About This Time 20 Years Ago… It’s The Hits of January-ish 2005!!

The Hottest Hit On The Planet:

“LADIES AND GENTLEMAN!!!! THIS IS A JAZZE PHIZZLE PRODUCTSHIZZLE!!!!

(oh dear, it appears that Snoop-speak is contagious)

“THE PRINCESS IS HERE!!!”

What an introduction hey! An introduction made no less exhilarating by being virtually incomprehensible, unless you happen to speak fluent-Snoop.

It wasn’t just hyperbole either. Ciara literally was a Princess. Or at least Ciara’s middle-name was Princess.

They didn’t go with the stage-name Princess though.* They didn’t have to. For Ciara itself is a great popstar name. Her real name as well. Ciara was named after a Revlon fragrance. Classy.

You can’t have a middle name like Princess and not use that in your marketing. It wasn’t just that “THE PRINCESS IS HERE!!!!” introduction. It went further than that. For Ciara was also crowned The Princess Of Crunk&B.

I suppose that last sentence requires some explanation.

• Crunk&B was the name crunk-king Lil Jon gave to that moment when crunk – the most intense form of party-rap ever conceived – turned pop.

• Crunk&B was – to paraphrase earlier hit makers, Bel Biv Devoe – mentally crunk, smoothed out on the R&B tip with a pop feel appeal to it.

• Crunk&B was also quite possibly the silliest name for a genre ever concocted, at least until PBR&B came along, half a decade later.

Crunk&B did not last long. Just that couple of months stretching from Usher’s “Yeah” to… well, pretty much until “1, 2, Step.” Also just couple of records, all of which appeared to be related to one another: the original Lil Jon beat for “Yeah” ended up on “Freek-A-Leek” by Petey Pablo, who ended up on Ciara’s first hit “Goodies”, which was produced by Lil Jon, who produced and rapped on “Yeah”… under such circumstances, and given such non-existent competition, Ciara could be understandably miffed that she wasn’t crowned Queen!

Lil Jon, may have made “Yeah” and “Goodies”, but didn’t make “1, 2, Step”. Who made “1, 2, Step”? I think you already know…

“JAZZE MADE IT!!”

That would be Jazze Pha, aka Jazze Phizzle. “1, 2, Step” is, after all, a Jazze Phizzle Productshizzle.

Like Diddy in the 90s – meanwhile mugging the camera like Timbaland in the 00s –  Jazze was always just… there.

In the background of every Ciara video. Building his brand. Saying “sho’nuff” a lot, because that was the name of his record company. Credit where credit’s due, it takes a certain marketing genius to name your record company after a popular phrase, one that you can just drop randomly into everyday conversation.

Always-being-there-in-the-background and turning your record company name into a catchphrase would have been solid marketing strategies, if Jazze had more product to market. If he ever made more than this one hit. I mean, sure, there were other Jazze Phizzle Productshizzle’s.

Jazze may have been unsuccessful at transforming himself into the next Timbaland, but “1, 2, Step” sounds very much like a Timbaland production. A Timmy Lizzle Productshizzle, if you will. There’s the same stuttering drum machines, the same zapping lazer sounds, the same vaguely old-skool vibe – Jazze was specifically trying to recreate Afrika Bambaataa’s “Planet Rock”, Ciara seems to aiming more for a 90s-summertime-jam feel – the same miraculous appearance by Missy Elliott.

Missy’s rap is incredibly short. A mere eight lines. It’s both a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it scenario, and the song’s coolest moment.

If, in saying this, Missy was claiming that “1, 2, Step” was going to be a Number One – understandable, since it certainly sounds like one – then she was getting a little ahead of herself: “1, 2, Step” stalled at No.2 behind Mario’s “Let Me Love You.” Hopefully my declaring it The Hottest Hit On The Planet will make up for America’s foolishness.

Prematurely claiming the Number One position was not Missy’s sole boast on “1, 2, Step.” Presumedly feeling that she needed to zhuzh – as they said at the time – herself up in the presence of a “Princess”, Missy claims that she’s “sophisticated fun” and that she eats “filet mignon”, the latter being one of the quaintest and least audacious boasts I’ve ever heard a rapper make.

Missy’s Imperial Phase may have been over by 2005, but her ability to make old skool party anthems that sounded like they came from the future, was still unmatched.

A few months later, Missy and Ciara would get back together for another old skool party jam, this time one that sounded as though it came from the future!

Ciara got to do an acapella during those couple of seconds that Missy likes to insert about halfway into her club-jams, where she allows the listener to catch their breath, before Fatman Scoop starts yelling at them again. (“Lose Control” is a 9)

No need to catch your breath in “1, 2, Step” however, since its titular dance is so dead-simple.

Simple! Anyone could do it! No wonder it was such a big hit! It was “The Locomotion” of the 00s!

…Assuming of course that the above is how you do the “1, 2, Step.” For later in the video, Missy and the Princess demonstrate a very different, but still dead simple, variation.

That the “1, 2, Step” dance is so easy is extremely thoughtful of Ciara, since gravity-defying and co-ordination flummoxing dance moves of automatic, supersonic, hypnotic, funky fresh flexibility are usually more her style. If Ciara has a CV, she probably has “dancer” right at the top of her skills list, even before “crunk&B singer” or “I wrote ‘Goodies’”.

Deeply ironic then, that her best known dance-move is one that even I can do.

“1, 2, Step” is a 9.

*Did Ciara not call herself Princess because there was already a Princess, back in the mid-80s, whose “Say I’m Your Number One” was an early Stock Aitken Waterman hit (but not a Number One, it’s an 8)? I honestly have no idea.
Ciara had also previously been in a short-lived and not-famous-at-all girl group by the name of Hearsay, not to be mistaken for Hear’Say, the early 00s UK boy-and-girl group invented by proto-Idol reality show, PopStars.
Ciara was constantly having her pop-plans thwarted by briefly successful UK acts.

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Meanwhile, In Club Land:

If you had to select just one song to represent the condition of club music in the mid-00s, you could do worse than choose “Call On Me” by Swedish DJ Eric Prydz:

The song that made Steve Winwood and his floofy hair relevant again.

A hit well-known enough to feel familiar when it was dug up again decades later, but also not totally obvious. When the guys who came up with the idea of dropping “Valerie” into their DJ sets started dropping “Valerie” into their DJ sets, nobody rolled their eyes because it was too cheesy. It was exactly cheesy enough.

That a Steve Winwood sample might become the basis of the hottest hit in Europe made sense; the influence of the 80s in the 00s was inescapable. Virtually every disco-dance-floor filler sampled an 80s song. Surprisingly often, a Pointer Sisters song. Disco was back – referred to now as neo-disco – shooting Kylie and Sophie Ellis-Bextor and the Scissor Sisters up the charts.

Rihanna was about to go through her phase of sampling and quoting 80s hits on “S.O.S.” and “Don’t Stop The Music.” Justin Timberlake was fooling himself that he was the new Michael Jackson. The entire New York indie-sleaze scene was based on Blondie and Joy Division and every other New Wave band.

You know whose else’s influence was inescapable in the 00s? Daft Punk.

Who, it just so happened were very strongly influenced by the 80s as well. So it was like 80s-influence squared!

Thomas didn’t play it on his own, however. He played it with DJ Falcon, as part of their DJ-duo, Together. They played it all over Paris in 2002. Anybody who went to one of their DJ sets – and pretty much every DJ in Europe did – heard the sample and it blew their minds!

But, Thomas and DJ Falcon never intended to release their version of “Valerie.” They didn’t think of it as a potential hit record. They just used it as “DJ tool.” Despite my online moniker I don’t know enough about proper DJing to talk authoritatively about this, but I think this means it was just an mp3 file that they could trigger with their DJ-decks. And every time they did so, the crowd would go nuts and everyone would beg them, please release it for real.

Ministry Of Sound sent them a letter, begging the duo to release it on their label.

Ministry Of Sound was initially just a London nightclub, albeit a giant London nightclub, with a famously huge and expensive sound system. They began in the early 90s and within a few years had branched out into being a record label. Mostly they released DJ mixes, such as the Ibiza Annual compilations, or The Chillout Sessions, or Clubbers Guide. They occasionally also released big hit singles. They had at least something to do with the success of such classics as “9PM (Til I Come)” by ATB and “Rapture” by iiO.

Once Ministry Of Sound sent Thomas and DJ Falcon that letter, and after they replied that they weren’t interested, Ministry Of Sound started searching around for another DJ to put their name on it.

They had to hurry though, because a whole lot of other people had the same idea, including one dude who had done this sort of thing before. And by “this sort of thing” I mean stealing a Thomas Bangalter idea and sending it up the charts. A guy called Paul Glancy.

Paul had previously called himself Spacedust, a moniker that was weirdly similar to Thomas’s side-project, Stardust, of “Music Sounds Better With You”-fame. This is not a coincidence. Spacedust had released a record called “Music Feels Good With You,” which, indeed, sounds almost exactly identical to “Music Sounds Better With You.”

But Paul didn’t stop there.

Thomas had also come up with the idea of a record sampling Jane Fonda crying out instructions for an aerobic routine, but he – or Bob Sinclair, who Thomas gave the idea to, because he didn’t want to do it himself – was getting sent cease and desist orders from Jane. So Paul – or Spacedust – decided to record it himself, hiring some random girl to just pretend to be Jane Fonda. Turns out you can’t copyright aerobics instructions!

And that record – “Gym & Tonic” – became a UK Number One!

So, we have:

• an idea for a record springing from the mind of Thomas Bangalter
• …that gets stolen by some random dude, promoted by a video involving an aerobics class
• …and it goes to Number One in the UK, half a decade before an idea for a record…
• …springing from the mind of Thomas Bangalter…
• …gets stolen by some random dude, promoted by a video involving an aerobics class…
• …and goes to Number One in the UK.

Sometimes the arc of history bends so much, it turns into a loop.

Except that this time, the random dude would not be the same random dude. It would not be Paul Glancy. Or Spacedust. Or Red Kult. Or whatever he was calling himself that day. Paul may have been the first on the market with a version of “Call On Me”, but it would not be his version that was the hit.

Now that Ministry Of Sound had the concept and a DJ to put his name on it, they needed to make sure that everything was just right: so they called Steve in to redo his vocals, changing it from “Valerieeeeee, call on me” to “call on meeeeeeeeeee, call on me”, a subtle but important difference.

More important even than getting Steve to redo the vocals, was the video. And Ministry Of Sound knew exactly what sort of treatment was necessary. For it was the UK in the mid-00s and Lad culture was at its peak. FHM magazine had a circulation of more than half a million, with new launches by Zoo and Nuts selling about the same. Magazines that were famous for one thing: photos of sweaty girls in bikinis.

Nothing was ever going to top the hot sweaty girls in bikinis holding power tools porn of Benny Benassi’s “Satisfaction”, but the video of “Call On Me” was sexy enough that it made Tony Blair almost fall off his rowing machine 

For the “Call On Me” video they went with an aerobics class. Just like “Gym & Tonic.” An all-female aerobics class, plus one lucky dude, going through a routine consisting exclusively of pelvic thrusts and associated crotch-shots, few of which appear to offer any fitness benefits at all.

Not to forget the sequels Pump It Up Hi-Energy, Pump It Up Burn It, Lose It, Pump It Up Beach Body… and many more.

The UK charts of 2005 would soon be drowned in filter-disco covers of 80s classics:

• Uniting Nation’s with Hall & Oates “Out Of Touch “
• Cabin Crew with their version of Boy Meets Girl’s “Waiting For A Star To Fall”, simply called “Star To Fall”
• DHT with their version of Roxette’s “Listen To Your Heart”
• And on the slightly more credible side, Mylo’s version of Miami Sound Machine’s “Dr. Beat”, mashed with his own track “Doctor Pressure”, called “Dr. Pressure.”

I’m not sure if we should count Crazy Frog and its version of “Axel F” in all of this – nor the not-80s-related-at-all remix of Elvis’ “Little Less Conversation”, or the Audio Bullies vs Nancy Sinatra’s “Shot You Down” – but they all happened, too.

“Call On Me” is a 7.

Speaking of mash-ups…

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Meanwhile, in Mash-Up Land:

The mashup fad of the early 2000s – suddenly appearing at a party near you the moment DJs discovered that playing two certified jams at the one time was far more exciting than just playing one – reached its zenith when Linkin Park and Jay-Z decided to combine forces and unleash “Numb/Encore” onto the world.

Since Linkin Park were not exactly the kind of band that made certified party jams:

…this was something of an unexpected move. It shouldn’t’ve been though. The best mashups had always been the most surprising, combing two jams that couldn’t be less alike.

Such as The Strokes and Christina, or Destiny’s Child and Nirvana, or Dolly Parton and Röyksopp. Linkin Park was so the apotheosis of party music that their mere presence in any party-mix was always going to come as a surprise. Perfect mashup material, then.

The way most people remember the mashup fad is that it began with 2 Many DJs and their 2002 album As Heard on Radio Soulwax Pt.2. Or possibly Freelance Hellraiser’s “A Stroke Of Genius” from a year before.

This however involves the erasure of such hits as 1983’s unimaginatively titled “Do It Again Medley with Billie Jean”, in which Michael sang over the top of Steely Dan. Or “The Adventures of Grandmaster Flash On The Wheels Of Steel.” There was a long tradition of this stuff.

What’s more – and here’s another reason why we maybe shouldn’t be too surprised about Linkin Park’s involvement in this whole caper:

What’s even more, Mike’s mashups had featured none other than… Jay-Z! Rapping over the top of Smashing Pumpkins! Also Mobb Deep rapping over the top of Rage Against The Machine!! There was even one mashup of Wu-Tang Clan, and the Jackson 5, and Nine Inch Nails, all at once!!!

But again, they were never actually released. Maybe if it had been a few years later, they would have been. Or at the very least uploaded to Napster.

For by the early 2000s, mashups were everywhere! The Sugababes went to Number One in the UK with a mashup of themselves singing “Freak Like Me” over the top of Gary Numan’s “Are Friends Electric.” Kylie Minogue performed “Can’t Get Blue Monday Out Of My Head” at the 2002 Brit Awards.

Most relevantly for our purposes however, Danger Mouse released The Grey Album, in which he mashed up Jay-Z’s The Black Album over the top of The Beatles’ White Album.

The existence of The Grey Album gave Jay-Z ideas. And Jay-Z was having those ideas at the very same moment all those other hits were giving MTV an idea: an idea called MTV Ultimate Mashups.

And who would they invite to be the first rapper rapping on the show? The most obvious choice was Jay-Z. After all, Jay’s status appeared to be at an all-time high!

Booking Jay-Z would be a huge scoop for MTV. I mean, Jay-Z had recently, and very famously and publicly, retired from the rap game. He’d recorded The Black Album, effectively a concept album in which Jay-Z organizes his own farewell party, complete with giving his own thank-you speeches. Every second song on The Black Album seemed to exist purely to remind you that, once The Black Album was over, Jay-Z would be no more.

Or perhaps not. Since “Encore” does include the lyrics: “when I come back like Jordan.” Even before he had retired, Jay-Z was already planning his comeback. And MTV clearly wanted to be the stage upon which Jay-Z would make such a Jordan-like comeback. MTV wanted this “Encore,” and “MTV Ultimate Mashups” was their version of screaming till their lungs got sore!

Now they just needed a band for Jay-Z to share the stage with. They asked Jay-Z which band he wanted, and Jay said Linkin Park, a selection both sensible and inspired, what with their mutual love for epic productions. So Jay sent Mike an email.

He went to his computer and mashed a few Jay-Z and Linkin Park tracks together, to show Jay-Z how it would sound.

Also, because Mike was making power moves.

MTV’s initial plan was for there to be three bands and three rappers. But Mike was like:

“I don’t like the idea of sharing this… if you’ve got Linkin Park and Jay-Z, I don’t think you need to share that episode with anybody else.”

So he knocked out three mashups overnight, effectively to eliminate any potential competition. Jay’s response was – according to Mike – “oh shit!” Jay was almost certainly referring to the mashups themselves, but I suspect he was also quite impressed by the hustle.

Now, Jay obviously hadn’t known beforehand that Mike knew how to mash. No one did. They probably should have guessed though. After all, Linkin Park records had always sounded like mashup records to begin with, what with all the rapping on top of rock-riffs and rockin’ out on top of hip-hop inspired beats and scratching noises.

As best as I can tell, there was never any actual ‘Hybrid Theory’ beyond just, “wouldn’t it be fun to play rap, and rock, and electronic sounds all at the same time?!?” There was never any mathematical formula or equation behind the theory. ‘Hybrid Theory’ was just a vibe. An aesthetic. A mantra. A brand statement.

“Numb/Encore” was simply taking this brand statement to its logical conclusion.

After Jay-Z and Linkin Park, there should be no more. Mike’s power move paid off!

“Numb/Encore” is a 7.

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