“Caught Out There”. “I’m A Slave 4 U”. “Like I Love You”. “Milkshake”. “Rock Your Body”. All productions by the Neptunes, all Top 5 hits here, all early-00s pop landmarks, still accorded due reverence. None of them, however, are the Neptunes’ first UK Number One. That honour goes to “Flap Your Wings”, half of the double A-Side lead single from Nelly’s two-for-the-price-of-two LP release, Sweat and Suit.
“Flap Your Wings” is not prime Neptunes. It’s not even the kind of thing you’d put on a list of their hidden gems. It’s good, don’t get me wrong, but it’s functional – a funky, urgent, bongo-driven groove whose busyness sounds more like that other totemic 00s producer Timbaland than the Neptunes’ trademark lean, off kilter rhythms. The beat isn’t a great fit for Nelly as a rapper either – his strengths are more conversational, the way he’ll slip in tender or cheeky asides, like “Hot In Herre”’s “unless your gon’ do it”. But on “Flap Your Wings” he sounds more mechanical, his flow more rigid, his voice one-note and pinched. He’s trying to recapture some of the lightning that made “Hot In Herre” or “Country Grammar” so charismatic, but it’s not something he can do on command.
“My Place”, on the flip, has the opposite problem. Nelly sounds more himself on this loverman’s apology tune, but the undeniably expensive, sample-built backing is anonymous in its opulence. Together the single is two halves of a good track, separated and frustratingly padded, which makes it the perfect launch single for a classic successful man’s folly like Sweat and Suit, an LP which became two for the flimsiest of reasons. (Sweat is for the uptempo jams, Suit for the classy lover’s rap, though nothing in Nelly’s previous work suggested a need to separate them – and a year later the star relented and issued a single-disc highlights comp with the unlovely name of Sweatsuit.)
Like many an act before him – hello Oasis! – the market demand for Nelly product was peaking just as inspiration began to fade. The LPs performed well enough that they’re not remembered as a bomb, but they manifestly weren’t classics, and they bring the curtain down on Nelly’s “imperial phase”. They also point to a growing problem with the UK charts in this era.
Ideally, the charts ought to be a perfect mirror of the heat around an artist – when they have the juice, they’re recording good stuff, and the public want to know more, the chart placings should be high. When they fall off, we shouldn’t be seeing them in Popular. Even in the chart’s glory days this wasn’t always the case, but at this point the charts are often a lagging indicator, reflecting label investment and expectation more than public enthusiasm. To make matters worse, maximum expectation coincides with maximum pressure to ship any product, even if it’s lacking the previous magic. It’s a vicious cycle which makes mediocre No.1s more likely. I’ll dig into the reasons and mechanics behind all this when we reach the fiasco of the 1000th No.1, but the Neptunes and Nelly are victims of these bad incentives. And – because their best work misses the top and their lesser retreads make it – so are we.
Score: 5
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When going through these kinds of chart retrospects, you often come across those was-this-really-number-one cases. This double-sided single is certainly a textbook case.
Re: the last paragraph. I don’t really want to spoil anything for you, Tom, seeing as you will eventually cover the nuts and bolts. But if we want to make a really oversimple Reader’s Digest version of it all, let’s just put it this way: the (partial) correction will come exactly 33 #1’s later than your mentioned 1000th.
Anyway, I’ll let you do the actual heavy lifting once it’s due. 🙂
”Flap Your Wings’ is not my sort of thing, but I’m rather fond of ‘My Place’ so I will give the total package a 6/10.
No different to Stevie Wonder or Prince in another era. Buyers and tastemakers have different favourites, in part because buyers cover the gamut including children, teenagers, parents, and non-metropolitan types. If anything, the problem may be that in 2004, even big singles weren’t very big compared to albums (let alone video games). Cash was not much of a barrier in 2004 and if you were interested in “the heat around an artist” you paid for the album.
Hey, not all of us outside big cities prefer “I Just Called to Say I Love You” over “Superstition” and so on! (Yes, I know I was saying this on affiliated sites more than half my lifetime ago, but it’s truer than ever now that all the geographical barriers of access which existed in the era of physical distribution as anything other than “New Elgar” heritage culture, and analogue radio stations with limited reaches, have been torn down …)
And there’s another “number one by default” Nelly song from this desperate low-sales era – which I don’t think will have been, shall we say, taken to Heart as “Hot in Herre” was in the doctor’s waiting room recently – where such an argument, patronising and outdated though it is, would be a good deal more relevant, surely?
But yes, this was the era when a lot of the real action – which now would be logged via streaming – was in filesharing, which would have provided a more representative picture had it been possible to include it. (The Smash Hits Chart, which Mark Goodier hosted for some commercial stations after leaving Radio 1, did make a hamfisted attempt to deal with the withering of the CD single format: Eminem’s “Mosh” made it into that chart that autumn.)
Something of a milestone for me, this – from the point at which I started paying attention to the charts (summer of 1996), this is the first number 1 I have no recollection of at all. Getting old is a terrible thing.
That said, it doesn’t sound like I was missing much. My Place is dull and way too long, and Flap Your Wings is a little better but sounds like poor man’s retread of Hot In Herre. 4/10.
Of more interest to me at this time – although probably not to many on here – was the unexpected comeback of Embrace, who got into the top 10 with the Chris Martin-penned Gravity this week, a few years after they seemed to have run their course. They’d do even better a couple of Popular years down the line, coming within a few hundred copies of the top. Gravity is very good, probably worth an 8, and the other singles Ashes and Looking As You Are were just as good.
Likewise! (except my memory goes back another decade)
Oh God, that’s not N1ck S0uthall, is it?
The more I think about Perils’ post the more out of date it seems, talking about singles “buyers” *in the present tense* – “buyers” hardly exist in the singles chart anymore, except on special occasions such as the multiple LadBaby releases and the current Beatles one, which get treated as more “legitimate” by the established media (usually the same outlets who were opposed to *all* pop, whether for Hoggartist or harrumphing-old-colonel reasons, for decades) but which aren’t really representative, at all, of the current market. And if you expressed patronising surprise to Portlanders who will be coming of age in time hopefully to get rid of Richard Drax – and therefore were born around the time the relatively brief iTunes era began to make an impact on the singles chart – that they were among the huge numbers of people whose streams kept “Sprinter” on top for ten weeks they wouldn’t even know what you were talking about, because they can’t remember a time when people in their position didn’t have equal access to this stuff with people in London. A long way to go before Popular gets *there*, of course, but with luck we’re that bit closer than we seemed very recently indeed.
Clearly on a post about a number one single from 2004 – and if we’re intent on being pedantic, one discussing the 2004 charts in the present tense – we are talking about preference determination at this point rather than today. In any case I see no reason why the non-metropolitans should think they’re on the worse end of the comparison.
I can tell this was the point I was losing interest in the chart because I don’t even remember this single existing.
I don’t remember this at all although I saw Nelly live around this time as I think I’ve mentioned in an earlier comment thread. No idea whether he did either of these but, going in with no expectations, he was great!
Now there’s a thing! I know I’m getting old (70 next birthday, help!) and this kind of music isn’t aimed at me but seriously, I thought Nelly was female! Do I get expelled from Popular after following it for all but a few weeks of its history for being deeply uncool?
Perhaps for one of two reasons? First, he rose to fame at the same time as Nelly Furtado, who is indeed female. Second, his prominent duet with Kelly Rowland, credited to Nelly and Kelly, which doesn’t dispositively identify who’s who.