“This Is the Night” by Clay Aiken (2003)

One critic’s view:  “‘This Is The Night’ has left absolutely zero cultural impact.  There are no prominent covers, no samples, no soundtrack placements.  The song has utterly evaporated.” – Tom Breihan @ Stereogum

The public’s view:  1.51 / 5.00, the worst #1 hit of the 2000s decade

The first season of American Idol successfully discovered the best unsigned singer in the United States.  The second season’s goal was to reveal the nation’s second-best unsigned singer – not counting anyone who had lost to Kelly Clarkson in the first season, and also not counting anyone who had ever been arrested or who had posed for nude photos or who was on the no-fly list or who had rotting green teeth or who was older than 24.  Clay Aiken was the second-best of this batch of the second-best, finishing behind a guy named Ruben Studdard.  Yet it is Aiken’s name – not Studdard’s – that is written in the record books as the proud owner of a #1 single.  The aforementioned record books are the only place you will find any reference to “This Is the Night”.  It is perhaps the most forgettable #1 in all of Hot 100 history, Tommy Page notwithstanding.

“This Is the Night” and its spiky-haired performer traveled a pothole-filled road to #1.  First, Aiken was voted off of Idol in one of the early rounds of competition.  Through a quirk in the show’s rules, he was permitted to return as a “wild card” contestant despite this initial rejection by the public.  The public then decided that they liked him after all.  Aiken was like Grandma’s Brussels sprout casserole:  something that grosses everyone out the first time they try it, but later becomes a favorite.

Even though he had endeared himself to many Idol viewers by the time of the final vote, Aiken still lost by a slim margin.  He was disappointed, but he didn’t pout or whine or accuse his opponent of cheating.  He didn’t urge his supporters to boycott Fox or to mail poop to Ryan Seacrest.  Instead, Aiken reacted to his loss by congratulating the winner and expressing gratitude for the opportunity to compete.  I’m glad that our society no longer accepts this pathetic defeatist attitude.  Everyone today now understands that contests don’t end simply because someone wins them.

Losing the final round on American Idol usually comes with a humiliating penalty.  The first season’s runner-up, a young man named Justin Guarini, was forced to co-star in a terrible movie before being sentenced to a lifetime of appearing in Dr. Pepper ads.  Clay Aiken’s contractually mandated chore was to perform “I’m a Little Teapot” with the aid of a sock puppet.  Just kidding – it was worse than that.  He was required to record “This Is the Night”, a generic composition that had already been disparaged by the Idol judges.  Releasing it as his first single was certain to put his career on a monorail to Nowhereville.  He’d be lucky if even Fresca or Mr. Pibb wanted him as a spokesman after that.

“This Is the Night” was designed to be a nondescript song that could be used in a talent competition without giving an unfair advantage to the person singing it.  It is musical wallpaper, with nothing interesting to offer aside from the absurdity of it becoming a #1 hit.  And Aiken was a decent enough singer, but his domination of the Hot 100 – and, therefore, of the national arts and culture scene – was far out of proportion to his TV fame.  Simon Cowell was the most popular figure on American Idol; the contestants were merely his foils.  The fate of a secondary character such as Aiken could never be as big of a phenomenon as the shooting of J.R. Ewing on Dallas, which sent the whole country into a maelstrom of angst until the beloved oilman recovered from his injury and the perpetrator was identified.  Claymania – which my spell-checker keeps changing to “Chlamydia” – was as relevant to most people’s lives as if someone had shot Squiggy on Laverne & Shirley, or had thrown a pie in the face of Higgins on Magnum, P.I.  Nonetheless, the lackluster entertainment environment of the mid-2000s allowed Aiken to spend a couple weeks on top of the chart.

Predictably, “This Is the Night” was not a golden ticket to sustained success in popular music.  Aiken did, however, branch out into politics, where he was able to once again demonstrate his proven skill at getting the second-most number of votes.

“I’m Real (Murder Remix)” by Jennifer Lopez featuring Ja Rule (2001)

One person’s view:  “The contrast between the rough verses and gentle hook doesn’t work as there’s nothing that brings them together seamlessly and the relationship they’re talking about doesn’t sound like one I want.” – Nerd with an Afro

The public’s view:  2.66 / 5.00, in the bottom third of #1 hits of 2001

The entire concept of success got flipped on its head in the early 2000s.  The most lucrative investments were stocks in dot-com companies with no viable plan for profitability.  The guy who received the most votes lost the presidential election.  And a red hot singer and actress couldn’t get her latest single to #1 until it was replaced by an inferior version that offended many of the listeners she was trying to attract.

Jennifer Lopez’s “I’m Real” was like an updated edition of the music that Janet Jackson had made in the 1980s, effortlessly wafting across the boundaries of pop, dance, and R&B.  This pleasantly harmless trifle of a song was perfectly suited for radio, but J. Lo’s management couldn’t care less whether the bumpkins out in Fly Over Land enjoyed hearing the track on their AM top 40 outlets.  Her label expected to sell only three or four CDs in all of Iowa; the real money was in the big cities along the coasts.  For the J. Lo album to go octuple platinum, “I’m Real” needed a hip-hop remix by someone with a deep sense of musical craftsmanship.  No such person was available, so the job was given to Ja Rule.

Ja Rule decided to change the parameters of the assignment.  Instead of remixing J. Lo’s hit, he composed an entirely new song with the same title.  And instead of doing a guest rap on one verse, as was the custom, he wrote himself into the new version on equal footing with the woman who was supposed to be the star.  The resulting duet was dubbed the “Murder Remix” of “I’m Real”.  The “Remix” part was a misnomer, as this was a total rewrite, but “Murder” was accurate because Ja Rule had managed to kill anything that was interesting about the original song.  He eliminated the catchy melody and added a Rick James sample that wears thin after being repeated in the background for four minutes.  It is the lyrics, though, that earn “I’m Real (Murder Remix)” a spot in the museum of “Bad” #1 Hits.

Ja Rule comes across as a thug on this track, but not a motivated type of thug who hustles to sell drugs or who gets into violent feuds with other rappers.  He can’t even be bothered to brag about his wealth or his sexual abilities, because that would require energy.  Instead, he just sits around and smokes so much weed that he forgets his own name and has to ask what it is.  J. Lo says she can’t go on without him, but never explains what attracts her to such a useless boyfriend.  She uses most of her lines to complain about other men, which suggests that she is settling for this guy because everyone else she knows is worse.  We are supposed to accept that the beautiful Jennifer Lopez can do no better than a dull stoner who calls her a “bitch”, but it isn’t plausible.

As Lopez’s label promoted Ja Rule’s rewritten track to urban radio stations, some of them pushed back against the transparent attempt to curry their favor.  J. Lo had previously marketed her music to suburban soccer moms, and now she was trying to have it both ways – literally, in fact, by releasing two different songs under the same title.  Disc jockeys at New York’s Hot 97 saw this as an insult, and they led a protest against Lopez’s needless use of the n-word in the “Murder Remix”.  At every appearance that J. Lo made in support of her single, she was forced to wearily utter some variation of the line “I am not a racist.”  When you’re having to say things like that on a promotional tour, maybe it’s best to just stay home.

The “Murder Remix” could be considered a catastrophe by many measures.  On the Billboard Hot 100, however, it was a huge success.  Ja Rule had stumbled into a loophole in the chart’s methodology.  Because his song was titled as a remix of “I’m Real”, it was credited with the airplay points from J. Lo’s original version as well as its own airplay.  Neither track was probably strong enough to hit #1 by itself, but this glitch in the formula allowed the “Murder Remix” to spend five weeks on top.  It worked out so well that J. Lo and Ja Rule repeated the stunt with “Ain’t It Funny” and “Ain’t It Funny (Murder Remix)”, prompting Billboard to introduce a new rule – the Ja Rule Rule, you could call it – to prevent another recurrence.

By the topsy-turvy standards of the new millennium, “I’m Real” is the perfectly ironic title for J. Lo’s endeavor.  What else could you call a song about an unrealistic and unrelatable romance, written as a cynical marketing ploy and then used in an artificial scheme to manipulate the singles charts?  It’s the audacity of it all, rather than any artistic merit, that makes it intriguing.

“With Arms Wide Open” by Creed (2000)

One person’s view:  “Overwrought, overproduced, and ugly.” – TumbleweedExtreme629 @ Reddit

The public’s view:  1.99 / 5.00, the worst #1 hit of 2000 to 2002

Many music critics look back fondly upon the grunge craze of the early ‘90s.  They curse the day that grunge was replaced by the execrable post-grunge, which committed the unpardonable sin of sounding like grunge despite being slightly later chronologically.  It should have been clear from the beginning, however, that grunge would have only a brief time as the dominant force in rock ‘n’ roll.  The movement’s hero was an iconoclast who disdained wealth and fashion, and whose success led to hundreds of others imitating him in an attempt to become wealthy and fashionable.  The contradiction could not be sustained.  Within a couple of years, the price of flannel shirts was bid up so high that no one aside from Eddie Vedder could afford the extravagant lifestyle associated with the genre.  Plus, life insurance companies wised up and stopped selling policies to anyone who was in a grunge band.  Post-grunge may not evoke the same warm reminiscences as grunge, but at least it has better actuarial statistics.

Creed is despised even more than the average post-grunge act.  I don’t feel like writing a long essay about all the specific reasons why.  Instead, I fed a bunch of reviews and online discussions about the band and their #1 hit into a word cloud generator, and this is what I got:

To the professional and armchair critics who write these reviews, it doesn’t matter that Creed has sold over 50 million CDs.  It also doesn’t matter that Creed’s reunion tour – a quarter century after the band’s peak – is one of the hottest concert tickets this summer.  The band will never appease its haters, and its haters happen to control certain honors such as induction into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame.  In that respect, Creed can be compared to Styx.  Like Styx, it even has a religious, overdramatic lead singer who often antagonizes people.  I guess Scott Stapp is the baritone version of Dennis DeYoung.

I’m going to be a contrarian again, as I was with Michael Bolton, and say that “With Arms Wide Open” doesn’t merit this torrent of contempt.  It’s an inspirational song about becoming a parent for the first time, and it can be appreciated for what it is.  Yes, the production is a bit overdone, and any newborn who enters the world to the sound of Scott Stapp’s angry deep-voiced barking is probably going to turn around and go back into the womb.  Plus, Stapp pronounces the word “open” as if it has a “u” in the second syllable.  But this was the start of a truly forgettable decade for popular music, and Creed’s #1 hit wins some points from me just by not being everything else on the charts at that time.

No other hard rock band has had a #1 song on the Hot 100 since the chart-topping feats of Creed and the similarly maligned Nickelback in 2000 and 2001.  I’m sure it will happen again someday, perhaps as part of a White Lion comeback, but for now we must contend with all of the hip hop, country, and Ed Sheeran that the gods of popular culture choose to bestow upon us.  We still have plenty of material for this blog.

“Thank God I Found You” by Mariah Carey featuring Joe & 98 Degrees (2000)

One person’s view:  “I’m a huge Mariah fan and I can say with complete confidence that this is her worst #1 by a wide, wide margin.” – musthavecupcakes_19 @ Reddit

The public’s view:  2.25 / 5.00, in the bottom third of #1 hits of 2000

Mariah Carey has had 19 #1 hits, more than anyone besides the Beatles.  When critics and listeners rank these 19 singles based on quality, “Thank God I Found You” is almost always at or near the bottom.  Does it deserve its bad reputation?  As Casey Kasem always said, there’s only one way to find out!  Actually, there are several ways to find out, but please keep reading anyway.

“Thank God I Found You” is a fairly standard sappy ballad, but it is not so bad that it can’t be saved by some great singing.  It is also the rare composition that can be improved by adding another vocalist and making it a duet.  Joe was an excellent choice for a duet partner, because he’s one of very few singers talented enough to share the stage with Mariah without having an egomaniacal persona that might risk upstaging her.  In fact, Joe doesn’t possess much of a persona whatsoever beyond having the most nonspecific moniker in all of music.  When I first heard that someone with the mononym Joe was featured on a Mariah Carey hit, I wrongly assumed that Fat Joe had gone on a diet and changed his name – much like how Snoop Doggy Dogg became Snoop, and P. Diddy left his P. in a urinal somewhere and became Diddy.  Joe could have been a much bigger star if he had spelled his name “Jeaux” or changed it to “Bald Joe”.

After Joe was added to the project, someone decided that this song needed a boy band too.  98 Degrees was the type of B-list group that a clueless rich dude might hire for his daughter’s birthday party, only for her to sulk in rage when she sees that it isn’t the Backstreet Boys or NSYNC.  Aside from this Mariah collaboration, the highest-charting hit by 98 Degrees was “Give Me Just One Night (Una Noche)”.  This latter song was a transparent attempt to cash in on the success of Latin-tinged pop music, with part of the title repeated in Spanish just to make the point obvious.  The endeavor might have made sense if 98 Degrees had even one member who was Latino, but the group was whiter than David Duke’s dandruff.  (Full disclosure:  My brother used to know one of the 98 Degrees guys when they both served on some kind of a committee together.  My brother doesn’t remember him ever lapsing into Spanish.)

Now we’re up to six credited singers on a song whose optimal number was more like 1.93.  This makes it a challenging listen because the vocalists are stepping on each other and you don’t know where to place your attention.  The video makes things worse by incorporating that irritating editing style in which one of the performers is shown for two or three seconds before abruptly cutting to someone else.  Roughly 80% of music videos use this technique, but I don’t know whether this trend started before or after 80% of Americans were diagnosed with ADHD.  Either way, I’m sure there is a causal relationship.

I’m no fan of ballads, as Savage Garden could tell you, but I think this song had the right ingredients to be a nice addition to Mariah’s catalog.  Unfortunately, there can be such a thing as too many ingredients.  Adding 98 Degrees to this track was like dumping a bag of Gummi Bears into the Crock Pot while the chili is cooking.  The four frat boys didn’t do a bad job, but Mariah and Joe could have handled the situation without their help.

“I Knew I Loved You” by Savage Garden (2000)

One person’s view:  “Its lethargic tempo would put me to sleep if the singing weren’t as bad as it were.” – dagwood525 @ Rate Your Music

The public’s view:  2.13 / 5.00, in the bottom 25% of #1 hits from 2000

Hearing Savage Garden’s “I Knew I Loved You” on the radio is like having your dog take a break from playing with you so that he can lick himself.  You could watch patiently while ol’ Woof Woof cleanses his private area for three and a half minutes, but it’s far better to turn your attention elsewhere.  Likewise, the first few notes of “I Knew I Loved You” should be your cue to change the station.

It isn’t just that the song is musically uninspiring, though it most definitely is.  It also has mawkish lyrics that idealize the man’s love interest more than any Lionel Richie ballad ever could.  Lead singer Darren Hayes describes his woman as having a thousand angels dancing around her.  She is the flawless female that he always envisioned and loved in his dreams, a bespoke soulmate who was created specifically to make his life complete.  (Yes, I know he was not actually singing about a female, but “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” applied to lite rock in that era just as it did to the military.  Let’s play along with the charade.)

This song can be contrasted unfavorably with Billy Joel’s classic “Just the Way You Are”, which reassures a woman that she doesn’t have to change any of her disgusting quirks and foibles to please her partner.  She probably eats spaghetti with her fingers and has a tattoo of a shirtless Michael Dukakis on an intimate area of her body, but Billy Joel loves her just the way she is.  “I Knew I Loved You”, on the other hand, suggests that Darren Hayes loves the woman only because she seems to meet the unattainable feminine standard that existed in his mind before they met.  This means that he simply hasn’t seen her defects yet, and now there will be pressure on her to maintain the illusion of perfection.  One poorly timed belch and this relationship is over.

Despite the cloying message, or perhaps because of it, this ballad spent 17 weeks at #1 on the adult contemporary chart.  Obviously, there must have been a major dearth of quality material for that format in early 2000.  Where’s Michael Bolton when you need him?

This was the Australian duo’s second and final Hot 100 #1, following “Truly Madly Deeply”.  I used to think that “Truly Madly Deeply” was a drag of a song, but it is positively peppy compared to “I Knew I Loved You”.  The only interesting musical feature of “I Knew I Loved You” is a key change near the end.  This type of modulation, moving all the notes up a half-step or even a full step, used to be common on hit records.  (“Livin’ on a Prayer” is perhaps the best known example.)  This shift can brighten the sound and give a song a burst of energy just as it might otherwise be wearing thin.  There still isn’t any energy in “I Knew I Loved You”, but the key change gives the listener hope that this bout with Savage Garden is about to conclude and that better times are ahead.

There are #1s that are more awful than this, just as there are things your dog might do that are more malevolent than giving himself an unseemly tongue bath.  The accusatory lyrics of “Separate Lives”, for example, are more repugnant than the ingratiating lyrics of “I Knew I Loved You”.  Ultimately, though, I have to agree with the critics and fans who classify this as the first truly, madly, deeply bad chart-topper of the 2000s.