And the nominations for the perfect pop song are…
Since Easter and Passover coincide this week, and I’m off the carbs to remember the miracle of Moses and the Israelites escaping persecution in Egypt (oh is that the ironyometer exploding?), here’s a departure from the normal prosaic column, in memory of Buzzfeed and the other sites that went mad on list articles (listicles) in the late 2000s and 2010s. Now we have TikTok, which serves up 15-second dopamine hits and ruins people’s attention spans.
To that end, here are the songs in the running for my entirely subjective but also entirely objective list of Perfect Pop Songs. I’ll touch on structure, lyric, mood and timbre, and the song’s status as the ultimate piece of ear candy. All six songs are united by major keys, upwardly mobile melodies and bits of nonsense, be it titles that do not occur in the lyrics or occur too much or humorous noises made with the mouth.
All of them date from the best of all decades: the 1990s. Let’s start with two songs from 1990 itself:
Deee-lite – Groove Is In The Heart and Jellyfish – Baby’s Coming Back
Russian DJ Dmitry Brill and his wife, Ohio-born singer ‘Lady Miss’ Kier Kirby were signed to Elektra Records, who threw money behind this irresistible slice of pop, which drafts in funkmaster Bootsy Collins and Tribe Called Quest rapper Q-Tip. It means very little: the Dr Seuss book Horton Hears A Who gets a reference, while Kier rhymes ‘malicious/delicious’ and sings of a ‘succotash wish’.
Throughout it all, there’s a sampled bass lick and, with disco tambourines running underneath, all sorts of percussive vocal effects: a pop, a brrrr and some na-na-nas. Simultaneous retro and contemporary, analogue and electronic, it cannot fail to lift your mood. It is no wonder that the band emerged on the New York club scene: this is visual music built for dancing, not for headphones.
As for Jellyfish, their song was taken to the top of the UK charts by McFly after singer Tom Fletcher discovered the band and wanted to ape their psychedelic pop sound. This one is in the optimistic key of D-flat, with stand-up drummer Andy Sturmer’s boisterous voice tripping over dotted rhythms and singing of ‘dumb mistakes’ and of being a ‘beaten man’. The chorus has ‘yeah yeah’ and ‘woo-woo’ backing vocals and a new chord pattern, followed by a proper middle eight which mentions ‘wild oats’, to hook the listeners. There’s even a part where the listener can clap along to the ‘knock three times’ line. It is perhaps the only pop tune ever to set ‘I’d buy a handgun’ to West Coast harmonies.
To paraphrase DJ Mark Radcliffe: how were there 50 better songs for sale on the record racks the week it hit number 51 in Spring 1991? (A glance at OfficialCharts.com tells me Cher was number one with the glorious Shoop Shoop Song, with Chesney Hawkes descending after his One and Only smash.)
The Cardigans – Lovefool and Hanson – Mmmbop
Here are two songs from the middle of the decade, one from some Swedes and the other from a trio of Oklahoma teenagers.
Lovefool, which gained prominence in Baz Luhrmann’s take on Romeo & Juliet, kickstarted The Cardigans’ great period where they scored worldwide hits. They haven’t put out a record since 2005, perhaps because they did so well out of copyrights like this UK number two hit that was kept off the US Hot 100 entirely by a stupid rule about songs needing to be released physically to chart.
With verses in the key of A minor and a chorus that bursts into the key of A major, a discotastic bassline and hi-hat cymbals drive the song on, with various earwormy guitar sounds popping up every few bars. It is the sonic bed on which Nina Persson’s gentle complaints float: her ‘problem’, which she ‘desperately ponders’, is that she ‘can’t care about anything but you’. Her plea to be loved is desperate, and she even wants her beloved to ‘pretend that you love me’. The Swedish-English of the second verse is fun: ‘Reason will not lead to solution/ I will end up lost in confusion’. As we will see later, writing in one’s second language can lead to unorthodox choices.
When I went to see Hanson play in London a few years ago, I was impressed with their pop/rock sound, but everyone in the room knew what they were there to hear: ‘Mmmbop, ba duba dop ba, du bop ba duba dop Ba du bop, ba duba dop ba du’ is how the A-Z Lyrics website notates it. But how many casual Hanson fans know the meaning behind the verses: ‘Hold the ones who really care, in the end they’ll be the only ones there’.
So much perfect pop is a mix of happy and sad, or what I call putting vinegar in the pudding, and the blockbuster chorus rather buries the lede in this song, written by philosophers who were 11, 13 and 16 at the time. Devout Christians, the brothers have since had 16 kids between them: Isaac has three, Zac five, and Taylor seven!
The New Radicals – You Get What You Give and Britney Spears – Baby One More Time
And from the very end of the decade, two songs that were omnipresent on music television at the time.
Max Martin never needed to work again after writing the biggest song on planet Earth, which was unleashed in early 1999 and begat the Britney soap opera. Turned down by TLC, the song begins with three hooks in three seconds: the opening keyboard, the ‘baby baby’ and the ‘ha-ha-ha’ breathing. Our narrator, singing Swedish-English (‘show me how you want it to be’) and overenunciating her vowels (‘oh prettay baybay!’), is losing her mind in loneliness, ‘blinded by her lover’ and willing to do anything. Long after Max, the most successful individual pop songwriter of the last century, has stopped making music, we will always have Baby One More Time.
Like Max, Gregg Alexander can walk into a high end retailer and buy everything in the store without being recognised except by people who watched music TV in 1999. Before the first verse comes in, we’ve already had a song’s worth of ideas and grunts, oohs and woahs, climaxing with the ‘ONE! TWO!’ chant before the intro proper. The song’s first line proper, ‘wake up, kids!’, is more or less pop music summarised in three words.
The long coda, notorious for a line which crams in ‘Beck, Hanson, Courtney Love and Marilyn Manson’, is a list of words sung over straight semiquavers that mean nothing written down. ‘Don’t! Let go!’ cries Alexander’s bucket-hatted visage in the clip for a song which he co-wrote with Rick Nowels, himself a very successful pop writer best known for Heaven Is A Place On Earth; Alexander and Nowels also wrote Life Is A Rollercoaster and Lovin’ Each Day for Ronan Keating and, for Santana, The Game of Love, which originally had Tina Turner on vocals.
Alexander retreated to the writer’s room after his own brief pop stardom. I’ll be spending the next few years working on a Pop Syllabus, and I can’t wait to listen to hundreds of pop songs. These six, though, are by all objective criteria the finest.
If you want hundreds more pop songs, buy my new book Now That’s What I Call Now: A History of Pop Music in Britain, 1983-2025, available for £4.99 as an eBook or for nothing with a Kindle Unlimited subscription