MARIO WINANS ft ENYA & P DIDDY – "I Don't Wanna Know"

Evening everybody. Well I must admit I rather enjoyed this one, especially after 7 weeks of Eamon and Frankee! I think this would be my personal favourite of ’04 up to this point, just edging out LMC or Usher (who I gave a 7)…so 8/10 for Mario imho.

This is the first of four 2004 number ones that I have no memory of from the time. Perhaps unfortunately, they’re all R&B slowies – not an area I had much time for back then. I’ll see where I stand with the others when their time comes but it’s especially understandable this song never registered with me. Being as I admire “Ready or Not” more than I actually enjoy listening to it (that Enya sample doesn’t sit well with me), ‘I Don’t Wanna Know’ is pretty lethargic to these ears. This sounds nothing like my summer 2004.

In using recognisable samples (or in this case the sampling of a sample – we’re three layers in), producers set themselves the noble task of making listeners gradually rehear the sample anew, the immediate evocations of the original context slowly slipping away through repeated listens. This is perhaps easier to do if your song ends up being a megahit itself, as this was. And yet, as Tom points out, this doesn’t quite manage it, nor does it offer anything else compelling enough in return for me. It’s the ‘Ready or Not’ template without much of a song to back it up.

Still, it kept off that World Cup Come on Eileen rubbish. A shame Dragostea Din Tei had to settle for third. 3

(This is an oft-repeated chart fact which has no doubt come up on Popular before but with this, Enya becomes an artist who has had one number one, a number one as an uncredited sample, and now a number one as a [sampled] featured artist. As for Mario, this was his only Top 40 hit, if one ignores his earlier guest spot on Puff Daddy’s Best Friend.)

I’m probably the only Enya fan here. This is the last we’ll see of her, I’m guessing?

The enyanomics of her success used to befuddle music critics. How do you sell eighty million records when you’re a forty year old Irish woman who lives in a castle, doesn’t tour, has musical tastes between twenty and three hundred years out of date, sings in a made-up language, etc? It didn’t make sense.

Enya’s secret was that she accessed new markets. For a while she was enyademic: heard everywhere in yoga studios, corporate retreats, and daycare centers. She “made the pie higher”, as George W Bush once said. Frustratingly, her later albums lean heavily into this market: where her early work is spiky and a little weird around the edges (it has Vangelis-style synths, and even distorted electric guitars) by 2005 she was turning out bland housecleaning music.

Like Brian Eno, her best work rewards any level of listener involvement. It has a certain complexity, but also works as a vague sonic soundscape while you re-align your chakras by jamming the ball of your left foot into your eye socket (or however yoga works).

This also made it ideal for rap samples. Guys like Eminem built careers out of the dissonance of a fiery verse and a soothing female voice. It was an incredibly effective trick. (Maybe too effective. Often, the sample sold the song, and the rapper got sidelined. Many such cases incoming.)

But Winans’ doesn’t do that. He half-raps, half-sings over the “Boadicea” with a slow, laconic delivery, drifting through the song rather than commanding it. Eminem would have gleefully played with the energy (enyagy?) difference between himself and his sample, but Winans matches Enya instead.

“I Don’t Wanna Know” nearly went to #1 in both the US and the UK. Quite a feat. His follow-up single left a Tsar Bomba-sized crater in the earth. The UK #1 chart remains one-hit-wonder central.

#7 – it is indeed the last we’ll see of Enya. And I’m also a fan, but that’s partly a result of growing up in a part Irish household and my mum and dad playing “The Celts”, “Paint The Sky With Stars” and “A Day Without Rain” with frequency.

On her two most recent albums she did actually reincorporate some unusual elements musically; specifically on “…And Winter Came” in 2008 (which wasn’t a Christmas album per se, but was marketed as such. I listen to it with the yearly frequency that people crank up Michael Bublé’s “Christmas” album, in any case), the second single of which, “My! My! Time Flies!” uses timpani and clap samples almost exclusively, and even has a guitar solo after some quirky lyrics referencing Tchaikovsky’s 1812 Overture and The Beatles crossing Abbey Road (‘One forgot to wear shoes’). OK, so it’s still not that close in time, but it’s nearer references sonically and historically than the rest of her work.

In fact, the references are many centuries more recent than “Boadicea”, the brooding, mournful chant off her soundtrack album for the TV series The Celts, which of course is referring to the queen of the ancient British Iceni tribe who led a failed uprising against the Romans, ultimately poisoning herself. (I live in close proximity to Colchester Castle and my mum’s always been fascinated by Ancient Rome, so it’s another interest I’ve inherited by osmosis).

So it’s sample use is, in a roundabout way, a clever one for Mario Winans, the sombre mourn over the passing of an ancient queen resigning herself to defeat, soundtracking a heartbroken R&B vocalist who, being part of the renowned Winans family (we did of course cover his uncle BeBe on Eternal’s “I Wanna Be The Only One”), has significantly more soul than Eamon possessed, as he sings about not wanting to know if his lover is with someone else now.

It’s perhaps why, of the many R&B chart toppers of 2004, this is actually probably my favourite, it does something a bit different and holds up well to repeated re-listens (although the dreadful “response” record by The Pirates and Shola Ama that #4 mentioned absolutely does not, but by that peaking at #7 a few months later proved the response record ‘craze’ of the Expletive You Right Back saga had well and truly passed).

I’ll go for a 6 on this one.

#8 – oh same. My dad likes quite a few songs by a bunnied American Idol winner and also came and saw a bunnied late 00s boyband with us at Christmas 2010. But then he also loves Jimmy Nail and The Travelling Wilburys! But then I’m the same. I do love my pop but then I also love a bit of Dire Straits, Paul Simon and Fleetwood Mac. I’ve got into Dolly Parton over the last year too. I think it’s my parents exposing us to such diverse stuff that means I’ve got quite a broad taste.

I also meant #5 on my previous comment, not #7. Apologies.

This is OK. Not anything I’d go out of my way to listen to but not actively terrible. The rap feels unnecessary and brings it down a bit. 4 or 5 depending how generous I’m feeling.

#3 – I have no memory whatsoever of that Come on England track (a nitpick – it was evidently for Euro 2004, not a World Cup). It felt like by this point, football anthems for major tournaments were ceasing to have any lasting impact. I’ve never heard it before and I never hear Ant & Dec’s We’re On The Ball (from the 2002 WC) or Embrace’s World At Your Feet (from 2006) anywhere these days, whereas Three Lions, Vindaloo and World In Motion are still in regular rotation whenever England are doing well (which we can discuss when the column gets to 2018, I guess).

Dragostea Din Tei was way more fun in fairness, that would have been fun to discuss here.

Another enduring hit from this fortnight was emo-rockers Hoobastank’s ballad The Reason – only a #12 hit here but a bigger US hit and one which I like a fair bit, even if it’s a little mawkish at times.

I remember when “My! My! Time Flies” was in the World Cup of 2008 – was a delightful addition. I’d just nominated “White Is In The Winter Night” from the same album for the Christmas poll, though it didn’t get out of its opening group (whilst getting more positive comments than at least one song that did).

The “Boadicea” sample certainly works well enough here, but it worked better the last time we saw it. Still, being credited here but not there is about fair on the Pato Banton ft U2 rule of credits – Enya is contributing a lot more to the quality of this record than she did to the Fugees’ “Ready or Not,” because the lead artist on that one actually did something good beyond snaffling “Boadicea” for a modern R&B sample. And between this feeling like an earlier-90s slow jam and the centring of male tears, my immediate feeling looking back at it in contrast to “Ready or Not” is that R&B went backwards in the intervening years. Of course, it extremely didn’t in the first few of them, but this plus Eamon feels like a genre in regressive retreat from its TLC/Destiny’s Child golden age. Maybe that explains this getting an answer record, and it being a hit itself.

In an unlikely turn of events this song has seen some renewed relevance in the past couple months via a straight-up cover helmed by a hip-hop producer of the moment and sung by The Bunny(nd). Really adds nothing to the original (which I quite like) though, just a few modern production touches and an added verse by another of-the-moment rapper. Probably the most pointless top-40 hit I’ve heard in a while.

5 seems about right to me. He’s a little unlucky here, as it’s not bad but not as good as the #1 it samples, the song that subsamples, or even the #1 his uncle was on.

#15, I thought the recent relevance came from the use of the same sample in Pete and Bas’ astonishing viral hit “Plugged In w/Fumez”