Scouting for Girls lasted two weeks at the top, and looked to have a good chance of hanging on for a third.\u00a0 But as it turns out, they couldn’t quite keep up the sales for the whole week, in the face of a challenger that was gaining momentum.\u00a0 On the plus side, the new number one has been climbing over a few weeks, which is the sort of thing I like to see in the chart.\u00a0 It entered at number 13 three weeks ago, and had climbed up to number 2 last week.<\/p>\n
On the down side……well, it’s “OMG” by Usher featuring will.i.am<\/strong><\/em>, and yet another in the line of autotuned R&B tracks from the last few years.\u00a0 The YouTube version<\/a> isn’t embeddable, but I can’t say I’ll lose much sleep over that.<\/p>\n Usher Raymond has been around since the mid-90s, and first charted in Britain with “You Make Me Wanna”<\/a> in 1998.\u00a0 Like many R&B acts, his chart performance in the UK hasn’t been quite as consistent as in his native America.\u00a0 He regularly makes the top ten, but he’s not consistently a number 1 act.\u00a0 “OMG” is his fourth UK number one, the others being the aforementioned “You Make Me Wanna”, and “Yeah!”<\/a> and “Burn”<\/a> from 2004.\u00a0 The first two are pretty good; “Burn”, on the other hand, is a dreary ballad which I’d completely forgotten about.<\/p>\n This is his fourteenth top 40 hit as a lead artist, and fifteenth if you count his guest appearance on “I Need A Girl (Part One)” by P Diddy<\/a> in 2002.\u00a0 It also features the seemingly ubiqiutous will.i.am from the Black Eyed Peas, who notches up his first number 1 credit as a solo artist.\u00a0 His previous solo peak was number 2 when he guested on “Beep” by the Pussycat Dolls<\/a> in 2006.\u00a0 By my count, he’s now standing at eleven solo top 40 hits (one as “Zuper Blahq”), and 14 as a member of his group.\u00a0 And that’s before you get on to the records he produced for other artists.<\/p>\n Now, in fairness, “OMG” isn’t simply a generic autotune number; it’s got those crowd noise samples, so at least there’s something different about it.\u00a0 Still, it’s not a blow-away single by any means, and I really don’t see the appeal of applying that much autotune to somebody like Usher who can actually sing.\u00a0 But that’s 2010 for you.\u00a0 If the iTunes chart is anything to go by – and it usually is – this will only be at the top for a week, but a long reign was never on the cards after a four-week climb.<\/p>\n So much for that.\u00a0 What else do we have?\u00a0 Well, after being more or less becalmed for a month, the rest of the top 40 has finally woken up again this week, with nine new entries.\u00a0 Add that to the three from last week, and we have the following unlikely collection…<\/p>\n\n