Can't find anything to rhyme with rhyme - I'll gotta rhyme rhyme with mixture
Continuing my trip back through the 2003 album charts.
14/12/03 : Elephunk - The Black Eyed Peas
This is our third visit with TBEP and so far I've described their offerings as truly terrible and incredibly, incredibly annoying - would anyone care to guess if I'm likely to enjoy this? And no, I don't own it.
What?!? This is actually tolerable. I mean, I don't love it but there are places where I quite like it ("Shut Up" and "Where Is The Love?" aren't bad at all, although it's surprising how little actual content there is in the latter), I generally appreciate that there's skill and work gone into it and I very rarely wanted to apply bleach to my ears (although I did find the nu-metal of "Anxiety" somewhat unexpected). I didn't need 59 minutes of it, but things really could have been far, far worse - all most peculiar!
We're at #5 this week on their eighteenth week of a frankly ridiculous 60 week run (it's not that good), with it peaking at #3 in its 22nd-25th weeks - it then had a thirteen week run in '05 and a seven week run in '06. WHY?!?!? The rest of the top five this week were Dido, Will Young and best-ofs from Michael Jackson and R.E.M. and the highest (and only) new entry was Lauren Waterworth - and after the absolute treasure trove of facts about Tony Henry two weeks ago, I Googled her hoping for a similar outcome. And it's fair to say she didn't quite deliver as much - she was 14, had been discovered by Pete Waterman and this is the only week she's ever spent in the album chart (so far, at least). But Instagram suggests she's still singing, so I hope she's living a happy life!
Wikipedia has a chunky 387 milliPeppers on the album - this is their breakthrough third album, the first on which they were credited as THE Black Eyed Peas and the first to feature Fergie, who replaced Kim Hill. There's a load of other stuff on there - I tried to read it but I just didn't care enough to actually pay attention, I'm afraid (and obviously will.i.am comes out with some utter bollocks). The critics were either very nice or "wtf?" about it - I was also surprised to see it got six Grammy Award nominations. Somewhat bizarrely, Wikipedia also a "retrospective impact" section which basically just says "it made TBEP into stars", which is true but hardly noteworthy. Commercially, it did very well globally, selling over nine million copies and getting to #1 in Australia and Switzerland (the Swiss are so hip-hop!) but only #14 in the US.
"Customers also listened to" Fergie, will.i.am, Eminem and Flo Rida - well, I understand half of them, I guess. I was very surprised by this album though - I certainly wouldn't do anything foolish like saying I loved it, but it was really remarkable bearable.
.jpeg)
Comments
Post a Comment