About This Time 20 Years Ago…

It’s The Hits Of October-ish 2005!

The Hottest Hit On The Planet…

Let’s check it out!

Is “My Humps” by the Black Eyed Peas the least sexy song ever written about “lady lumps”?

Is “lady lumps” the least sexy term ever devised to describe a woman’s curves? Well, yes. Or, at least, very possibly. “Lady lumps” has, after all, an intimidating amount of competition.

A quick Google of “lady lumps synonyms” has reminded me of the existence of lollybags, boobage, breasticles, puppies, and headlights. Not to forget bazookas, knockers, melons, jubblies, jugs, norks, hooters, and – apparently, although I’ve never heard of it before – chi-chis.

Now, all the synonyms mentioned thus far specifically regard breasts. “All that breast inside your shirt”, as Will.i.am put it, at that point of the “My Humps” song-writing process when – despite having used neither jubblies nor jugs nor norks – he decided he couldn’t be bothered thinking of anything better.  But ladies have other lumps. As Fergie explains it, she has “lady lumps” “in the back and in the front.”

Will.i.am also recognises this fundamental truth, asking:

• “What you gonna do with all that ass?
  All that ass inside your jeans?”

Will.i.am neglects to select tush, derriere, caboose, keister, heinie, and – apparently, although I’ve never heard it before – bahookie.

He even ignores “moneymaker” despite Fergie’s efforts in trading her physical assets for financial ones being the song’s primary theme. “My Humps” is basically James Brown’s “Hot Pants” philosophy – best illustrated by the funk classic’s full title “Hot Pants (She Got to Use What She Got to Get What She Wants)” – updated for the McBling generation.

It’s probably best that Will.i.am didn’t go with either chi-chis or bahookie. He already pushed the art of the entendre to breaking point on lyrics such as: “mix your milk with my Coco Puffs, milky, milky coco, Mix your milk with my Coco Puffs, Milky, milky, riiiiiiiiiiiiiiiight” I’m not even sure what’s supposed to be Coco Puffs and what’s supposed to be milky milk in this scenario.

The Black Eyed Peas don’t perform “My Humps” much anymore, and Will.i.am has indicated that it’s his rap verse that is the cause.

Even Will.i.am possesses self-awareness enough to realize that “Mix your milk with my Coco Puffs… milky, milky, riiiiiiiiiiiiiiiight” was never going to earn him a five- microphone rating in The Source (or even have The Source deign to give them a review at all!)

To give you an idea of the subterranean levels of street-cred that Black Eyed Peas have in the rap game, The Source:

– has only ever reviewed one Black Eyed Peas album: Bridging The Gap, one of their early pre-Fergie efforts. It got a respectable three microphones.

For, incredibly, there was a time that the Black Eyed Peas were the kind of rap group that would get reviewed in The Source.

They had come out of the socially-conscious rap scene. The positive rap scene. They counted De La Soul as contemporaries. For a little there while it looked as though they might carry the mantle of the hip-hop group that white liberals liked.

Back then, they looked like this:

Maybe they remembered what happened to Arrested Development, because a few years later the Black Eyed Peas were a very different kind of hip-hop group. The kind of hip-hop group that white pop fans liked. The kind of hip-hop group that made records with Justin Timberlake – anti-war protest records with Justin Timberlake, but still.

The kind of hip-hop group that made “My Humps.”

Black Eyed Peas still dressed as though they were part of that positive rap scene, or at least a cartoon parallel universe version of that scene (everything they did seemed like a cartoon parallel universe version of something… “My Humps” a cartoon parallel universe version of a sex-jam)

Black Eyed Peas were more likely to wear a newsboy flat cap than a back-to-front baseball cap.

The Black Eyed Peas were also one of the most diverse outfits in pop, certainly the most diverse in hip-hop… they had a Black man, a Filipino-American, a Mexican-American, and a white girl! Something –  or someone – for everyone! It should have made them more likeable…they could have been a Sly & The Family Stone for the new millennium – they had even sampled “Family Affair” early on, on the genuinely funky “Weekend” – but instead, somewhere along the way, they became a novelty party band instead.

Instead, they made “My Humps.”

“My Humps” was originally written with the Pussycat Dolls in mind.

And honestly, that makes so much sense; the most annoying “rap” group of the decade, writing a song for the cheeziest hyper-sexualized girl group of the decade. There was no way that this wasn’t going to be an era-defining hot mess… so Will.i.am decided to keep the song for himself, already non-existent street-credibility be damned.

The Pussycat Dolls probably weren’t too upset about that though, since he’d given them “Beep” instead, which is pretty much the same song. The primary difference between “My Humps” and “Beep” is that on “Beep”, Will.i.am doesn’t even bother with the entendres, he just inserts a “beep” sound instead. For most of the song he’s just rhyming “beep” with “beep”, and yet that’s still less lazy writing than rhyming “they say I’m really sexy” with “the boys they wanna sex me.”

Will.i.am says that he wrote “My Humps” in the character of his hot cousin, Mimi. I’m not sure that I would have written a perve-song about my cousin, but that’s why he’s Will.i.am and I’m just DJ Professor Dan.

More specifically, “My Humps” is written from the perspective of Mimi, recording an answer record to the Ying Yang Twins “Wait (The Whisper Song).” Although this is the G-rated version – well, more G-rated version – Will.i.am is referring to the original X-rated version goes “wait til you see my …”

Then again, Will.i.am says a lot of things.

– to which “My Humps” belongs –

Other than “Don’t Phunk With My Heart”s Bollywood sampling – specifically Asha Bosle, the singer that Cornershop’s “Brimful Of Asha”, a song with its own pervy lyrics about breasts, was written about – I’m not getting that at all.

I’m mostly feeling discombobulated that a group that seems to go out of its way to annoy as many people as possible would record a concept album about a major religion.

For the Black Eyed Peas are annoying.

They even appear to have intentionally chosen stage-names for the express purpose of inconveniencing people who have to type out pop star names for a living. Not just Will.i.am, which is bad enough, but good God… ‘Apl.de.Ap?’

It could have been worse: Will.I.am originally put himself out into the world as Will 1X. His first rap group – signed by Eazy mutha%$@^&#^# E – was A.T.B.A.N Klann (A Tribe Beyond a Nation).

Ridiculousness was baked into the Black Eyed Peas from the start.

So when Will.i.am decided that he needed to write a sex jam, he naturally had write the most ridiculous cartoon version of a sex jam of all. A ridiculous cartoon version of a sex jam that blatantly samples an equally ridiculous sex jam, “I Need A Freak” by – I kid you not, this was their actual band name – Sexual Harassment… which is most likely what you would be accused of if you sang, or otherwise quoted, any of “My Humps” in public.

“My Humps” is a 4.

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Meanwhile in UK Girl Group Land…

Keisha Buchanan liked a boy.

The boy may or may not have liked her back.

Keisha kept on dropping hint after hint that she wanted to go on a date with this hunk. She’d mention a movie she’d heard was good. But instead of suggesting they go see it together, he’d suggest she go see it and report back to him if she liked it. Maybe he just wasn’t very bright. Or maybe he’d heard about Keisha’s reputation… for the word around town was that Keisha Buchanan was a mean girl.

How did Keisha get this reputation? Why were reporters constantly asking the other members of the Sugababes whether they were afraid of her? Why, whenever one of the other girls left the Sugababes – and they did seem to leave far more often that was the case with other girl groups – did everybody automatically point the finger at her?

To understand this, we need to explore some Sugababes lore.

Before the Sugababes, there was All Saints, the mature, grown-up version of the Spice Girls, a group put together and managed by Ron Tom. Not everything All Saints did was class – the world is still mystified by their R&B cover of “Under The Bridge” – but “Never Ever” and “Pure Shores” are eternal classics.

Then, Ron Tom had the genius idea of putting together a teenage All Saints. “A teenage All Saints” wasn’t exactly the marketing concept Ron Tom had in mind, though.

Ron Tom was more thinking about creating a girl group version of a United Colors of Benetton ad.

So, we have Keisha, who was Jamaican. We have Mutya, who was half-Filipino, and whose name nobody has ever pronounced correctly. And we have Siobhan, who was Irish… obviously.

Presumedly, the United Colors of Benetton influence is why they went with a white background for the video of “Overload”, their first hit, and the most impossibly gloomy girl group song since the gory days of the Shangri-Las, complete with a blistering guitar solo. “Overload” is not your typical girl group song.

The message was clear. The Sugababes were different from other girl groups.

I’ve heard grown men refer to them as “scary.” They referred to themselves as “moody cows.” They were constantly rumoured to be splitting up, constantly rumoured to be having fights. On one tour, they had to cancel two nights in Dublin because of a fight, apparently over “Toxic” by Britney Spears. It has never been revealed which Sugababe took the controversial anti-“Toxic” position.

It wasn’t long before the first of many Sugababes to leave, left. It was Siobhan. She excused herself to go to the toilet in the middle of an interview in Japan and never came back.

Leaving the Sugababes would become part of the Sugababes tradition.

It was usually rumoured to be the result of Keisha’s bullying. They were teenage girls after all. According to the Popbitch gossip-website, Keisha and Mutya liked to communicate via a secret girl language. A secret girl language called Avagab. Some people call it “backslang.” It basically involves a an incredibly annoying and inefficient means of communication.

It wasn’t that much of a secret though – teenagers spoke it all over north London – but somehow Siobhan had never learnt it.

So with Siobhan disappearing into the Tokyo sewerage system – presumedly – the Sugababes needed a replacement. They found Heidi.

Heidi had been in Atomic Kitten, the Sugababes closest rivals for girl group chart supremacy. If Sugababes were “moody cows,” Atomic Kitten were… just your typical ballad singing girl group with a penchant for singing 80s classics like “The Tide Is High” and “Eternal Flame.” But Heidi had left before they’d become famous, and after a stint with SAW that went nowhere, ended up in The Sugababes.

Heidi looked like your stereotypical girl group member, which may have helped the Sugababes widen their appeal. Previously they were the girl group for people who didn’t like girl groups. Now they could also appeal to people who did like girl groups.

So they mashed up “Freak Like Me” with “Are ‘Friends’ Electric?” and filmed a video in which they were vampires.

The “Freak Like Me” video wasn’t just a freaky video; there was a sub-text. As the first single released with the new line-up, the video had to answer the question of whether Heidi would be accepted by the O.G. Sugababes? Was Heidi freaky enough to be a Sugababe?

In the video it was decided that yes, Heidi was freaky enough. In real life though, it wasn’t so simple… Keisha and Mutya had been Sugababes since high school… they’d worked hard for this. They didn’t appreciate an interloper suddenly being parachuted in. Particularly not one who had been an Atomic Kitten. Mutya claims that she refused to talk to Heidi.

This new Keisha-Mutya-Heidi version of The Sugababes totally dominated the charts, with three Number Ones – “Freak Like Me”, “Round And Round” and “Hole In The Head” – even before “Push The Button” came along.

This success wasn’t solely due to the new line-up, it was also due to the new production team: Xenomania. But Xenomania weren’t involved in “Push The Button” – they’d moved on to producing Girls Aloud – so let’s move on as well.

Instead, “Push The Button” was produced by an American, Dallas Austin:

Not exactly the guy you would expect to come up with such fizzy robotic ringtone electro-pop goodness as “Push The Button”… although he had just worked on Gwen Stefani’s “Cool” and a bunch of P!nk’s more rock-oriented hits, so maybe he was trying to branch out.

Thus, we come back to Keisha’s crush.

So, that crush that Keisha had… who was it with? All we know is that it was somebody else who was collaborating with Dallas at the time.

Looking at Dallas’ producer credits, it was either somebody not very famous or JC Chasez, the second most popular member of N*Sync (Dallas was also working on a Duran Duran comeback album at the time, but I think we can discount that scenario)… and Dallas is giving Keisha some advice: “you’ve got to tell him to push that button.”

Keisha clearly wasn’t being as assertive with this guy as she was in the video.

She should have been more like Mutya… after all, her sexy ass got him in a new dimension!

How good was “Push The Button”?

Well, legend has it that The Sugababes had said no to “Don’t Cha.”

Possibly this was because they tended to at least co-write their own songs, but I like to think it was  because they’d already come up with a song that did everything that “Don’t Cha” did, but multiple times better… as was evidenced when “Push The Button” knocked “Don’t Cha” off of the Number One spot in the UK.

“Push The Button” was the Sugababes finest – and biggest – moment, but it wasn’t enough to stop the Sugababes curse from striking again.

This time however it was Mutya who decided that the time had come for her to leave. She had good reason to. She had just given birth and was suffering from post-natal-depression. You do not want to be on the pop-star promotional treadmill whilst suffering from post-natal-depression.

So out went Mutya.

“That’s who has replaced me? What a diss,” as Mutya would say in Groove Armada’s “Song For Mutya”, more or less 17 months later, a line that simply must be about Amelle, no matter how much Mutya swears that it’s not.

A Mutya-less Sugababes just didn’t feel right. It was Mutya who had always been responsible for most of the “moody cow” aesthetic. Without Mutya, the Sugababes would ultimately end up singing a Bruno Mars rewrite of “I’m Too Sexy”, just a couple of weeks before Keisha herself was fired – FIRED! – by the Sugababes management, in circumstances that remain unclear.

• Had Keisha really been fired via a text message?
• Had her replacement already started re-recording Keisha’s vocals a week before Keisha was informed that she was out of the band that she had been in from the very beginning?
• Had Keisha been fired for her bullying? For being the mean girl?

I don’t believe it. I find it hard to imagine Keisha as the bully she is so often made out to be. The proof is in the “Push The Button” origin story: a bully would not have waited patiently for him to come and get it. A bully would have made sure that he knew that he could say it and she’s with it.

A bully would have made the guy push the button.

“Push The Button” is a 9.

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Meanwhile, On Indie Dancefloor Land:

Everybody was talking about the Arctic Monkeys.

Everyone in the UK, anyway.

The music press, the proper press… mostly they were asking the same question that the Arctic Monkey’s themselves asked with their follow up EP:

Arctic Monkeys gave them a lot to talk about.

There was the bad band-name for starters. People used to make fun of the Arctic Monkeys’ name: “there are no monkeys in the Arctic”, people would say. “They’re not going to get far with a shit name like that,” others would add.

Everybody seemed to agree that Arctic Monkeys was the worst band name since… if not Hootie & The Blowfish, then definitely the similarly frigid Test Icicles, who had received some hype a couple of months earlier, almost entirely due to having a stupid name (Australia has a punk band called The Testeagles but no-one ever gave them shit for it)

Turns out that Arctic Monkeys is a derogatory term for northerners. An old drunk shouted it at them one time.

For Arctic Monkeys were northerners. From Sheffield, South Yorkshire – checks that Sheffield is considered part of “the North” and not “Midlands”… seems to be right on the border, but I think it qualifies? – a decent sized town that has produced a bunch of big bands – Def Leppard, The Human League, Pulp – but is still far enough away from everything that the boys didn’t have anyone to teach them how this rock’n’roll thing should be done.

Which therefore led to the other thing about the Arctic Monkeys that people loved to talk about.

MySpace had been around for a couple of years at this point and it was really beginning to explode. Mostly it was filled with emo kids, or at least kids with emo hair.

What Alex Turner didn’t have though – and never would have – was a MySpace profile.

Alex Turner was an old-fashioned sort of guy. He wasn’t into all this newfangled social media. He didn’t even seem to like the Internet. Alex Turner was into old stuff. Take a look at the video for “I Bet You Look Good On The Dancefloor” again. It very intentionally looks exactly like an old Old Grey Whistle Test episode. Presumedly one from 1984.

I mean, this was a guy who snootily wrote the lyric “there’s only music, so that there’s new ringtones,” a line that could only ever be written in 2005.

And yet, for reasons beyond their control or understanding, the Arctic Monkeys became known as “that ‘MySpace’ band.”

That band that became famous on the Internet. Because they were famous on the Internet, they weren’t just written about by music journalists; they were written about by technology journalists. They were written about by business journalists. There was an article about them in The Economist! Naturally the headline was “Monkey Business,” no doubt much to the chagrin of the Black Eyed Peas. It was all so very not-rock’n’roll.

All because, months and months before they had actually released anything official, you could listen to a bunch of Arctic Monkeys songs on their MySpace profile.

But in an era in which the music industry was battling to stop their music being leaked online – even going as far as completely rewriting and recording albums whenever they did get leaked – putting your music up on the Internet, capable of being played with a click on the screen, seemed revolutionary.

The Arctic Monkeys didn’t come up with this new distribution channel out of some grand marketing strategy. They didn’t come up with it at all. They didn’t make their MySpace profile. They didn’t even know what MySpace was.

“We just thought that was how it worked. We didn’t know anyone else in a band.”

Also: “We thought rather than send our demos to record labels, let’s just give them to fans and make the gigs better.”

And indeed, their gigs did get better.

Soon there were people showing up to gigs and singing along to all the words. And going “bah bah bah” to all the guitar riffs.

People simply knew the songs because one of their fans, who had been given one of the demo CDs, had built the band a MySpace profile. That feels strangely inappropriate now.

And nobody thought anything of it.

Other fans – or perhaps the same fan, who knows? – uploaded the CD to a torrent site, and it ended up being referred to as “Beneath The Boardwalk.”

It’s starting to feel as though the entire early career of the Arctic Monkeys was completely and utterly random, everyone involved making it up as they go.

Other fans took a more old fashioned approach, burning CDs and leaving them on bus seats for kids to find. There was something about the Arctic Monkeys that made fans want to help them out and spread the word, without the band itself having ever suggested it. Or really understanding what it was that their fans were doing.

None of which would have mattered if the songs weren’t great. Otherwise those CDs would have ended up on landfill, and Arctic Monkeys would have invented “landfill indie” instead of just inspiring it.

One reason for teenage fans taking the initiative to spread the word about a band that wasn’t their own was likely that the Arctic Monkeys felt like one of their own.

Whilst the rest of the indie rock gods of the era – your Brandon Flowers, your Julian Casablancas, your Pete Dohertys – were in their mid-20s – whilst Jack White was 30 and Alex Kapranos from Franz Ferdinand even older than that – Arctic Monkeys were only slightly older than the girl on their single cover.

She had snuck out to go drinking with her mates when “the design company took a snap of me and asked for my contact details.” Before she knew it she found herself on the CD cover:

And also selling the hottest record in the country.

“I Bet That You Look Good On The Dancefloor” was huge.

It was a UK Number One. Not just a UK Number One. But:

• A Debuted At Number One.
• A Debut Single Debuting At Number One.
• A Debut Single Debuting At Number One despite the fact that surely every indie kid with an Internet connection had already torrented the thing.

Knocking off the Sugababes in the process.

Not that the girls seemed to mind, since they – recognizing a perfect pop song when they heard one – would soon cover it (sans Mutya since she had already left)

What a way to begin your career.

With that intro: even before the song properly starts you’ve churned through not just one, but two of the greatest intros in indie dancefloor history, the Chunk-A-Chunk, and The Great Big Guitar-Riff Overture, before finally lurching into the mother of all 00’s rock grooves. It sounds as though the band are having a ball, but very possibly not; because the entire band seems to think that the song is rubbish.

That’s how you know that Arctic Monkeys are a proper serious indie band: Like all serious indie bands since the dawn of time, they hate their big hit (unlike most such serious indie bands though, they still play it every night).

They are a bit crap. Some of it doesn’t make a whole lot of sense: if the “your shoulders are frozen” line is about the girl giving Alex the cold shoulder – as the Internet informs me it is, although I always thought it was describing her dance moves – then why is she making eyes at him?

Also, the “Rio” reference seems a little random. All of which makes me wonder: Why,Alex, in the year between your demo being uploaded onto MySpace and the actual official canonical single recording, didn’t you come up with something better? You’re supposed to be the poet – the Morrissey, the Jarvis Cocker, the Mike Skinner – of your generation!

Then again, “I Bet You Look Good On The Dance Floor” is the perfect encapsulation of a lifestyle.

I spent a lot of time – pretty much every Friday night, and a great many Saturdays – on the dancefloor in 2005. “Banging tunes and DJ sets and dirty dance floors and dreams of naughtiness”…

..Ah Alex Turner. You were describing my life. You were describing a whole lot of lives.

Which feels like my cue to embed Ladytron’s “Destroy Everything You Touch”, 2005’s best song for dancing like a robot from 1984, yeah, 1984.

“I Bet You Look Good On The Dance Floor” is not just a banger, it’s a bang, b-b-bang-oh and it’s a 9.

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