Once a reliable refuge from the miseries of the modern world, the pop charts are becoming every bit as grim as real life. 2017 in particular has really seen things take a turn for the maudlin – but why is it happening? Why are we so obsessed with sad sounding songs at the moment?
It’s a question that has plagued mankind since 1994. Is East 17’s Stay Another Day a Christmas song? Or just a song that gets played and played and played at Christmas? What about The Power Of Love? What about 2 Become 1? We knuckled down into the musical theory of festive pop to figure everything out once and for all.
The X Factor often gets accused of being formulaic, but if that was really the case they wouldn’t need to waste so much of everybody’s time with auditions and bootcamps and the like. So we’ve tried to figure it out. We did some deep statistical analysis on the contest’s winners and now we’re ready to save Simon Cowell some serious man hours…
Weird though it seems, Sam Smith’s song – Writing’s On The Wall – has become the first Bond theme ever to top the charts. How has Sam Smith managed it? We stripped all twenty-three Bond songs down to their bare essentials to see if there was any explanation for it. Any explanation at all.