“Answer? I hardly know ‘er!” – hard not to feel for Eamon having his hit both confirmed as a novelty so immediately and gazumped so effectively. Whether Frankee and Eamon were exes or strangers before their tracks came out hardly matters – they are now linked forever in a union stronger than any marriage, the bond of pub quiz trivia. What is the only answer record to replace its original at Number One? “F.U.R.B.”, come on down.
“Two sides to every story”, Frankee mutters before launching into a track that’s far more vicious than Eamon’s original. She’s summing up the primal appeal of the answer record as a concept – it’s a way for the implied voices of pop songs to speak up and set matters straight. And the way society and the industry were in the heyday of the answer disc, that often meant women getting an opportunity to turn the tables on men: the more pious or self-righteous the man, the more delicious it is to hear that opportunity taken.
That was the promise of the answer record – at its best, it could be a conduit for the unheard, breaking open another song and putting it to a kind of trial by imitation. But that best was rare. Like a newspaper corrections column, the answer record’s right of reply was generally a far smaller deal than the original. With few exceptions, even good answer songs are intriguing footnotes to a classic tune, and plenty are as pointless as an explained joke. A track like Dodie Stevens’ “Yes I’m Lonesome Tonight” did exactly what it promised but it was at least beautifully sung. But there’s no real excuse for the redoubtable Connie Francis’ “Should I Tie A Yellow Ribbon To The Old Oak Tree?” (No, Connie, you should not).
Frankee could have continued this spare-wheel tradition. On paper that is all she does – “F.U.R.B.” is as blatant a cash-in as any 50s or 60s reply song. It infuriated plenty of chart-watchers, including Chris Moyles, a man who knew a thing or two about unnecessary joke records (as proved when he recorded a “F**k It” parody himself). But on record, “F.U.R.B.” does something else. Frankee pushes herself into and through the original song, not just correcting Eamon’s story but rewriting it. Like a crass 00s cousin of the assorted “Roxanne” hip-hop tracks 20 years earlier, “F.U.R.B.” becomes an inextricable part of “F**k It”, the scorned yin to its whinging yang. If you liked – or detested – one, chances were you’d feel the same about the other.
Or would you? “F.U.R.B.”’s success is partly down to its proximity to Eamon, but it’s also, for me, a better track. It’s cheaper and nastier, but in this context those are good things – they mean Frankee lands its blows harder, and those blows are more brutal. Eamon’s song treats his ex as an irrelevance: the specifics of their relationship are so much chaff. But Frankee’s below-the-belt counterpunch is all about the specifics, the particular inadequacies of Eamon’s sexual performance. Very mean given it was likely all invented, but it makes for a much spikier, more direct song.
It’s not just the venom making “F.U.R.B.” feel that way, too. “F**k It” sounds like a new jack R&B tune given a four-letter update. But because it’s cheaper, the production on “F.U.R.B.” accidentally looks forward, not back, its more prominent hi-hats reminding me of 2010s trap records more than anything 90s.
But in the end, the battle was always going to come down to one simple question. Who’s better at swearing? And the way Frankee gobs out the word “fuck” every time she reaches it puts her well ahead, making poor Eamon sound like he’s trying it on for size. Sure, it’s all a put-on, and after seven weeks of this drama you’d be forgiven for wanting them both to F right off – but “F.U.R.B.” enjoys its nastiness so much I can’t help but like it.
Score: 6
[Logged in users can award their own score]
‘Uptown Top Ranking’ was also a superior answer record to ‘Three Piece Suit’ by Trinity – to the extent that the latter is now an obscure footnote to A&D’s Number 1
A mildly amusing novelty, but not much more. It’s not even much of a rebuttal – the crux of her argument seems to be that he’s crap in bed, therefore she’s justified in cheating on him. “It was your fault somehow” suggests she knows she’s in the wrong. 3/10.
It’s worth noting that this period saw the unleashing of a chart monster. In Frankee’s third week at the top, a song by a little-known US indie band made an unassuming debut at #10 before dropping down the chart over the next few weeks.
That song is still in the top 100 now. It is of course Mr Brightside, which has so far racked up 350 weeks in the top 100, miles ahead of its nearest competitor (an Ed Sheeran song) and seems destined to never leave.
I’m sure there’ll be later points where the impact on the charts of downloads and then streaming can be discussed more appropriately, but for now I’ll say that, as overplayed as it is, Mr Brightside is still a great tune.
An acronym(?) that spells out into an initialism.
At almost two decades’ distance it’s tempting to chalk the whole Eamon/Frankee thing up as adding to the gaiety of nations and examine it no further. And I certainly bear no resentment towards Frankee’s act of canny glory-hopping – that’s pop music, baby! Hooray!
Almost two decades’ distance make the sexual stereotyping across both records rather less cheerful. Women who don’t do what their men want are defiled and deserve aggression; men who show emotion are sexually inadequate and deserve mockery. That’s pop music, baby. Hooray.
Narcissism of small differences time:
Plus points – the spoken-word “you know there are two sides to every story”, the metafictional first verse, “I had better sex all alone”
Minus points – “crying like a bitch”, the synth stabs that seem to be from an entirely different record, “yo”
Comedy points – the surely deliberately unconvincing “your fault somehow”, the even less convincing Eamon ‘lookalike’ in the video, “you must be smoking crack”
My inclination is to disagree with Tom and call it a score draw. But he is right about the swearing.
I discovered this blog during the first lockdown, and I’ve been really enjoying it. It’s a little odd maybe that I comment for the first time on a week a number 1 that I dislike is featured, but I clearly remember its release in 2004 because it was a very happy time for me. One of the reasons was because I bought my first car in mid-May 2004, and I spent the spring and summer driving around Dublin with the radio on. This song was on Irish radio constantly at that time, so even the mention of this song brings me back to that happy summer.
But there’s two things I find really interesting about this particular song. Firstly, the story about she knew Eamon seemed to change constantly. At the beginning, we were told she was his ex and she was the girl he was singing about in F** k It. The story changed shortly after, and we were told she was a secretary at Eamon’s record company and he had discovered her. Some time later, it changed again, and apparently she attended a casting session by the record company and Eamon chose her as the best person to sing the answer song. Finally, Eamon admitted that his only involvement was clearing the use of his music, and that they’d never actually met.
Secondly, Frankee is interesting because she’s a “pure” one-hit wonder, in that she never had another charting song. Most one-hit wonders manage to follow up their massive hit with another charting song, though it might have only charted at number 38 or 49 or 75. Frankee never again appeared on the charts. In fact, I even recall it being mentioned a few times that she never even released another song, though Wikipedia (never reliable admittedly) says she did, a song called “How You Do” in 2004 and “Watch Me” in 2006.
Making your chart debut at number 1 but never again charting is something you link with novelty hits, but since Frankee did release an album (The Good, The Bad, The Ugly) suggests there were hopes she’d stick around. Perhaps a bit like Eamon, she never realised that she really was just a novelty hit.
I’d thoroughly hope that a young woman who lets her record label launch her with a parody response version of a novelty hit, with bad-sex jokes and gimmicky swearing, committing her first-person self to the persona of a character in a stranger’s song, is aware she’s gunning for a novelty hit.
just noticed the tracklist on Frankee’s album reads as a skit – link in my name
Evening everyone. To agree with Tinkertrain, a mildly amusing novelty, I think is a spot on assessment. I must admit the “your sex was wack” and “I’m glad I didn’t catch your crabs” lines raised juvenile chuckles in me! I’m tempted with Flahr’s score draw analysis, even though I think I slightly prefer Frankee’s effort if I had to choose….but neverthless 4/10 for both imho. Welcome aboard to jdsworld (#5).
#5 – the story-shifting does ultimately gift us with Eamon stating “I welcome her to my world of ho-wop!” so, on balance, a positive for global net happiness.
I may be wrong here (in all honesty I didn’t much care then or now) but a big part of the selling point for F.U.R.B was the enigma of whether Frankee was Eamon’s actual girlfriend or not. While the record was hitting big we were led to believe she was but it turned out she wasn’t. It’s also worth noting that Eamon could have easily killed this track had he wanted to but he chose to double his money instead with the royalties. Eamon’s subsequent career could have gone either way – some seemingly apparent one hit wonders have surprised us but he ultimately didn’t. Frankee was always going to be a one hit wonder.
A note on “answer” songs. There were earlier precedents as commentators have pointed out but the previous example within hip hop was the minor hit No Pigeons by Sporty Thievz which rebutted TLC’s No Scrubs from the male perspective but this was the point where it became a minor craze. I’ll save further discussion for the next bunny along which also had a (non bunnied) answer song.
Call me a tinfoil hat conspiracy theorist, but I absolutely 100% believe that Eamon and Frankee staged this whole thing.
It’s too perfect. What are the odds that Eamon’s ex girlfriend would also be a musician, and in a position (with a major label deal) to rush a song to market before the craze died down? And if she wasn’t his ex girlfriend, why did Eamon license his song to some random psycho stalker?
And what was Frankee’s angle? Suppose I’m a musician, and I tell my label “yo, here’s my debut single. It’s the current #1, but with new lyrics about how Miley Cyrus is infected with crabs. I’m her ex-boyfriend, btw.”
Would my label respond “sure, we’ll release that!” Or would it be more like “no, that will get us sued. Also, seek professional help.”?
Eamon could never keep his story straight about who Frankee was. First he said she was someone he’d worked with before. Then he said they’d never met.
My thinking is that by week 2 or 3, Eamon’s management has an idea: a publicity stunt to keep the brand in the public eye. Suppose the girlfriend in the song shows up, with a song of her own? Ka-ching! And Eamon replies (in his toneless whine) “I know a ho.”
The plan worked. Frankee got a #1, and Eamon got a nice pile of cash. Everyone won. Except for people who hate the song, who now have three more weeks of torture to look forward to.
With some slight embarrassment – I were but a wee boy – I must admit I did not realise there *were* two songs until I first played Now 58 on release day, where both songs are ofc sequenced together (as were I Feel Love ’95 and The Sunshine After the Rain on Now 32. But sadly Now missed an opportunity to do the same with – or even include – Professional Widow/People Hold On on 36 or Operation Blade/Phat Bass on 48).
This is my favourite of the two tracks, for its more arresting, or at least more amusing (if churlish) content, the quasi-swingbeatish production as Tom highlights, and – splitting hairs maybe – because I do just prefer her singing voice (her deeper pitch probably disguises her thinness better, though it really does feel besides the point to grade Fuck It/FURB on something like that). Yet I still don’t find it particularly likeable, which to some degree is for the reasons #2 points out. 5.
The sleeve is remarkably cheap-looking, considering this was (atypically) All Around the World’s third number one in half a year, and indeed last for another five. Suitably, it makes the track seem like a quick spurt of unvarnished, lo-fi energy that had to get out there asap (while also strengthening the 80s Roxanne evocations).
Also, through its inclusion on the Now 2005 DVD, I got to know the music video to this a lot better than Fuck It’s. So the image of the Mercedez-driving “Eamon” getting pelted with teddy bears endears me more than the famous pizza-throwing showdown in Eamon’s own vid.
(In week one, Eamon and Frankee kept the joint highest charter ever from Morrissey at bay, in what may be one of the angriest Top 3s ever. Never mind that old sod though, the real loss here was Kelis’ brilliant Trick Me being kept at number two in week three. Many still remember Moz’s Jonathan Ross appearance from this time, his well-timed reappearance prompting maybe the peak of public fondness for the man. Me? My only memory of the JR show in 2004 is seeing the Trick Me video and loving it, and then waiting some time before I owned it (on Now 58. I’m back where I started!))
Mercedes*
There weren’t nearly enough answer records in 2004; imagine “It’s None Of Your Flipping Business Who David Is” or “Multicoloured Hair Makes Me A Weirdo Does It, You Public School Saddoes?” or “Boring Bloke” as a riposte to “Mysterious Girl.” The alacrity of the appearance of this one suggests a coordinated campaign – it was a rather shorter-lived noughties equivalent of the Real Roxanne saga. The tune is the same as “Fuck It” but the arrangement and the beats are harder and Frankee correctly decides to frame her riposte as comedic fury, nailing the reason for her departure on poor Eamon’s perceived inadequacies – “You thought you could really make me moan/I had better sex on my own” (cue a chorus of sniggering backing vocalists) – such that she had to go and “do your friend” instead. “Fuck it, I faked it/…Your sex was wack,” she concludes. It’s a great idea but comparatively lacklustre in composition and performance; you can tell it’s all a bit half-hearted, as confirmed by the whispered coda of “You made me do this.” Frustratingly, Alicia Keys’ Usher answer record “Nope!” never materialised.
Is there really still any debate about whether or not it was “real”? Aside from Eamon himself giving up the game rather quickly, I suspect most people weren’t convinced even at the time, likely including many of the people who bought the single. I was certainly a little too willing to pat my 17 year old self on the back for noting that it was lucky that Eamon’s ex could sing and looked like she’d just walked off the set of a Maxim shoot; I was wrong thinking that was particularly clever of me, and I was wrong thinking it might have mattered, any more than it mattered if Hulk Hogan and Roddy Piper really hated each other. For what it was worth, Frankee was keeping up the Kayfabe as “recently” as 2006 when she was interviewed (already!) for some one hit wonder program. I am somewhat surprised to realise they weren’t actually on the same label though.
Not everywhere shared our enthusiasm for Stage 2 of this feud, with only Australia and Belgium joining us in taking it to Number 1, a step down from the double figures Eamon managed. It’s kind of a losing game comparing the US Charts to those of anywhere in the world, but it’s notable that this made #63 on the Billboard Hot 100 compared to Eamon’s #16.
What interests me in retrospect is that by the time the Eamon track got to Number 1, the Frankee track had already been out in the US, yet as far as I remember the Eamon track wasn’t known as “one side of the story” for the first couple of weeks of its time at the top of the perch. I don’t think you’d be able to pull that off today, although it’s not like we didn’t have the internet in 2004. Maybe people who hung around hipper corners of the internet knew what was coming.
As for the record itself, it seems to me a step or two down, the vocals may be stronger, but with its added bells and whistles it seems like a watered down variation on something that was hardly pure to begin with. It may well be that Frankee curses with greater vigour than Eamon, but in both cases most of us just heard pauses anyway.
#11 – Irish Blood English Heart is a terrific track, despite Moz’s continued endeavours to sabotage his career. It was that and the catchy follow-up First Of The Gang To Die that got me into Morrissey and then The Smiths, who are now one of my all-time favourite bands, so I have a lot to thank it for.
A shame that neither he nor The Smiths ever got to #1; a thread discussing him/them would be interesting.
I have no opinion on Frankee. By this point I was tired of the whole tawdry affair..
Best answer record? Lydia Murdock’s Superstar (Billie Jean’s side of the story).
#14 Those are both great songs – both pretty well-remembered in public now, even, with First of the Gang possibly his last ‘classic’ single? – and while nothing is too surprising in the era of fanbase hits, particularly in a period of poor singles sales like this, it’s still quite remarkable that all four Quarry singles made the Top 10 (the album itself being kept off the top by Keane, which I’ve seen a few times possibly put down to Sanctuary’s imperfect distribution, a la Rough Trade and the first Smiths album).
#11/#14 I definitely liked those last classic Moz songs at the time, especially being a dreary indie teenager at the time. Can’t stand him now but can still absolutely see the appeal of First of the Gang especially. (And, yes, Trick Me was robbed. Popular would’ve been better for covering it.)
As for this? The initial song was cheap and nasty enough to begin with; maybe Frankie wins this comparison by being self-aware enough to know it. Of course, Eamon’s hook was the strongest part of the whole equation and Frankie is by definition leeching off it, so maybe he wins after all.
And I will say that it’s a better “new song to the tune of an old one” #1 than The Millennium Prayer
I give it a 6 as well, mostly because it’s just so delightfully vicious I have to kinda respect it. Maybe it he’ll that I’ve always enjoyed that subgenre of “female rappers talking shit about men.” The production is a tad overwhelming though, it feels too “loud.”
One of the first things that came to mind when remembering “F.U.R.B” was Stylus Magazine’s Singles Jukebox column, writer of which at the time was William B. Swygart. At one point during this song’s run at number one, he referred to Frankie’s head nodding in the video as being akin to that of Lizo Mzimba from Newsround, now BBC News fame. I’ve never been able to unsee it since.
My great problem with the “answer” record is this; it’s in essence not a bad thing if the original song it’s riffing is good. But if it’s a grating whine like Eamon’s was, then it takes a barely alive horse that was on especially shaky ground already and flogs it to death.
And because they shared a melody and in essence lyrics, it all contributed to what felt like an absolute eternity with them both settling in at the top. 2 for me, mainly for the slight hilarity of getting the phrase “I didn’t catch your crabs” into a number one single in the year of our Lord, 2004.
They’re both shit. Neither of them deserves anything more than a 1.
And yet I can’t, because the sheer meanness of one of them compels me to score it less than the other. Frankee blaming him for her decision to cheat is vile and not amusing (if it was him who cheated and blamed her for it the Twitterati would be up in arms; a quick Google suggests that in this genre at least, there aren’t too many relationship-based “answer songs” which involve men responding to women). And it ties into the whole “story” here; regardless of the fakery and flummery around this, the notion of her cashing in on him and his fame while ignoring her own role seems to fit.
He gets 2, she gets 1. They both deserve each other.
Well I’ve listened to the Moyles parody now and it’s… not one of his best. He (and Dave who had a big hand in them) were super-inconsistent – a lot of them were trash but I will not hear a word against their loving paean to weekend dining “Lunch In This Pub”.
Eamon and Frankee should have teamed up to record a fourth-iteration answer to him telling him to butt out.
Unlike, say, Jim Reeves, Eamon is laying no claim on the respondent, nor does Frankee disagree analytically about his pain or her contempt. What we end up with is a series of dick jokes aimed at teens or even younger listeners, meaning Frankee was the true consequence of Eminem. As another inheritance from Eminem, I’d add the necessary importance of recent pop culture and biography to Frankee’s record, which didn’t matter at all for Eamon’s – I’m sure many people did not know he was white, for example.
I’d look to diss tracks like “Dre Day” as more relevant and recent precedents than those older gendered answer records. Diss tracks often shared the commitment of answer records to a blogosphere-worthy line-by-line refutation of the original material, followed by raking over the author’s past (plus dick jokes). Frankee’s more oblique and comic approach feels more like an MCU franchise episode than a dialogue; there’s even a slight change of genre flavour from R&B to hip-hop. This makes me wonder if all involved were angling for a third or fourth instalment between our star-crossed poppers, before the entire bit got swept to international number one status.
We’d come a long way from “It Wasn’t God Who Made Honky Tonk Angels”, hadn’t we?
As a fair few people have mentioned, FURB’s third week saw Mr Brightside by the Killers enter the chart for the first time, a new entry at number 10.
I was listening to the chart that particularly Sunday – by that point something I was no longer doing religiously every week – and I remember thinking that the song was the most incredible thing I had heard for a long time. So I did the logical thing which was invest in the Hot Fuss album when it came out a week or so later (a fine album although nothing topped that one track).
Viewed from a personal perspective I didn’t know than that I was meeting the first and arguably only truly great band of the 21st century who would successfully fuse post Strokes indie with the mysticism of Springsteen and U2. I was still a home boy in those days so plucking up courage to go to a gig was still a few years away (in another lifetime I might have not only bought the album but a ticket to see them at the Leeds Cockpit) so I couldn’t have predicted that in 2017 I would be a few rows away from Brandon Flowers at First Direct Arena (itself only a dream in 2004 but I digress).
But that’s a story many people can say about the first time they heard one of their favourite bands and Mr Brightside’s 10-26-38 top forty trajectory was hardly unusual. So nobody could have predicted the subsequent chart legs it would have and that almost twenty years later people would keep coming back to the song. The Killers themselves aren’t bunnied, coming closest in Autumn 2006.
Can’t say anything about this one – I discussed parts on the previous entry.
BTW, on some weeks of Top of the Pops, a custom remix mashing this with the previous number one was played occasionally.
3 for this reply single.
I remember being let down by this as a kid, because the idea of a ‘rebuttal’ – actually unravelling something about the original, giving the woman a voice – seemed really cool.
They didn’t bother.
I’m flattered
I agree with Tom that this is the better record, and probably helped pave the way to the internet feminism of the early 2010s where every bad thing that women did to men was the man’s fault, and every common 20 year old on Facebook was posting Marilyn Monroe quotes.
Just remembered that AATW released this one… 5 years later they had another stab at releasing a cheap answer track to a massive hit, this time a reply to JLS “Beat Again” (in the form of JLX “Cheat Again”). I don’t think it ever got past the promotional release stage though, which was par for the course for most AATW singles at the time.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jR0z8k1PloA