In early 2010, A.V. Club writer Nathan Rabin decided to listen to and write about the bestselling, zeitgeist-friendly CD series NOW That’s What I Call Music! in chronological order. Each one of the 33 American NOW! collections compiles a cross-section of recent hits from across the musical spectrum. Beginning with the first entry from 1998, this column will examine what the series says about the evolution and de-evolution of pop music.
- “Get The Party Started/Sweet Dreams,” Pink featuring Redman
- “I’m A Slave 4 U,” Britney Spears
- “Family Affair,” Mary J. Blige
- “Whenever, Wherever,” Shakira
- “Ain’t It Funny,” Jennifer Lopez
- “Livin’ It Up,” Ja Rule featuring Case
- “Rollout (My Business),” Ludacris
- “Lights, Camera, Action!” Mr. Cheeks
- “Raise it Up (All Cities Remix),” Petey Pablo
- “Caramel (Remix),” City High
- “Turn Off The Light,” Nelly Furtado
- “Gone,” ’N Sync
- “Emotion,” Destiny’s Child
- “Differences,” Ginuwine
- “Drowning,” Backstreet Boys
- “Stuck In A Moment You Can’t Get Out Of,” U2
- “Just Push Play,” Aerosmith
- “Dig In,” Lenny Kravitz
- “Wish You Were Here,” Incubus
- “Giving In,” Adema
When we first encountered Britney Spears, the first lady and plastic soul of the NOW That’s What I Call Music! series, she was in a sorry state. She lingered on the precipice of loneliness-induced death. Then she spied a vision of her own tabloid future in “Lucky” before proudly proclaiming in “Stronger” that she was stronger than yesterday, everything was going her way, and her loneliness wasn’t killing her anymore.
On “I’m A Slave 4 U,” her steamy contribution to the ninth installment of the NOW! series, she stops playing the wide-eyed coquette and embraces her inner porn star. Spears has worked the virgin-whore paradigm like no one since Madonna, but on “I’m A Slave 4 U,” she tosses the “virgin” part of the equation out like a stripper’s discarded pasties. “I’m A Slave 4 U” sounds like sex. In the liner notes for Phrenology, ?uestlove quoted Nelly Furtado saying that “Pussy Galore” sounded like walking through a Thai whorehouse barefoot, a description equally applicable here. Spears was playing the same coy game of double entendres and inference, but the sexual nature of her music was becoming impossible to deny.
In case there’s any doubt that Spears is whispering, in a breathy, teasing post-coital coo, about dirty, dirty fucking rather than an innocent night on the dance floor, the music video lingers on her sweaty, ripe flesh as she grinds through her trademark stripperoebics. Spears’ performance of the song at the MTV Music Awards goes even further; the overarching theme of her indifferently lip-synced turn seemed to be “omnisexual fuckfest at Poison Ivy’s lair.” Animal-rights activists complained about the use of jungle animals as background props and the widespread abuse of trouser snakes Spears’ performance provoked. “I’m A Slave 4 U” threw down the gauntlet. She was not a girl and not yet a woman, but she sure wasn’t a wide-eyed innocent anymore.
Fellow diva Pink began her career as a white R&B singer with punk-rock attitude and a big, black voice. In a world of interchangeable pop tarts, Pink was a shit-starter more interested in putting would-be Casanovas in their place than pining for dream dates. In her single “Don’t Let Me Get Me,” Pink complains, “L.A. [Reid, chairman of Jive] told me, ‘You’ll be a pop star / All you’ve got to change is all that you are.” Then she bitches about being compared to Britney Spears.
The sass-mouthed youngster became a pop star on her own terms, but “Get The Party Started/Sweet Dreams,” her contribution to the ninth volume of NOW!, is about as commercial as pop music gets, a fist-pumping, party-starting anthem awash in bratty attitude (or brattitude, as the Bratz might put it) and swagger. Rockwilder’s remix fuses “Get The Party Started (I’m Coming Out)” with another hit, the Eurythmics’ “Sweet Dreams,” and adds an “urban,” “street,” “black” element courtesy of Redman, who won my heart forever for the following reasons:
- He’s consistently awesome
- He was the subject of the best Cribs episode ever, a subversive exercise in reverse wish-fulfillment, where he showed MTV his incredibly nondescript New Jersey home, a shambles where the doorbell only works if you push two wires together, and some random dude is perpetually asleep on the couch
- When I interviewed him a few years back, he shared his unusual strategy for developing a grassroots following: going to random bars and buying strangers Heinekens. That way, they’d always remember the night Redman came into the bar and bought them a beer, and they’ll also hopefully purchase all his subsequent albums. The sales of his latest releases suggest it didn’t work as planned, but he gave barflies across this great nation a story for the ages.
Under the tutelage of the artist formerly known as Puff Daddy, Mary J. Blige cultivated a winning persona as a round-the-way girl with brass knuckles in her back pockets and serious anger-management issues. She was R&B’s Queen Of Pain, but on the irresistible Dr. Dre-produced “Family Affair,” she exudes pure joy. But Blige’s greatest contribution to our culture lies in the seismic change in dance-floor politics she instigated. Before “Family Affair,” there was a widespread consensus that the club was the perfect place for hateration and holleration. Then Blige revolutionarily declared that there was no need for either in this dancery. Hateration and holleration fell out of fashion overnight, while incidences of partiers getting crunk because Mary’s back increased sevenfold.