Tell me why ain't nothin' but a heartache
Continuing my trip back through the 1999 album charts.
27/06/99 : Millenium - Backstreet Boys
Somewhat surprisingly, for the third week in a row we have an absolutely MASSIVE album that I've completely avoided for all this time. I can quite understand why I've swerved this but I suspect I'm going to admire it for doing the job it's supposed to. It probably won't surprise you that it's not one I owned - 10/27.
Yup - it definitely pushes the buttons it's designed to push and, if I'm being honest, it's also perfectly acceptable. It doesn't hurt that it opens with "Larger Than Life" and "I Want It That Way", both of which I'd go as far as saying I like (particularly the latter) - the rest of it isn't quite up there with those two tracks, but (in strong contrast with Britney) there isn't a massive drop in quality and there are (surprisingly, for me) no absolutely dreadful tracks (although some of them definitely contain more Cheddar than I feel the need for - particularly "The Perfect Fan").
This week on the chart we're all the way down at #13 on their sixth week of a 53 week run, with it having peaked at #2 in its debut week - I suspect Wikipedia will tell me it did slightly better in the US. The top five this week are The Chemical Brothers (a new entry), Boyzone, Jamiroquai, Shania and ABBA with the next highest new entry being The Beta Band (#18 - I always thought I should like this lot, but never quite managed it).
Wikipedia has a lot, but less than I was expecting (184 milliPeppers) on the album - and there is surprisingly little content in there. It does remind me that, as with Britney's album, Max Martin was involved - that man earned a bit of cash in this year, I suspect. The critics were nice enough about the album - they could quite easily have been sniffier about it, but I think they recognised it wasn't going to make any difference because people were gonna buy it. And buy it they did, by the bucketload. It sold over a million copies in the US - in its first week. And basically it just kept going, spending 93 weeks on the chart, getting to #1 in the year end chart and is one of the top ten selling albums of all time over there. And it didn't exactly do too badly elsewhere - #1 in most countries (it even got to #6 in Japan, and generally Western albums don't do so well over there) and has hit something like 24 million copies sold globally. Which I guess we can say is quite a few.
"Customers also listened to" *Nsync, Spice Girls, Britney Spears and Christina Aguilera - well that was a lot more female oriented than I was expecting. Maybe if you're a Backstreet fan then you can't even countenance listening to any other boy band - who knows, who cares? I found this album a lot "better" than I was expecting, but there's absolutely no danger of me listening to it again and I'm very much bemused at exactly how popular it was globally.
Comments
Post a Comment