Question - tell me what you think about me.
Continuing my trip back through the 2001 album charts.
05/08/01 : Survivor - Destiny's Child
I'm certainly not a DC fan, but this has got to be better than Atomic Kitten, right?
Well, it certainly starts strongly with "Independent Women Part 1", "Survivor" and "Bootylicious" - all of which were top two singles both here and in the US. However, having listened to them for the first time in ages, I was surprised at the lack of content in all of them - there's an awful lot of repetition going on. And that's definitely a theme across the rest of the album, along with a general feeling that, no matter who you are, these ladies just know they're better than you and don't have any time for your shit. Having said that, there are a couple of soppy songs on there as well and these are even worse. And a whole hour of it all is just far too much for me, I'm afraid - there's no doubting the ladies can sing, but sometimes that's just not enough.
We're at #3 in the charts this week on their 14th week of a 46 week run, with it having spent its 1st, 2nd, 12th and 13th weeks at #1 - so it did alright for itself, I guess. The rest of the top five were David Gray, the Prince best-of (a new entry), D12 and Gorillaz and the next highest new entry was Roger Sanchez (#34).
Wikipedia has a huge amount (531 milliPeppers) and it tells us it's their third album, but features a line-up change with founding members LeToya Luckett and LaTavia Roberson having made the observation that the band's manager, one Mathew Knowles, seemed to mystifyingly favour Beyonce Knowles above them - who knew? Unfortunately, Mathew didn't take this observation all that well and so they found themselves out of the group, which they discovered by watching a video for one of their singles and finding out they weren't in it - ouch! They were replaced by Farrah Franklin and Michele Williams - with Farrah only lasting five months before she too mysteriously departed. Don't mess with Mr Knowles!
A lot of the rest of the entry suggests that both Knowles family members tried their best to hog the spotlight with various songwriters and producers claiming their contributions weren't fully acknowledged - unfortunately, I suspect it's the case that to be successful you have to override everyone else and if you're successful then everyone else tries to claim they were involved. I did however learn that "Emotion" was a Barry & Robin Gibb composition, first recorded by Samantha Sang in '78 - a Bee Gees version was recorded in '94 but didn't see the light of day until it appeared on a best-of in '01, completely coincidentally after the Destiny's Child version had been released. Even more culturally important, I learned that "bootylicious" was first used by Snoop Dogg on a '92 Dr Dre single, although he used it "as a pejorative" as opposed to Destiny's Child "neologism of approval" (which is a very Wikipedia way of describing things).
Critically, the album was generally reviewed well enough, but people didn't go overboard for it - NME described it as a "boundary-pushing nil-shit-taking exercise". Commercially though, people did go overboard for it with it getting to #1 in Belgium, Canada, The Netherlands, Germany, Greece, Iceland, Ireland, Norway, South Africa, Switzerland and the US, selling ten million copies globally. So I think we can say it did OK for itself.
discogs.com tells us this is another fifty pence album but if you want the enhanced multichannel SACD version (for both you people with SACD players out there) it's going to set you back £85. However, having listened to this album, I'm not sure I'd find the multichannel warbling an improvement - this album has some fine sounds in places, but it needs less content and less repetition.
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