Charts – 21 November 2010
Rihanna lasted two weeks at the top, but we now return to our regularly scheduled X Factor dominance. The current number one – and it’ll be a one-week affair because the annual X Factor charity single will displace it on Sunday – is “Love You More” by JLS.
JLS were the runners-up in the 2008 series of X Factor. In an uncharacteristic lapse of judgment, Simon Cowell didn’t take up his option to sign them, only for Epic to sweep in and launch them as a proper R&B-ish boy band. They’ve been genuinely successful – this is their fifth single and their fourth number one – so despite being technically outside the X Factor fold, they’ve been written back into the show’s success story. Simon Cowell would certainly much rather people were talking about this bunch than Joe McElderry, I suspect.
“Love You More” is an inoffensive mid-paced ballad. It’s also the official charity single for the BBC’s annual “Children in Need” telethon, but chances are it would have made number 1 without the help.
It successfully fends off the challenge of Ellie Goulding’s “Your Song” cover from the John Lewis ads, which nonetheless climbed 36 places to land at number 3, and looks like it’ll be around for a while. I’m still not sure about it, to be honest… it feels a little bit calculated to me, but hey, it’s obviously connecting with an audience.
If you believe the newspapers, of course, the big story of last week was supposed to be the debut on iTunes of the Beatles’ back catalogue. An idea had taken hold with the more gullible sort of journalist that when the Beatles’ songs were finally made available online, there would be a massive chart invasion. This was never especially likely. Anyone who really cares about owning Beatles songs has had forty years to make their purchase; it’s not like they’re hard to get. Nor are the albums sensibly priced on iTunes. For example, they’re charging £17.99 for the double albums. But Amazon are selling them for less than half that, so if you’re buying them on iTunes, well, bad choice.
What could potentially make a difference is the ability to download individual songs. The Beatles have always been very careful about protecting the way their music is presented. But yes, you can now buy individual tracks from iTunes. As it turns out, though, there wasn’t much demand for that either. You have to query whether the Beatles’ audience is particularly interested in iTunes, and whether the typical iTunes consumer is actually all that bothered about the Beatles. After all the hype, only one Beatles track made the chart – “Hey Jude”, scraping on at number 40.
Ironically, there might actually be more Beatles songs in the chart this week. Why? Because they did a Beatles theme week on X Factor. The midweeks have “Hey Jude” climbing to 35 and “Let It Be” at number 30 – a slightly bigger impact, but hardly earth-shattering.
Also entering the most recent chart:
- “Like a G6” by the Far East Movement featuring the Cataracs and Dev at number 6. This is the breakthrough hit for an Asian-American hip-hop group who’ve been around for years without previously attracting much notice, only for this to be a hit in America and around Europe. It’s minimal, to put it mildly, but it’s a good hook. A G6, if you’re wondering, is a Gulfstream G650 – it’s a private jet. The Cataracs are a California alt-rap duo who’ve similarly never attracted any previous notice in Britain, and Dev is a rapper who appears to get a credit because they sampled the “like a G6” bit from the bridge of her single “Booty Bounce” (video features some strobe-effect rapid edits, btw, but bonus points for making a video that features absolutely no bouncing of any description).
- “Safe” by Westlife at number 10. Self-reviewing single from the turn of the century blandly balladeering boy band who seem to never go away. The days when they consistently got number 1 hits are behind them and to be honest I’m not quite sure who’s still buying their records. (Since the single is likely to drop out of the top twenty in its second week, the answer may well be “fans who never broke the habit and nobody else”.) Nonetheless, their 25th hit, every single one of which made the top 10.
- “What’s My Name” by Rihanna featuring Drake at number 18. This is going to be the second official single from her new album, and while the record company would probably prefer to keep the focus on “Only Girl In The World” for the moment – still at number 2, by the way – this is getting some spill-over sales as an album track download, presumably because they’re already pushing it in other territories so there’s a video available. (Another track from the album, “S&M”, is also picking up downloads, and charts at number 55.) Her 21st UK hit, and the third and biggest for Canadian rapper Drake.
- “Game Over” by Tinchy Stryder featuring Chipmunk at number 22. Well, that’s how the charts are listing the artist credit. Stryder’s YouTube channel gives it as “Tinchy Stryder featuring Giggs, Professor Green, Tinie Tempah, Devlin, Example and Chipmunk.” Stryder gets the leap credit because it’s on his album, as near as I can make out, but it’s basically an all-star jam single. Not especially commercial – it’s a bit of a dirge, to be honest, and the first verse is almost intolerably dull. Perhaps a case of crossover grime/pop acts trying to reconnect with their original audience. Stryder’s seventh hit, Chipmunk’s eighth, and the rest apparently technically don’t count. Still, a break from the normal single release for virtually everyone involved.
- “Shame” by Robbie Williams and Gary Barlow, re-entering at 31 presumably as a side-effect of the Take That album coming out. (It sold over half a million in its first week.) The track made number 2 on its original release in October but dropped out of the charts rather more quickly than it deserved to.
- “Just Drive” by Alistair Griffin at number 38. This is an oddity. Alistair Griffin was a contestant in the second series of the BBC’s underperforming talent show Fame Academy back in 2003, when he came second to Alex Parks. He had two hits in 2004 (including the forgettable double A-side “Bring It On”/”My Lover’s Prayer” which got to number 5) but pretty much hasn’t been heard from since. This is an official single, but it doesn’t have a video or any real promotion behind it – it was, however, used by the BBC to soundtrack a video package at the end of their coverage of the Formula 1 season and seems to have charted solely on the strength of that, giving Griffin a much-delayed third hit.
House to Astonish Episode 50
A week late, but worth the wait – it’s our special anniversary 50th episode, marking not just 50 or so hours of chat about comics but just over two years of House to Astonish. This time out we’re talking about the cancellations of Thor: The Mighty Avenger, Deadpool Corps and Deadpool Team-Up, Marvel’s new website, the movie of Dan Clowes’ Wilson, the relaunched Dandy, Wizard’s new convention acquisition, J Michael Straczynski’s career moves and the Walking Dead renewal, along with a look at February’s solicitations and interviews from the Thought Bubble convention with Antony Johnston, Kieron Gillen and Jamie McKelvie, reviews of Batman Incorporated, Spider-Girl and Marineman, and a special listener Q&A. It’s all go, as you can imagine, but we still manage to fit in all this plus a talking schoolgirl beaver, three mince pies for dinner, a cosmic Yes, Minister, an elected upper chamber of super-villains, sentient podcasts and Karl Marx’s wrestling career.
The podcast is here, or here on Mixcloud – let us know what you think, either in the comments below, on Twitter, on our Facebook fan page, by email or by retiring a running joke that has reached the end of its natural lifespan.
Sadly, because of the amount of space we have on our podcast hosting plan, we’ve had to take down the very first episode, and we’re going to have to take them down on a one-in, one-out basis from now on, but what we’re going to do is pop them up on Mixcloud where you can listen to them at your leisure, should two-year-old news and reviews be your thing.
Thanks from both Paul and me for listening over the past two years, and here’s to the next two.
The X-Axis – 21 November 2010
We’ve got tons of content on the blog this weekend. The double-length episode 50 of House to Astonish will probably go up more or less while I’m writing this, and check further down the blog for another music post and for a preview of tonight’s Survivor Series show.
Oh, and I’ve finally got around this week to listening to the Tom vs Aquaman podcast, which is basically recaps of Aquaman stories from the Silver Age. And it’s awesome, so I take this opportunity to endorse it for your relatively-bitesize listening pleasure.
This week’s X-books include Daken, X-23, X-Factor and adjective-free X-Men, and there’s also a bunch of debut issues and an anniversary. So…
Batman Incorporated #1 – Check the podcast for more discussion of this. But this is the launch issue of Grant Morrison and Yanick Paquette’s new ongoing Batman title, with a very odd and potentially interesting concept. As I understand it, Bruce Wayne is back from the dead, and he’s decided that he wants to expand the Batman brand. So he’s going to have, well, franchised Batmen all over the world. On one level, it’s a neat device to keep Dick Grayson in the Batman role, as the franchised Batman of Gotham. It’s also a seemingly ludicrous idea which, on further reflection is still ludicrous but potentially interesting. Batman is a substantial real-world brand, and the whole “dress as a bat to intimidate criminals” thing means that even in story, Bruce Wayne conceived the identity as a branding exercise. Of course, spawning hundreds of Batmen could dilute the brand, but you can cover that in the story. So it’s a weird idea but one that could work.
Survivor Series 2010
The WWE sure is making life easy for me with these columns. Once again, we’ve got a card that’s based around one or two core matches, with the rest filled out randomly at the last minute. Which means there’s less to say about them.
Survivor Series, in theory, is one of the major shows on the WWE’s pay-per-view calendar, although it long since drifted hopelessly from the original theme of ten-man elimination tag matches. It’s ironic that in a period when the WWE has generally been trying to build their shows around gimmick themes, Survivor Series has actually been going the other way, even while it holds on to the name as a relic from yesteryear. There’s one elimination match on this year’s show, and it’s very much a last-minute affair designed to get the Smackdown crew on the show.
The other thing to bear in mind about this show is that the WWE have got it into their heads that there’s a proud tradition of doing screwjob finishes in the main event at Survivor Series. This harks back to the notorious “Montreal screwjob” at Survivor Series 1997, when the outgoing Bret Hart was genuinely doublecrossed to bring about a result that he wasn’t willing to co-operate in. While the WWE seems to have finally stopped banging on about the resulting storyline – which it kept harking back to years after anyone in their right mind had stopped caring – the notion that you get weird double-cross finishes in Survivor Series main events seems to have taken root. Which is why they’re building this show around a main event whose central selling point is the promise of a ludicrous finish…
Charts – 14 November 2010
To the surprise of a lot of people, this week’s number one is “The Only Girl In The World” by Rihanna, which hangs on for a second week. So far as the record industry are concerned, this wasn’t really in the script. The general assumption was that Take That would top the charts with ease. But it turns out that the British really, really like that Rihanna record.
And so it’s a number 2 placing for “The Flood” by Take That.
For the benefit of the Americans out there, it’s worth recapping the story. Take That were a five-piece boy band who were hugely popular in Britain, and pretty successful in the rest of Europe, in the first half of the 1990s. With a core fanbase of teenage girls and a secondary fanbase of gay men (that’s not facetiousness, they started off playing the gay nightclub circuit), they updated the boy band format for a new generation and did it very, very well. And while the group had been manufactured, they served largely as a vehicle for songs written by one of their members, Gary Barlow.
The X-Axis – 14 November 2010
If you’re here for the podcast, then just a reminder that we’re skipping a week, and episode 50 will be up next weekend. (We did tell you on the last episode, but it was right at the end…)
It’s a very quiet week for the X-titles – just the two Forever titles – which is fortunate, to be honest, because I’ve not had time to read that many of this week’s books. But here are a few things I have read…
Amazing Spider-Man #648 – The lead-off issue for the new direction, which they’re billing as “Big Time.” Dan Slott’s been one of the writers on the book for years, but now that he’s the sole writer, he seems to be treating this as the start of an entirely new run. It’s a slight overstatement to say that this reads like a first issue – but only in the sense that it stops short of recapping Spider-Man’s origin and spelling out who J Jonah Jameson is. Against the background of kicking off a new Dr Octopus storyline, Slott takes us on a tour of Spider-Man’s supporting cast to remind us of what they’re currently up to, nudges a couple of characters like Marla Jameson into new roles for his new period, and sets up Peter Parker with a job that he’s actually suited for – a think tank role where he isn’t expected to work regular hours. And that seems to be the high concept; Peter finally gets a status quo where he doesn’t have to worry about the same thing that writers have been using as fallback drama for the last thirty years. In some ways a smart move, since all this “how can I pay the rent” stuff no longer works if readers are going to ask the obvious question “Have you considered borrowing some money from the Avengers?” On the other hand, I vaguely recall that they tried something similar at the start of the ill-fated John Byrne run and aborted it within six months, but hopefully Slott has a clearer idea of where he’s going with it.
Charts – 7 November 2010
(In case you’ve forgotten, or you just didn’t listen all the way to the end of last week’s podcast, House to Astonish episode 50 will be out next Sunday. In the meantime, regulars features…)
As expected from the midweeks, the top two singles trade places this week, with Cheryl Cole dropping to 2, and “The Only Girl in the World” by Rihanna climbing to number 1. With the charts having slipped back into the old ways of much-hyped singles entering at the top upon release – perhaps because that makes it possible to concentrate sales into a few days in a way that can’t be done when you’re promoting the third single from an album and it’s already available for download – it’s the first record to climb to the top since “Club Can’t Handle Me” by Flo Rida in August. (Yes, Bruno Mars went back to number 1 a couple of weeks ago, but he also entered at number 1 in the first place.)
It’s more of a European electropop record than an R&B track, which is hardly surprising, since it’s a Stargate production. And it’s a great single – stomping production, big chorus, and for once they’ve not gone overboard with the Autotune. One of the best number one singles of the year, actually.
The X-Axis – 7 November 2010
It’s getting late, there’s a lot to review, let’s get down to it. This week’s X-books include the first issues of Generation Hope and X-Men: To Serve and Protect, plus Wolverine #3 and, if you squint a bit, Namor #3. But first…
Amazing Spider-Man #647 – This is a triple-sized anthology issue, wrapping up the “Brand New Day” period, and so the five dollar price tag is pretty reasonable. Well, I say the “Brand New Day” period. They actually stopped using that tag months ago, and there’s something a bit contrived about dusting it off now. But this issue does mark the end of the thrice-monthly format and the team of writers, so there’s some legitimacy when it plays the “end of an era” card. In plot terms, this is a mixture of epilogue and tying up of loose ends, with a couple of throwaway elements to set up future stories. So we’ve got Vin Gonzales getting out of jail, Harry Osborn moving on, and Mary Jane showing up again to give her blessing to Carlie Cooper as the new love interest. Which some people won’t much care for, and in a sense, the fact that the creators still feel the need to do it can be seen as a demonstration that the reboot failed to extricate Peter from his marriage effectively.
Charts – 31 October 2010
Autumn – that very special time of the year when the leaves fall, the nights draw in, and anyone vaguely associated with The X Factor makes sure they have a new album out. This week, it’s judge Cheryl Cole, and the first single from her second solo album is “Promise This”.
Cole started off in 2002 as a member of Girls Aloud, the girl group formed on reality TV show Popstars: The Rivals, and who turned out to surpass all predictions for their durability. Wisely recognising that winning a talent show would only take them so far, their management more or less assigned them to become the front group for production studio Xenomania, leading to a string of generally well-received singles. Theoretically they’ve never split up; they went on hiatus in 2009 for the members for pursue solo projects – or, in other words, for Cheryl Cole to make solo albums, Sarah Harding to have a go at acting, and the other three to kill time. (Nadine Coyle’s first solo single will be on Sunday’s chart, and the midweeks have it at 26.) There’s no obvious sign of the group reforming.
Charts – 24 October 2010
I’m running behind on these again, so this is the chart from the week before last – plenty of new entries, few of them particularly noteworthy.
There’s a change at the top, but unusually, it’s the return of a previous number 1 – “Just The Way You Are (Amazing)” by Bruno Mars.
