I don't know why you're not fair

Continuing my trip up the list of the most streamed songs for each year.  

1993 : What Is Love - Haddaway

Seriously?  There had better be a "good" reason for this or I'll be having words.  And, even more importantly, why doesn't the song title have a question mark at the end of it?  I will accept that it's got a decent enough chorus, but that's all it's got, hasn't it?

Yup - for a song that's 4:29 long, there really isn't a great deal of content.  And the video is most bizarre - it has a lot of content with Haddaway exploring a big house which has vampires, dancers and a load of random shit, but it makes absolutely no sense at all with the focus switching every five seconds and a load of the action happening in reverse.  It's nonsense, I tell you.

Wikipedia tells me the song was written and produced by German husband and wife team Dee Dee Halligan and Junior Torello - or to give them their real names, Dieter Lünstedt and Karin Hartmann-Eisenblätter.  Their search for a singer lead them to Nestor Alexander Haddaway and they told him to sing it like Joe Cocker.  Haddaway, to his credit, suggested his way made a bit more sense and everyone was happy with the end result.  Including, surprisingly, the critics - lots of them said a load of nice things about it, including my favourite "You don't find out what love is, but that doesn't mean you'll be disappointed".  And Haddaway definitely wasn't disappointed by the commercial performance - it stormed continental Europe and reached #1 everywhere except, somewhat surprisingly, Germany where it only got to #2.  It even got to #11 in the US, selling a couple of million copies globally.

Wikipedia has quite a large section on cover versions, two of which did quite well in Europe - Klaas (it doesn't exactly do a lot with the original - it even uses Haddaway's vocals) and Lost Frequencies (quite a nice ambient-ish version).  The other ones mentioned are a very peculiar mix - Diane Birch (she does a really good job with this), E.M.D. (again, not bad), Emergency Gate (this also uses Haddaway but it's VERY different - amusingly so), Kiesza (the women have really run with this song well) and David Guetta (exactly what you'd expect - and it charted here, but Wikipedia doesn't care about that).  Wikipedia's given us a surprisingly good selection of covers there - so good that secondhandsongs.com is unable to add to it.

Despite the good covers, there is absolutely no way this is the best track of the year and Wikipedia gives us no idea why it might have won - I expect the socials are involved somewhere but I can't be bothered investigating and I'm going to spend my time (hopefully) looking for better tracks from the year.  The best selling track in the UK was Meat Loaf's "I Would Do Anything For Love (But I Won't Do That)" and the rest of the top five were UB40's "(I Can't Help) Falling In Love With You", Ace Of Base's "All That She Wants", 2 Unlimited's "No Limit" and Gabrielle's "Dreams" - not exactly an inspired selection but at least they're all better than Mr Blobby who is at #6.  Ye gods.  Looking further down the year end chart I can't say there's an awful lot to inspire me - The Bluebell's "Young At Heart" (#12) and 4 Non Blondes' "What's Up" (#21) are probably my favourites and I wouldn't describe either of them as classics.

So, what better tracks can we turn up from the charts?  I'm going for Duran Duran's "Ordinary World", New Order's "Regret", Sub Sub's "Ain't No Love", Janet Jackson's "That's The Way Love Goes", Spin Doctors "Two Princes", R.E.M.'s "Everybody Hurts" (you're not going to get many finer tracks than that), M People's "Moving On Up" and Take That's "Babe" (I don't like this, but it's better than a lot of stuff this year).  And that's it!  What was going on in '93?!?  It's even more intriguing because a lot of well known artists released records in '93 - Madonna, Bowie, Whitney, Bon Jovi, Tina Turner, Michael Jackson, Billy Joel, Mariah Carey, Depeche Mode, Bryan Adams - but none of them were on fire this year.  There were also a whole load of tracks in the charts this year from earlier years - it just feels like a load of people just gave up this year, so let's hope for more from '94.

I'm looking at the US charts with minimal expectations - and it's safe to say that I was mostly not surprised.  Most of it is either rubbish that I've already seen in the UK charts or R&B stuff that never made it across the Atlantic - the only surprises for me are Tag Team's "Whoomp! (There It Is)", which is a decent enough track but I've never have guessed it would be #2 in the year-end list and The Proclaimers' "I'm Gonna Be (500 Miles)" at #27 - apparently this was because it featured in Benny & Joon.

So I would absolutely give the year to R.E.M., but I'm a bit biased and I have to accept that more of you like Haddaway - you're heathens, the lot of you (although some of those cover versions were surprisingly good).  I'm also very surprised by the overall lack of decent tracks this year - looking at the best albums of the year, there were quite a few decent ones out, but I'm guessing any singles didn't make the top ten which is the cut-off for my consideration.  Oh well - never mind, eh?

1992 - Another jolly ditty
1994 - No way did this win the year