“To lose one Number 1 to a no-name producer, M’sieu Bangalter, may be regarded as a misfortune; to lose two seems like carelessness.” “Call On Me” shares an origin with Spacedust’s workout-based “Gym & Tonic” – a canny musician shaping a hit out of Thomas Bangalter’s leftover ideas – and thanks to its video it shares a theme too. “Call On Me” is indelibly, notoriously, the sexy aerobics track, whose promo clip was so brazen it drew comment from the Prime Minister (“I almost fell off my rowing machine”)
Unlike fly-by-nights Spacedust, Eric Prydz has built a solid career on the back of “Call On Me”. He’s reportedly lukewarm about his biggest hit now, though I don’t know if that’s because he’s moved on from the filter disco sound or the relentless crotch shots. It might even be that he’s a bit embarrassed by the other shameless thing about “Call On Me”, which is how much it owes to Bangalter & DJ Falcon’s Together project without actually crediting the French duo.
Together only released two singles, but they DJed extensively in the early 00s, and “Call On Me” borrows from an unreleased mix from their DJ sets. That used a Steve Winwood sample, and I’d guess used it very much in the way Prydz does here, turning it into a slice of yearning and looping it to repeatedly build the track. It’s a good trick – creating dynamics by keeping the beat steady and letting the sample gradually phase in, increasing in volume and clarity like it’s materialising with you in the room. It gives you the relentlessness of repetition with the illusion of change.
It’s also the trick Together used on their masterpiece, the 10-minute “So Much Love To Give”, which pushed the filter-house sound to an exhausting, ecstatic limit, looping the title phrase to create a track that’s perpetually peaking, endless waves of synapse-tickling desire. “So Much Love” is a divisive track – some people find it unbearable, and listening to it at home feels a little perverse, though for me it’s a glorious experience, like a dopamine-drenched take on early Steve Reich.
And while I quite enjoy the same ideas when they show up on “Call On Me”, they also feel annoyingly half-hearted. It’s the only way you can do this stuff and have a proper hit with it – a somewhat pointless edit of “So Much Love To Give” charted a while after this – but at three minutes “Call On Me” barely gets going, and the inclusion of the resolving Winwood line – “same boy I used to be”, feels like a bathetic concession to structure. “So Much Love” is a tantric climax; “Call On Me” is a shabby wank.
And speaking of which –
The “Call On Me” video is not particularly explicit – even the “night verson” is only a slapped bum away from the one they played in Tony Blair’s gym. And it’s not the first dance video to solve the “faceless techno” problem by getting a bit sexy. Benny Benassi’s “Satisfaction” in 2002 matched its machine-speech electro-house with a soft-porn video of oiled-up women hammering nails and drilling. 3 Of A Kind’s “Baby Cakes” comes with a video of sexy bakers squirting cream all over big buns. So why was it “Call On Me” that became notorious, the punchline to any joke about tacky dance music videos – and the inspiration for a heap more of them?
I’d offer a couple of ideas here. First is that the Prydz directors understood exactly where the line was for daytime play – the banned videos of the 80s and 90s became famous because people couldn’t see them; “Call On Me” because famous because people could. Second, “Baby Cakes” (and even “Satisfaction” to an extent) are playing sex for laughs – you might watch it and think “this is hot” but you’re also being invited to watch it and think “this is ridiculous”. “Call On Me” drops that fig leaf: there’s no dimensionality to it beyond an obvious pitch to lad mag readers.
It’s worth stressing that the fig leaf of irony was exactly that. “Call On Me” is a product of a moment when the first generation of lad mags – Loaded et al – were giving way to the second – Nuts and Zoo. That transition prompted a certain amount of sighing and hand-wringing about declining standards – how the witty, blokey masculinity of Loaded was being edged out by this crasser version. But whatever its founders’ dreams (music! film! articles about lions!), Loaded had long felt like a simple wrapper for photoshoots of hot women; Nuts and Zoo, its offspring, simply dropped the pretence. The marketing strategy changed; the objectification didn’t.
What strikes me looking at the Eric Prydz video now is what struck me looking at a copy of FHM then: the sheer narrowness of the range of ‘hotness’ acceptable to videographers and editors. Current reckonings with the 00s – often by women who were young then and living with the consequences of relentless body policing – stress this, a vast fear of variety, of the other, of the strangeness of desire. And one part of this wider cultural failure is that the look and feel of house music – a music built first on the motion of Black, queer bodies and second on a dream of inclusivity – became so entwined with this mechanised, cramped, copy-and-paste idea of sex. “Call On Me”‘s video isn’t solely to blame for that – it was part of a much wider process – but it epitomised that shift, and there’s nothing strong or open enough in its music to balance that legacy out.
Score: 3
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Who gets what out of “Call on Me”, the 991st number one?
Firstly, house music.
There had been “Loneliness” already, but “Call on Me” is effectively the first bona fide electro house number one, in that this heralds the era of it becoming mainstream house’s central crossover form in Britain. Although Prydz closely follows Together’s French-touch template, electro house’s bigroom tendencies are smeared all over the track. There are bangs and crashes, some enveloping decay here and some drop-anticipating tension there, adding musical melodrama to what is otherwise a fairly straightforward dance tune. Electro house took the Steinman-ite love of heartstop gesture found in trance and applied it to music that was innately funkier – essentially a marriage of trance, funky house and electroclash that superseded all three in popularity. Sometimes the bigness was unearned, but by my reckoning “Call on Me” gets away with it – practically a three-minute primer for what almost all pop-house would soon enough sound like.
But this record wasn’t held up as a flagship one for innovation. Quite the opposite. After all, there was a whole litter of mid-2000s dance hits built on looped, five-second, familiar 80s pop samples. This was of course nothing new, but between “Call On Me”, Out of Touch”, “Waiting 4 U”, “Somebody’s Watching Me”, “Falling Stars”, and even Prydz’ eventual follow-up, among numerous others, it’s easy to see why mainstream dance music – troubled in the post-superclub era – could seem moribund to so many. In his commentary on Uniting Nations’ TOTP performance, Limmy recently lamented the “period of constantly taking songs from the 80s and just looping one bit” before whining/droning “all on eeeeehhh, allll on eeeeeh”. Prydz’s hit is still for some the main offender, the ultimate example of this nadir.
But for me, some examples could work like rescue operations. Hall & Oates’ “Out of Touch” is in my ears a great chorus prepped up by lumpen verses. I don’t much care for Uniting Nations’ showy interpolation but they at least lock onto a good idea. What I do care for a lot more is Mylo’s sublime “In My Arms”, where Kim Carnes’ melodic shimmers of sun-heated synth are finally freed from a record I otherwise cannot stand and are set loping into a perfect picture of stomach butterflies, glistening bits of “Waiting for a Star to Fall” sprinkled over the synthbed like fairydust (then again, Mylo was far more ‘credible’ than these other chancers anyway). Ultimately, Prydz improves “Valerie” for me too, extricating the good part of its chorus (before the key change) and setting in spinning in a rococo EDM temple, Winwood’s voice a passionate drone that might as well be another synthline.
Or at least, Prydz does these things to “Valerie” because Together – a short-lived French house superduo of DJ Falcon and Thomas Bangalter – already had. So what did “Call On Me”, the 991st number one, do for Daft Punk?
The closest Daft Punk had come to number one was “One More Time”, but the closest thing to a Daft Punk number one was Spacedust’s “Gym and Tonic”, a domestic, Tesco Value remake of Bangalter and Bob Sinclar’s “Gym Tonic”, with diced up elements of Bangalter and Alan Braxe’s “Music Sounds Better with You” fried in. The original “Gym Tonic” could not be cleared for UK release, allowing Spacedust to move in with their woefully stunted version. Prydz’s “Call on Me” isn’t quite history repeating itself – there was no intention for Together to ever release their own version, despite Ministry of Sound’s request – but it is close in practice: another Thomas Bangalter co-production being remade by a fan (understanding no release for the original would occur) in a streamlined, more chart-friendly manner. What isn’t necessarily so is Together’s version being obviously more dynamic, or being dynamic more obviously. What Prydz does, as this is electro house in the making after all, is contribute all the structural dynamic it could ever need – in particular, the breakdown may owe something of its presence to “One More Time”, but this being 2004, not 2000, Prydz couldn’t resist colouring in metallic delay or dub-echo to its almost every sound. The whole thing sounds swarmed in chemicals.
Together’s version is dynamic in subtler ways. Such was the raison d’être behind all their work. What happens when you loop one four-second vocal snatch, mostly hands-off, into infinity and beyond? Do you start hearing new noises, start interpreting sounds differently? Do words begin losing their meaning, or take on new meanings? Does the mind start breaking constructs like phrases into their respective syllables, like how when we’ve seen a wordmark so often we ‘read’ it without even reading it? What is ‘meaning’ in house music anyway? Together’s own take on sampledelia plays pretty openly with ideas like these, or at least allow listeners to factor in the creative process behind making it. That is when they’re not dancing, of course – the best version of “Call on Me” is a live recording, the euphoria so pronounced you can practically feel the sweat – but the demented use of repetition is such that I haven’t read many profiles or reviews of their best work that don’t consider it.
For me, if you hammer home a vocal sample so intensely, it can’t help but take on a stronger ‘meaning’, and – if the few words being looped are right for you – strengthen the listener-song relationship in real-time, even if this is your first listen. Together’s 2002 masterpiece “So Much Love to Give” – one of my favourite records ever made by anyone – is the best example there is, and the exact midpoint between the lovelorn but vivacious “Digital Love” and the withdrawn, anguished loops of the next Daft Punk album. Say “I’ve got so much love to give” the once and it’s ambitious. Say it a million times, however, and its beyond desperate. Say it a million times, set it to bleeding waves of filter-house and it’ll still sound beyond desperate, but now also heartbreaking.
This is something that the Freeloaders should have taken note of with their remake, which made the UK top 10 in early 2005 – the most blatant Eric Prydz derive there is. Rather, at certain junctures they resolve both the music and the Real Thing sample (“…to you!”) to unambiguously give it a happy ending. The Together original may even have one too, but it crucially fades out too soon for anyone to tell.
Daft Punk were recording their third album, Human After all, when “Call on Me” reached number one. Its first single, “Robot Rock”, blinked into the top 40 the same week Freeloaders’ “So Much Love” entered the top 10. Even if the duo themselves weren’t achieving their best success, their impact was more widespread than it had ever been. No longer did stuff have to sound explicitly like Daft Punk to sound inspired by them. Prydz and Freeloaders on the one hand, “Daft Punk Is Playing at My House” – another top 30 hit from this time – on the other. (Indeed, Human After All *sounds* more in tune with LCD Soundsystem than French house, its scratchy, minimal electro-rock études having obvious kinship with plenty of dance-punk, New Rock and post-punk revival pop from the period, and many of their one-time peers – from the Chemical Brothers to Moby to Fatboy Slim – similarly sensed the newly renewed relationship between indie and dance and adapted themselves accordingly.)
What did house videos get out of “Call on Me”? Again, nothing that hadn’t already been done. If you want smut and malegaze in the MVs for dance hits there was no shortage over the years – Boogie Pimps’ spectacularly yucky “Somebody to Love” from earlier in 2004 was still on my mind when I saw “Call on Me”. But again something was right about the timing of “CoM”. The Prime Minister never spoke about falling off his rowing machine to “Synth & Strings” or “The Drill”. The track is for many indivisible from its video, partly the reason it ever did so well to begin with. And so it seemed like there was a load of this shit from hereon-in for a few years. The Ministry of Sound, who issued “Call on Me” via their Data imprint, even adapted their Annual series so that the newest edition would have a bonus DVD of “the sexiest videos ever”, then switched to “sexiest of the year” in 2005 and 06, now that every four videos on MTV Dance looked a bit like “Call on Me”. A few would even come close to equal its notoriety.
What did Stevie Winwood get out of “Call on Me”? He re-recorded his sampled vocals for the track. The last time he had sang on a number one it was 1966. If I remember correctly, the 38 year gap between number ones was the longest ever for a singer. I’m guessing it still holds this record. It might not by Friday, though.
And what of Eric Prydz? Perhaps he got to number one pretty shadily, because in many ways this wasn’t really his track. But he was no non-entity. Following some early sides on Cadence, “Slammin'” was, as I understand it, popular during Ibiza’s 2003 season, ditto “Woz Not Woz” a year on, and by the time of “Call on Me” his name was already on a number one single, having remixed “Lola’s Theme”. Though closely associated with Ministry/Data for years, he twice came close to number one again, firstly with his “Another Brick in the Wall” remix “Proper Education” (that rarest thing: a properly licensed Floyd sample, and because it is credited to Prydz v Floyd, the only ‘Pink Floyd’ UK single between 1994 and 2022, ahem) and then with the fantastic “Pjanoo” (Italo goes bigroom). Later on he became a respectable prog-house veteran, as he remains to this day. Even Four Tet has remixed him.
And everyone else in the chart? In week one, on my (amazing) seventh birthday, Girls Aloud were runners-up for the third consecutive time with “Love Machine”. This spell wouldn’t, or couldn’t, be broken the way it ought to have. Green Day were back, but this time it’s serious – American Idiot, the album, was my soundtrack to being seven. In week three, Ronan Keating pulled yet another forgotten No. 2, while Deep Dish’s brilliant and suave “Flashdance” settled for bronze – just as its slimy descendant “I Like the Way” would six months later. This was also the final week R.E.M. ever saw inside the top five, or even the top 20.
In week five, during a return spell for “Call on Me” after the next bunny, the Manics entered with the almost wholly electronic “The Love of Richard Nixon”. It is one of the most obscure No. 2 hits by a major rock band ever, an undesirable feat that is probably even more true of its follow-up. On the surface, the group really benefitted from these troubled days of the singles charts – a fanbase as eager as ever, physical sales gravely low and a chart that hadn’t yet figured out what to do with downloads. That follow-up would have been a more deserving 1,000th number one than what overtook it, but would it still have been much of a “real hit”?
And what did “Call on Me”, the 991st number one, do for me? Well, nothing out of the ordinary; it was just a great hit single in an era of them, simply put. This era is bound up in memories of youth club, friends, birthday parties, VH2, Hits 59 and Now 59 – the latter’s frosty sleeve of ice, Christmas lights and pitch black sky is so evocative I almost have to take some time out. Every number one single of the period – except for two, including that Nelly one we just passed, of which I have no memories – lives potently in these memories. Yeah, yeah, so you keep saying. But it’s true. Contrary to what the “Call on Me” sample insists, I’m decisively not the same boy I used to be.
8
This is the best kind of comment – the one that makes me regret a low mark (a tiny bit)! Thanks for writing it, and glad we agree on “So Much Love To Give” at least
My post (which I think got spam-flagged when I edited it for actual paragraphs?) landed firmly in the gap between the original review and Lee’s comment! Which is a much, much kinder review than I might have expected to write on it.TLDR; this entire sub-genre of samplebait mid-00s dance is both a cheap trick and a successful one when done well, this is it basically being done well, low-key this might not be that far away from something like “Love Grows (Where My Rosemary Goes)” which also slams one good hook to infinity and beyond and may or may not get away with it.
Tom, you’re fairly flying through these 2004 posts! Is it a race to get to the big 1,000?
A shame most of these number 1s are fairly average. This one didn’t do much for me and it was everywhere at the time. Not unlistenable, but it runs out of ideas very quickly. Think I’d rather just listen to Valerie (or, indeed, Falling Stars, Out of Touch or Somebody To Love, other hits from the era mentioned in Lee’s post which did this kind of thing much more enjoyably). Even the video wasn’t that big a deal as far as I could see. 4/10.
Lee’s power-post mentions a few other notables:
This is basically me doing NaNoWriMo, except it’s ToPoWriMo – Tom Popular Writing Month. The idea is to post an entry a day in November, to kickstart the project and make some proper progress.
Glad to hear it!
I’d be full of admiration if you find something interesting to say in every one of the imminent glut of posts about Bunny Presley.
Those are quite likely to be a long post arbitrarily sliced into 3, but I don’t know yet
I’ve never seen the video and had no idea it was so controversial. Clearly other things were on my mind in autumn 2004.
The track itself is fairly dull, though not as tedious as So Much Love To Give. I remember hearing that for the first time the previous and experiencing that thudding realisation that there was no song there at all, nothing other than the same phrase repeated over and over and over again until you wanted to scream.
Maybe. The founder of Loaded (James Brown (no not that James Brown)) still insists that it was FHM’s fault that ‘men’s mags’ descended into being all about the pictures of near naked women. I’ll leave others who were around at the time to debate the merits of that argument.
I think there may have been a year or two when James Brown’s vision of Loaded – which I tried to acknowledge
– was fully reflected in the mag’s actual contents but by 2004 we’re long past that.
Yeah, while Brown’s vision of Loaded was certainly different* to what it and the lad mags in general became, photos of scantily clad women were in the mix from the start (I just had a look at some early covers to double-check that my memory was correct.)
*Eg, Hunter S Thompson was a key point of reference
(Full disclosure: had a job interview with Brown and Alan Lewis for a job on Loaded pre-launch. Didn’t get the job – probably just as well all told.)
There’s a parallel pop universe where Prydz instead got Steve Winwood to re-record “with the wind in her arse” from the original “Valerie”. That looped over and over, off into infinity…
I am somewhere between Tom’s original review and Lee’s reply here.
At the time? Absolutely, 110% behind the former. I hated it, I especially hated the video, and I hated it despite being the in-theory perfect demographic (18-year-old cis white male) this was made for. I loved turn-of-the-millennium trance despite my inability to hear it in its natural habitat; this felt like a symbol of dance music gone very wrong, and all the other sample-hammering songs around it with sometimes similarly Zoo-esque videos just left me going “I’m out” at the entire genre and dive into the “worthy” realms of landfill indie. I was writing my own music for the first time now too, and it genuinely felt like I’d levelled up out of regrettable teenage cheap thrills as assuredly as I had with my politics swinging away from Daily Mail-inspired weakest-to-the-wall vengeance conservatism at the same time. (Ish. Even at this point I could fake Toryism enough to be a runner-up in a national essay-writing competition from the literal IEA. Some of the £500 went on buying most or all of Sarah McLachlan’s back catalogue…)
In retrospect, this was just replacing one potentially-regrettable teenage phase with another (musically at least; the politics mostly stuck). Landfill indie did have a lot wrong with it, and was just as prone to its own cheap tricks like tacked-on string arrangements. Have I been tempted to listen to Snow Patrol or latter-era Embrace much lately? No, I have not. Have I actually listened to “Call On Me” a few times in the weeks before this post completely unrelated to Popular getting there? Yes, I have.
Quite simply, Eric Prydz’s cheap tricks work, at least for me occasionally. Repetition around a strong hook with at least some semblance of change is a winning play for my ears, and so is the production using the electro house tricks Lee mentions. In the club, as Lee pointed out, that repetition can create its own opportunity for meaning. I can’t speak for that, because it wasn’t just age that made me unable to listen to the various Ferry Corstens in a trenchcoat at a nightclub in 1999, it was my autistic sensory hypersensitivity, and in particular my intolerance of flashing lights and dense crowds. Instead, my autistic brain latches on to the repetition for a completely different purpose, of enjoying the loop of sounds as a sensory joy in its own right, a stim. Other dance music has done that even better for me – “Flat Eric” is a particular favourite ‘stim loop’ at least some of the time – but the vocal sample approach to this certainly works more often than I’d like, and “Call on Me” succeeded as much because of having a good one to work as it did that leery video.
And, as Tom quite rightly points out, the culture that video was part of was absolutely devastating to the women in the way of it. One of my sixth form friends missed out on Oxford after her anorexia-affected A-level results – released around the same time as the “Call on Me” video – missed the terms of her conditional offer (in retrospect she considered this a blessing as the Oxbridge environment could have made things even worse). It’s that culture – and the fact I was arguably battling with disordered eating myself for much of the 2000s – that predisposes me to continuing hatred of this sub-genre, and makes it genuinely the closest I have to an out-and-out guilty pleasure. But, every now and then, it’s exactly the pleasure I need.
Marking this feels impossible, but a couple of months ago I’d have been preparing a 1 for it in my head and it’s absolutely not a 1. As pure audio rather than video? I think I’ll mark its route-one musical sugar rush as a 5 but I could easily be talked into a 6; either way, lizard-brain bubblegum that has one trick and plays it well feels like it should get middling marks, and by that framing this is almost a mid-2000s Edison Lighthouse (I’d give “Love Grows (Where My Rosemary Goes)” a 5 or 6 too). Would I feel more or less disposed towards it if it ran as long as “So Much Love To Give,” a song I’m only lukewarm towards but purely because I don’t rate the hook enough to enjoy hearing it as a stimloop? Was there a ten-minute version of this?!?
This was a great record at the time but even by the standards of the time, as a club record it felt stupidly long, mostly because it didn’t do very much. And sadly it became more memorable for the video than anything else.
“So Much Love To Give” had a similar problem, although in the case of that record, it overdid it by looping a small sample for over 10 minutes. The Freeloaders version that charted shortly after this was actually a project by the guys from N Trance, and while I enjoyed it for what it was, it felt very much like a Spacedust-esque rip off. Although the Basscore remix (an alias of Friday Night Posse) was great, closer to the Together version but much more concise.
You know what, I actually rather like this. I think Prydz is able to so some interesting and different things with the repetitive nature of Winwood’s re-recorded sample, and I think there is enough variety here to make it a decent single. 7/10 imho.
With hindsight I’ve often looked back on Call On Me’s reign at number one as the point where the singles chart in its traditional format (punters buying singles) began its death throes. It wasn’t a record anybody seemed remotely excited about and it wasn’t a massive seller; it just stayed at number one because there was nothing to replace it. Maybe this is a bit unfair as Call On Me did hold off Love Machine (a strong pop record by any standard) and sales were down generally.
However I am ultimately more interested in the discussion around the three rock based records that made their top five appearance during Call On Me’s run at the top. All are by bands I am a fan of and have seen live.
Taking Green Day first; by any standard American Idiot (single and album) was a hugely important moment. It marks the moment when pop punk came of age and showed that the genre had something to say. Green Day themselves couldn’t follow it but in some ways they didn’t need to. For a generation of teenagers picking up guitars for the first time (and there are still many) this was a year zero moment – if you had something to say you didn’t have to look to post Britpop to say it.
With hindsight the two other bands were launching albums that would bear the brunt of their previous release failing to do what it was supposed to do – one artistically and one commercially.
REM’s previous album, Reveal, was released to enthusiastic reviews and it remains one of my favourites of theirs. What it didn’t do was produce a stream of hit singles and become an Automatic For The People style sales supernova – indeed the band had to steady the ship with a “best of” in late 2003. Leaving New York was a strong comeback and promised much (as a single it was never going to be more than a fanbase concern), however the sedate and one dimensional album was a colossal disappointment. Perhaps ironically if Around The Sun came out now it would be hailed as a near return to form with songs as good as Leaving New York, Electron Blue and The Ascent Of Man making it seem a bit mean to pick at the filler.
It should be noted that REM did manage to come back all guns blazing in 2008 with the Accelerate album before finally giving up the ghost on their dreadful swan song album which I could barely bring myself to listen to more than once.
By contrast the Manic Street Preachers were following Know Your Enemy which at the time was hailed as a return to form; then rose tinted spectacles were removed to reveal it wasn’t anything of the sort. The result was the sharpening of knives for Lifeblood. I’ve always felt this was unfair; I loved Lifeblood in 2004 and I still love it now. The Love Of Richard Nixon was a strange choice for a single and does divide fans but the album deserved better – as was proven when one of its strongest tracks (Solitude Sometimes Is – not a single) was resurrected at the York Barbican in 2019 and cut through the setlist.
Every album the Manics have released since is of value and their 2018 record Resistance Is Futile is the pick of the crop; perhaps their best ever.
Ha – in characteristic Manics fan-disharmony I’d have to say Resistance Is Futile did very little for me and I’d take Futurology and maybe even The Ultra Vivid Lament over it as great late period albums.
I don’t hate Love Machine (despite the best efforts of the bloke on after me at the Edinburgh fringe one year who had Arctic Monkeys’ gruesome live cover as the opener on his intro tape) but it definitely wouldn’t be in my Girls Aloud top ten (maybe, based on the one or two deep dives I’ve done into their canon, not even top 20 or 30) Something grating in it somehow.
Kind of agree re: Resistance Is Futile – it’s not a bad album but other than International Blue, there’s not a lot on there I’d go back to. Futurology was certainly better and so was Rewind The Film.
I reckon I heard this before Valerie and was befuddled when that cropped up on Mrs Mack’s iPod.
Surprised you’ve gone so low with this, Tom. I’ve not actually listened to it for ages but I’d figure it for a 5 or 6 at least. I always found it agreeable without every getting excited by it.
Oh and I am definitely coopting the putdown “shabby wank”!
As a novelty hit, this was kind of fun, but the rash of copycat records, or what certainly seemed like copycat records, quickly engendered a great sense of malaise about the charts and pop culture in general. There were an astounding three Top 20 singles in a three month period of 2005 based in whole or in part on samples from Waiting for a Star to Fall, including perhaps the least exciting chart battle of all time when two hard to distinguish versions were released one weak apart from each other.