I'm saying things I've never said, doing things I've never done

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

2020 : Head & Heart - Joel Corry Ft. MNEK

I'm sure I'll recognise this when I hear it, but I don't know it from the title alone - although I'm pretty certain it's not going to be far from Joel Corry's other work.

Ah yes, it's the "bum-bum-bum dum-bum-bum" one - pretty catchy, if somewhat inessential even if MNEK (do you think that's his real name?) has a lovely voice. Given there's only 2:47 of it, it certainly doesn't outstay its welcome and the video is actually quite neat with a split screen of one guy having a bad day and another one having a great day and at the end they meet and (of course) optimism triumphs over pessimism. It's cheesy, but it's kinda cool.

Wikipedia has remarkably little on the track - most of it just describes the video. Commercially, it did phenomenally well everywhere except for Belarus (#172), Estonia (#110) and, somewhat surprisingly the US (#99) (as a random aside, did you know that Hungary has four top 40 charts?). It's been streamed over a billion times on Spotify and, somewhat bizarrely, at the APRA Awards (kinda the Aussie Brit Awards), it won the Most Performed Australian Work award, despite there being no evidence of Australian involvement anywhere. I also learned that MNEK is a gramagram - if I tell you his surname is Emenike, you can probably work out what one of those is!

Wikipedia gives us no cover versions and even secondhandsongs.com only gives us four versions (none of whom I've ever heard of). YouTube comes to the rescue though with Sam Smith (it sounds exactly like you're expecting, but that's a good thing) - there are a load more on there but you're absolutely fine not hearing them.

Looking at the year-end chart, this came in at #5 with the rest of the top five being (in reverse order), Lewis Capaldi's "Before You Go" (released in '19), Saint Jhn's "Roses" (released in '16), Tones & I's "Dance Monkey" (released in '19) and, at #1 this year, The Weeknd's "Blinding Lights" (released in '19) - so it turns out this was the highest ranked track from this year. Other tracks that I like from the year end chart that are from this year are Dua Lipa's "Physical" (#19) - and that's your lot! There are quite a few others in there I know but they're all from '19.

So, let's take a look further down the chart - expectations are not high though. I guess I've at least heard of Justin Bieber's "Yummy", Billie Eilish's "No Time To Die", Little Mix's "Break Up Song", Cardi B's "WAP", Tate Macrae's "You Broke Me First" and, of course, the all-time classic from The K*nt's "Boris Johnson Is A F*cking C*nt". Looking across the pond, I'm going to be amazed if The Weeknd isn't #1 - and the good news is that I don't have to be amazed. And, unsurprisingly, I don't know any more of the songs here than I do in the UK but I was surprised to see Lizzo's "Good As Hell" at #55 because it was released in '16.

So, not a terrible track - I wouldn't have thought it would take the year but actually there wasn't a load of competition so I suspect Covid might had a hand in that. They were strange times, weren't they?

2019 - Actually a decent track
2021 - A fine track - from Ed!