25 October 2019
Did ‘Dance Monkey’ serve as aversion therapy by somehow flushing a taste for bad hits out of our systems? My recollection of the late-2019 and 2020 charts is of, if not quite a mini golden age, then a notable post-‘Dance Monkey’ uptick in quality from that particular low and the generally dreary, formulaic trop-pop that dominated the latter half of the ’10s. I won’t overstate my case or lower my guard; after all, there’ll still be sad-boy folk-pop and an imminent reflux of Eminem. But one must find grounds for optimism where one can.
Down-the-line floorfillers: there’s another thing we hadn’t seen much of at the top of our charts around that time. ‘Ride It’ is an imaginative remix of a decent 2008 slow-jam bhangra-R&B UK top twenty hit by Jay Sean which hadn’t charted in Ireland. That’s still Jay Sean’s voice on this but pitch-shifted down while sped up, and now sounding like a disembodied soul trapped in purgatorial limbo on the dancefloor of his youth until he can make amends for breaking someone’s heart. The new vocal has a sort of frantic, distraught emotion, the speeding-up and the snappy beats lend urgency, and the synth hook added by Regard is catchy. I really liked this at the time, and I’m relieved to hear it still sounds fresh and smart.
Regard in 2019 with ‘Ride It’ was the third Kosovo citizen in seven years, after Rita Ora and Dua Lipa, to have a number one single in Ireland. Twenty years before that, an Irish charity collective had topped our charts with ‘Candle For Kosovo’ in support of that country’s refugees here during the war of 1998-99. Ora and Lipa’s parents had arrived in London as refugees earlier in the ’90s; Ora was born in Pristina, and Lipa went with her family to live there in her early teens. Regard is from the city of Ferizaj. Pop records are hardly important societal artefacts or meaningful indicators in such a context, but maybe our chart story of Kosovo offers modest hope that refugees can be welcomed to the point of being celebrated for their successes, and that today’s besieged or troubled countries can soon return to the banal normality of only being in the news instead for their successful pop acts.
