(Credits: Far Out / NASA / Uwe Conrad)
As a 2000s baby myself, I feel I am more than qualified to speak about what I humbly consider to be the best era in music. Not that I’m biased.
This was the decade that began in indie sleaze and ended in The Black Eyed Peas’ ‘I’ve Got A Feeling’ worming its way into our brains for the rest of eternity – and you can’t go from one extreme to the other more than that. In the meantime, you had the advent of Florence and the Machine, the heyday of the Arctic Monkeys, the cultural resurgence of Kylie Minogue, and the single greatest moment in musical television history – when Beyoncé came out to sing with Alexandra Burke in The X Factor final 2008. Life peaked.
The 2000s was also a time when the entertainment industry was massively overhauled towards the landscape that we’re well accustomed to today. The creation of reality TV music competitions like Pop Idol, Britain’s Got Talent, and The X Factor breathed entire new life into the charts, with the songs of their contestants crashing into the top 40 like the Big Bang. There were numerous stars birthed in this process, including the aforementioned Alexandra Burke, as well as others like Leona Lewis and Gareth Gates whose rags to riches tales were lapped up by audiences, but probably less so by the artists who were trying to break out via a more traditional route.
Take the great chart battle for Christmas number one in 2009 as the prime example – X Factor was at its cultural peak, and its winner that year, Joe McElderry, was vying for the top spot with his cover of Miley Cyrus’ seminal hit ‘The Climb’. But he was being chased up the rear end by Rage Against the Machine’s ‘Killing in the Name’ after a public campaign was launched to ensure Cowell’s dominance over the apparently meaningful annual chart position was ended. It was nail-biting stuff, really, and in the end, Rage clinched it, leaving the reality TV reign in ruins. This was the shake-up of the status quo because – well, the squeaky-clean Saturday night entertainment singers had blown everyone else out of the water up to that point.
Indeed, the song that set the precedent for the singing show supremacy actually went on to be the best-selling single of the decade and, up until 2015, the entire 21st century. That was Will Young and his double A-side winners’ record from Pop Idol 2002, ‘Anything is Possible/Evergreen’. Scoff all you like but cast your mind back 22 years, and you will remember just how huge this was – Young became the holder of the fastest-selling debut single in UK chart history, which stayed at the top spot for three weeks and was subsequently certified three times platinum. It’s really no mean feat.
Of the top ten songs of the 2000s, Young is joined by two other reality TV protégés – Gareth Gates’ version of ‘Unchained Melody’ and Alexandra Burke’s cover of Leonard Cohen’s ‘Hallelujah’ take the sixth and seventh spots, respectively, leaving the rest to be filled by more traditional pop and rock acts… and the ones ultimately who arguably have more staying power in the industry. You’ve got classics like ‘It Wasn’t Me’ by Shaggy, ‘Sex on Fire’ by Kings of Leon, and ‘Chasing Cars’ by Snow Patrol all in there, demonstrating that the Noughties charts weren’t purely made up of TV cheese.
OK, it may not have been much of a comparison to Oasis or ‘Candle in the Wind’ – the best-selling single of the decade previous – but in many ways, Will Young’s ‘Anything is Possible/Evergreen’ was the perfect epitome of the zeitgeist of 2000s music, and it’s a badge I’ll wear with pride. The only thing left to say is to underestimate TikTok at your peril because if the surge in reality TV two decades ago is anything to go by, the music industry is bound to keep changing.
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