied by a montage of inspirational video clips of tearful people hugging. By itself, it kind of leaves me cold.

1999 Christina Aguilera: Genie In A Bottle

There are those among us old enough to remember when it were all green fields around here. For myself, I'm old enough to remember when Christina Aguilera was marketed as the girl next door type. I guess she still is, as long as you happen to live next door to a strip club, but even if she wasn't parading around in school uniform in 1999, the seeds of her more….liberal…. future were already being sown; 'Genie In A Bottle' is no less sexually suggestive/exploitative in its innuendo-laced painting of the young Aguilera as a virginal bottle fizzing with pent up hormones just waiting for someone to pop her cork. You just have to rub her the right way. Apparently.

But apart from seeing Aguilera all fresh faced and not tarted up in some burlesque/S&M dominatrix outfit and wailing about how ‘Dirrty’ she is, the biggest surprise I now get from 'Genie In A Bottle' is, well, just how dull it sounds. Which isn’t the song’s fault per se - since 2001, I've become far more au-fait with The Strokes Vs Christina Aguilera mash-up creation that pastes Aguilera's original ‘Genie’ vocal directly onto the backing to The Stroke's 'Hard To Explain' to create 'A Stroke Of Genius', an inspired match whose spark and crackle trumps the jaded derivation of its component parts.

Because in giving it the rock setting of The Strokes' guitars, Aguilera's low moan of a vocal gets charged with the mischievous longing of a woman dying for her bottle to be rubbed. The match is so 'right' that Aguilera genuinely sounds like she's singing a different song to the limp pop/R&B stylings that carry this 1999 original and which provide an environment for her not to care less in to the point that it's tempting to think the backing had deliberately been switched by some moral crusaders, intent on protecting her virtue by sabotaging the sexual frission her vocal sparks when it strikes against a harder surface.

And that's a shame, because at least that context gives the lyric a certain 'grown up' legitimacy (instead of fuelling some teen sex male fantasy) and would keep it away from the impressionable young teens that were her audience. 'Genie In A Bottle' remains a solid entry in her back catalogue, but this is pop not so much with an edge as pop spiked with rohypnol and passed to the unwitting. And once the dust from the stockings, bras, basques, high cut pants and low cut tops has settled, it's probably one of the dirrrtiest things she's ever done. But not in a good way.

1999 Eiffel 65: Blue (Da Ba Dee)

If, in some super museum of the future, there should be a need for a single exhibit to epitomise popular Western music in the nineties, they could do worse that stick 'Blue (Da Ba Dee)' on a plinth under glass. Which may seem a bold statement, but to my ears it's a mish mash of styles and traits that have dominated the sounds of the last ten years. For a start, it's another Europop single (and we all know by now how popular that genre has been), which means it also ticks the ever popular 'dance' box too, so two birds, one stone.

Crucially though, the nod to dance isn't just token - 'Blue (Da Ba Dee)' is more subtle than the overt, crayon bright thump of (for example) 'Barbie Girl' and it threads its pop hook on a credible, trance-like beat and piano loop that would only be unwelcome in the 'cool clubs' through an innate snobbishness. Add in some vocoder treated voices babbling a semi-rapped nonsense lyric that lead into a chorus of monstrous catchiness and you have an artefact that, by summing up everything it ever did or could stand for in three and a half minutes, at a stroke makes ten years of Eurodancebubblegum pop redundant. Which kind of makes it a pity I've had to suffer ten years worth of some awful stepping stone singles when the journey could have been a single simple ladder climb/snake slide (depending on your viewpoint) to get to this point.* Oh, and they're all blokes too and so technically a boyband to boot. See? The nineties in a bottle.


*But apart from that, two other things spoil 'Blue (Da Ba Dee)' for me:

1. That it wasn't actually the last number one of the decade (because how fitting would that have been eh?).

2. That Eiffel 65 saw fit to follow it up with the disturbingly similar yet not one tenth as much fun 'Move Your Body' in 2000, a move that, at a stroke, destroyed their aura of fluky, one hit wonder genius.

1999 Vengaboys: We're Going To Ibiza

A re-tooled cover version of Typically Tropical's 197? hit 'Barbados', Vengaboys strip out all the racial stereotyping of the original that furrowed my brow, switch the Caribbean destination for the Balearics and concentrate solely on the arms in the air chorus. Perhaps it concentrates a bit too much - the original at least had a story of sorts underpinning the nonsense (bus driver longs to escape the rain and head home to the sun), but in celebrating Ibiza for itself (i.e. as the clubber's destination of choice) it both underestimates and misunderstands the original to serve up a flattened cover of no discernable personality (though bizarrely, it keeps in the "I don't wanna be a bus driver all my life" line - just how long were they intending to stay?).

Being Europop, then perhaps it doesn't need to do any more to succeed, and to be honest I'd have a lot more time for this had the tune been original. But it's not, and the appropriation of Ibiza (or, as Kim Sasabone sings it, 'Eebitza') as a generic, one stop shop representation of hedonistic dance culture is lazy. Bad enough by itself, but then selling it as such to suburban office workers on a rainy Friday night at their local 'nightspot' is as patronising as Kay Starr taking the piss out of her square parents for trying to dance to the new fangled rock and roll they were clueless about. Cultural gap/generational gap - somebody here doesn't have a clue either, but I fear this time the joke is on the listener. If only they knew it.

1999 Lou Bega: Mambo No. 5

Of course, if we're going to be talking about popular, mainstream Latin music, then they don't come much bigger than Perez Prado, Cuban bandleader and 'King Of The Mambo'. Bega's 'Mambo No 5' takes it's title and central rhythm (via much sampling) from Prado's own 1949 dance tune. It's all credit to Prado that his piece still sounds contemporary, though Bega (who was actually German) helps by coating it with an extra layer of bright Europop and adding a lyric that's equal part nonsense party games ("Jump up and down and move it all around. Shake your head to the sound put your hands an the ground") and equal part a tongue in cheek celebration of his love of the ladies ("A little bit of Monica in my life" etc etc). In Bega's hands, 'Mambo No 5" is a brash burst of colour that maintains enough of its Cuban origins to provide a sheen of authenticity to something that would otherwise be pretty throwaway. But I guess when you have the good fortune to be following Halliwell then anybody would be hard pressed to come up with something less enjoyable.

1999 Geri Halliwell: Mi Chico Latino

Another passenger on that creaking Latin bandwagon, ex Spice Girl Geri takes the soft option with a release sounding not unlike a 'La Isla Bonita' demo, complete with an arthritic grind in place of Madonna's dance swish and a frying pan flat groan of a vocal that rings as genuinely Italian as a Poundstretcher pizza. The Mediterranean flavour gives our Geri excuse enough to writhe around in a bikini on a boat in the video, but honestly, Halliwell and her "I've got a secret, I cannot keep it. It's just a whisper of a distant memory" are about as much fun as stepping barefoot in dogshit.

1999 Westlife: If I Let You Go

When considering boybands, the usual pithy comment/complaint that emerges is that they're interchangeable and 'all sound the same'. I have some sympathy with this, largely because it's true, but to date at least Westlife have bucked the trend by offering up something a bit different than the usual same old. Different for boybands anyway - first number one 'Swear It Again' was a dense slab of Wagnerian handwringing, and though 'If I let You Go' takes a step back from that angsty abyss, it doesn't take a huge one; the choppy indie-like opening gives way to another mini Meat Loaf blast of histrionics as the guys agonise over weighing in the balance whether a long distance relationship or unrequited love from afar is worth the candle. One of those two anyway - the exact meaning of 'If I Let You Go' is obscure save a general idea that there are some tough choices to be made in the name of love. Or maybe even more - does the "And once again I´m thinking about taking the easy way out" refer to suicide I wonder?

Probably not, but it all adds to the weighty pot that's been Westlife's stock in trade to date, the sound of a band walking the line between pop bunnies and rock pigs and unsure of which side of it to fall. 'If I Let You Go' is a mini operetta of a song, one that seems more suited as a linking narrative of a show and it's something I can easily imagine a Bon Jovi or a Bryan Adams cranking out in a stadium. Five more of either of that pair is hardly what the world is waiting for then or now, but what would be predictability personified in their hands becomes a slightly more interesting proposition in West. Only slightly mind - for all its fancy pants production and huge key changes, 'If I Let You Go' is still MOR/AOR fayre that gets dull very, very quickly.