10 Years, 100 Songs: #1. “Take That, And Rewind it Back…”

Over the final months of our fine decade, Intensities in Ten Suburbs will be sending the Naughty Oughties out in style with a series of essays devoted to the top 100 songs of the decade–the ones we will most remember as we look back fondly on this period of pop music years down the road. The archives can be found here. If you want to argue about the order, you can’t, because we’re not totally sure what the qualifications are either. Otherwise, sit back and enjoy.

I’ll be honest–I don’t really blame you if you’re a little disappointed here. I had a little trouble believing it myself when we were creating the final countdown from the shortlist, got down to #1 and found “Yeah!” there staring back at us. It just didn’t really feel like a slam dunk choice for the #1. It wasn’t the best single, it wasn’t the most influential single, and it wasn’t the most popular single, though it was pretty damn close on that last front. And I’d understand if you read through the last 99 (199 if you count the short write-ups) entries and expected something a little grander, something sweeping and undeniable, something simply more than Usher, Lil’ Jon and Ludacris. But all I can really say in our defense is that when I looked back over the rest of the top ten, weighing the pros and cons of every choice, “Yeah!” was the only one that made any sort of sense to me to rest at pole position. It is, for better or worse, my choice for the single of the decade.

And the primary reason for this? Well, it’s still the first song that I think of when I think of 00s pop music. That could be in large part due to time and circumstance–the amount of radio I was listening to in 2004, how impressionable i was as a music listener at that time in my life, and the number of great personal memories that I have tied in some way, shape or form to the song. But really, it’s that simple. If you asked me to name an 80s song, I’d probably name you “Like a Virgin.” If you asked me to name you a 90s song, I’d name you “Smells Like Teen Spirit.” And if you asked me to name an 00s song, I’d name “Yeah!” On a Top 100 list where we did a purposefully shitty job of defining the terms and conditions of placement and ranking, I’d have to say that being the song I still consider most inextricably tied to the decade that berthed it has to be the criteria that supersedes all else.

Oh yeah, and it also happens to be a fantastic song. The reason for that is the most basic of mathematics. If you asked me in 2004 what the most surefire formula was to come up with a great hit single that everyone would be guaranteed to love, this would have been my verbatim answer, with maybe a couple more stammers and backtracks thrown in: “Well, it’d probably be an Usher club jam. With Lil’ Jon producing. Oh, and you’d have to get Ludacris to do a verse somewhere.” That’s the answer, and there’s no alternative–it was the tic-tac-toe of 00s pop music. No other time in music history, before or likely after, did you see three pop superstars at the absolute peaks of their absolute primes getting together to work in perfect harmony. You were no doubt waiting for the basketball analogy, so here it is: It would be like if Orlando swung a trade of their non-Dwight Howard starting lineup for LeBron James, then waited a couple years and picked up Chris Paul in free agency. With that CP3-LBJ-D-12 Big Three–which suddenly makes all other Big Threes in basketball history look like a Fabolous-Trey Songz-Scott Storch hook-up–there’s positively no chance that Orlando wouldn’t own the NBA season, just like there was positively no way that “Yeah!” wasn’t going to own pop music in 2004.

Despite the fact that he would go on to a historic run of chart dominance shortly thereafter, at the time, the weakest link  in the chain was Usher himself. Not that Mr. Raymond’s skills were ever in question–the man never wowed you with his talents, but he could carry an R&B number with the best of them, and had actually been responsible for two of the biggest (and in retrospect, underrated) hits of the decade to that point, with “U Don’t Have to Call” and “U Got it Bad.” But it had been a couple of years since those songs, and with 2002 being the cut-off for the true start of the Naughty Oughties, there was always the slight, slight possibility that Usher was really just a 90s relic that audiences needed a couple years to shake off. With “Yeah!,” though, there was no doubt that Usher’s true reign had only just begun, his range as impressive as ever, his dance moves trasnfixing as always, his ability to pursue and be pursued by shadowy vixen figures in his music videos still unparalleled. (Seriously, no man has ever spent as much of his life tangoing with shadowy vixen figures as the U, for whom the chase is surely more of a thrill than the capture.)

Usher needed the right song, and the right producer to create it, to re-capture the nation’s hearts, though, and that man certainly wasn’t going to be Jermaine Dupri. Lil’ Jon, on the other hand, was just entering into his Do No Wrong period, and in fact would never Do More Right than “Yeah!” itself, a song which probably rivals even his own “Get Low” for his definitive contribution to 00s pop music. The thing that always struck me about the beat to “Yeah!” was the immaculate symmetry of it, between the keyboard riff that basically worked like a perfect musical palindrome, and the whistle hook (Note to pop music producers worldwide: PUT MORE WHISTLE HOOKS IN YOUR SONGS THEY ARE ALWAYS GUARANTEED TO BE THE CATCHIEST THING ON THE RADIO) that always ends up exactly where it begins. It’s one of the simplest beats of the decade (or rather, it would have been if not for that two-year period where the Hip-Hop Producers Union of America apparently decided to put a $20 financial cap on beat construction), but it still sounds like it was created by a crack team of crunk scientists. Not to mention the invaluable contributions Jon made with in the song with his vocal presence, including the song’s early highlight, where hushed female voices give Mr. Raymond the classic “Ush-er, Ush-er, Ush-er, Ush-er” introduction, and apparently feeling a little left out, the chaliced one interjects, “…AND LI’L JON!!!!!”

But the song’s not-so-secret secret weapon was the third verse, provided by one Christopher “Ludacris” Bridges. Luda had the magic touch in 2004-’05, a run in which you seemingly couldn’t watch an hour of MTV Jams without catching him on three or four of the videos, and you wished it could’ve been six or seven of the videos instead. His verse in “Yeah!” was one of his all-time greats, and one that I can still rap pretty much word-for-word to this day, filling up the stat sheet with both his traditional cartoonish vocal inflections (“Watch out, my outfit’s RE-DI-CU-LUUUSS!!,” “Won’t stop till I get ’em in they BIRTH-DAY SOOOOOOOT!!“) and classic one-liners (“If you hold the head steady, I’ma milk the cow,” “Ludacris fillin’ cups like Double-D’s”), and even getting in a reference to his buddy’s signature hit (“Bend over to the front, touch your toes”), all in a super-quick 16 bars that feels like even less. Luda also gets the rather prestigious honors of seeing the song and its three stars out, with the unforgettable send-off “Take that, and rewind it back, [artist] got the [contribution] to make your booty go [smack].”

“Yeah!” topped the pop charts for 12 weeks in the summer of 2004, ranking at the end of ’09 as technically the second-biggest hit of the 00s (behind only Mariah Carey’s “We Belong Together”–doubt there are too many non-chart nerds out there would be able to guess the answer to that trivia question). Usher would spend 15 more weeks at #1 that year with fellow Confessions smashes “Burn,” “Confessions, Pt. 2” and “My Boo,” combining for a US chart record of 27 weeks on top in the ’04 calendar year, making him the first and only American artist to have actually owned a year of pop music in a semi-literal business sense. He waited a little too long to do the follow-up, and “Love in This Club” was a very disappointing comeback (Usher-Jeezy-Polow Da Don isn’t a bad troika, per se, but comapred to the original, it’s a pretty bad spinoff), so rather than enter putting his name in the discussion for being the biggest pop star since Michael Jackson, Usher proved himself as a considerable talent that was nonetheless at the mercy of his circumstances, and in the long run, somewhat replaceable.

That’s OK by me, though–with the luster starting to come off a little from all three artists moving into the 2010s, “Yeah!” feels more like an 00s song than ever, and even though the song probably doesn’t get the credit it deserves (aggregate review site Acclaimedmusic.net ranks it as the #55 most-acclaimed song of the decade, somehow ranking below Blur’s “Out of Time” and Morrissey’s “First of the Gang to Die”–damn Brits), I’d probably prefer not to hear it so much anymore. I want to be able to hear “Yeah!” at any point in my life and still picture rapping along to the Ludacris verse with one of my friends in their parents’ basement, or hearing it at a bowling alley and freaking some people out by filling in the “NOW LET ME SEE YOU DO THE A! TOWN! STOMMMMMP!!” part from the video at the end. It was a great song from a great year in a great decade for pop music, and if that’s not a good enough reason to put it at the very top of this list, I don’t know what is. Can someone hit me off with an “…And cut!”?

Before I get out of here, though, ten personal favorites I would have loved to have included on our list if I could’ve provided anywhere near the proper historical justificatoin:

10. Life Without Buildings – “The Leanover”
9. Le Knight Club – “Soul Bells”
8. Phoenix – “Love Like a Sunset”
7. The Dismemberment Plan – “Face of the Earth”
6. Badly Drawn Boy – “Once Around the Block”
5. Doves – “Black and White Town”
4. Freeway f/ Jay-Z & Beanie Seigel – “What We Do”
3. The Microphones – “The Moon (Song Islands Version)”
2. Weezer – “The Greatest Man That Ever Lived”
1. Capitol K – “Pillow”

And ten songs from 2009 I would’ve considered including if I had heard/appreciated them in time:

10. Black Eyed Peas – “Boom Boom Pow”
9. Ke$ha – “TiK ToK”
8. Pitbull – “I Know You Want Me”
7. Passion Pit – “The Reeling”
6. Lady Antebellum – “Need You Now”
5. Miley Cyrus – “Party in the U.S.A.”
4. Dirty Projectors – “Stillness is the Move”
3. Shakira – “She-Wolf”
2. Drake f/ Kanye West, Lil’ Wayne & Eminem – “Forever”
1. Animal Collective – “My Girls”

I also would have included “Use Somebody” over “Sex on Fire.”

And just because they were mentioned in the comments section for the #2, if I was making the list again today, I absolutely would have included John Mayer’s “No Such Thing” and Evanescence’s “Bring Me to Life”–I didn’t appreciate the former until recently, although I’m not sure precisely what my reason for excluding the latter was.

Thanks for reading, everybody. It was your comments and feedback that helped me get through by far the most ambitious undertaking I’ve ever even considered on IITS, and to actually finish on time for once. Happy New Year to all of you, and here’s hoping the pop music of the 2010s bring us as much joy and wonder as the 100 songs we’ve spent the last six months discussing.

(Have any thoughts or remembrances of this song? Want to correct our lyrics or call us out for relying too much on Wikipedia? Please feel free to leave a comment here, or (gulp) Tweet us about it at twitter.com/intensities. Your input is lusted after and appreciated.)

The List So Far (Now With Links!):

100. Green Day – “Jesus of Suburbia”
99. The Ying Yang Twins – “Wait (The Whisper Song)”
98. Crazytown – “Butterfly”
97. Taylor Swift – “Teardrops on My Guitar”
96. The Fray – “Over My Head (Cable Car)”
95. Fergie – “Fergalicious”
94. Lidstrom – “I Feel Space”
93. Chevelle – “Send the Pain Below”
92. T-Pain f/ Yung Joc – “Buy U a Drank (Shawty Snappin’)”
91. The Arctic Monkeys – “I Bet You Look Good on the Dancefloor”
90. Cassie – “Me & U”
89. Nelly Furtado – “Maneater”
88. Mike Jones f/ Slim Thug & Paul Wall – “Still Tippin’”
87. Bat for Lashes – “Daniel”
86. The Darkness – “I Believe in a Thing Called Love”
85. Dynamite Hack – “Boyz n the Hood”
84. DJ Khaled f/ T.I., Rick Ross, Fat Joe, Birdman, Lil’ Wayne & Akon – “We Takin’ Over”
83. Matchbox20 – “Bent”
82. The Game f/ 50 Cent – “Hate It or Love It”
81. 311 – “Amber”
80. 3 Doors Down – “Krptonite”
79. Nas – “Made You Look”
78. Royksopp – “Eple”
77. The Pussycat Dolls – “Don’t Cha”
76. DMX – “Party Up (Up in Here)”
75. Junior Senior – “Move Your Feet”
74. Twista f/ Kanye West & Jamie Foxx – “Slow Jamz”
73. The Streets – “Weak Become Heroes”
72. Jimmy Eat World – “The Middle”
71. The Yeah Yeah Yeahs – “Maps”
70. Snoop Dogg f/ Pharrell – “Drop It Like It’s Hot”
69. Alice DeeJay – “Better Off Alone”
68. Xiu Xiu – “I Luv the Valley OH!”
67. Incubus – “Stellar”
66. Mariah Carey – “We Belong Together”
65. Andrew W.K. – “Party Hard”
64. Jurgen Paape – “So Weit Wie Noch Nie”
63. Taking Back Sunday – “MakeDamnSure”
62. Kid Cudi – “Day n Nite”
61. Paramore – “That’s What You Get”
60. System of a Down – “Toxicity”
59. dNTEL f/ Ben Gibbard – “(This Is) The Dream of Evan and Chan”
58. Three 6 Mafia f/ 8Ball & MJG – “Stay Fly”
57. Good Charlotte – “The Anthem”
56. The Lonely Island – “Lazy Sunday”
55. Darude – “Sandstorm“
54. Yellowcard – “Ocean Avenue”
53. The Killers – “Mr. Brightside”
52. Luomo – “Tessio“
51. Blink-182 – “Stay Together For the Kids”
50. My Chemical Romance – “I’m Not Okay (I Promise)“
49. Freelance Hellraiser – “A Stroke of Genius”
48. Daft Punk – “Digital Love”
47. Snow Patrol – “Chasing Cars“
46. Sean Paul – “Like Glue”
45. Ludacris – “Stand Up”
44. Britney Spears – “Toxic”
43. Kings of Leon – “Sex on Fire“
42. Jennifer Lopez f/ Ja Rule – “I’m Real (Remix)”
41. Lifehouse – “Hanging By a Moment”
40. Plain White T’s – “Hey There Delilah”
39. MGMT – “Kids”
38. Gym Class Heroes f/ Patrick Stump – “Cupid’s Chokehold”
37. Franz Ferdinand – “Do You Want To”
36. Kylie Minogue – “Can’t Get You Out of My Head”
35. Vertical Horizon – “Everything You Want”
34. The White Stripes – “Fell in Love With a Girl”
33. Jay-Z – “Takeover”
32. Maroon 5 – “This Love”
31. Silversun Pickups – “Lazy Eye”
30. M.I.A. – “Paper Planes”
29. Timbaland f/ OneRepublic – “Apologize”
28. Beyonce f/ Jay-Z – “Crazy in Love”
27. Coldplay – “Yellow”
26. Lil’ Wayne – “A Milli”
25. Shaggy f/ Ricardo “RikRok” Ducent – “It Wasn’t Me“
24. The Strokes  – “Last Night”
23. Kelly Clarkson – “Since U Been Gone”
22. Radiohead – “Idioteque”
21. Fall Out Boy – “Sugar, We’re Going Down”
20. The All-American Rejects – “Move Along”
19. OutKast – “B.O.B. (Bombs Over Baghdad)”
18. Interpol – “PDA”
17. Justin Timberlake – “Rock Your Body”
16. Vanessa Carlton – “A Thousand Miles”
15. The Clipse – “Grindin‘”
14. Cam’Ron f/ Juelz Santana & Freekey Zeke – “Hey Ma“
13. LCD Soundsystem – “Losing My Edge”
12. Soulja Boy – “Crank Dat Soulja Boy“
11. StainD f/ Fred Dusrt – “Outside”
10. Rihanna f/ Jay-Z – “Umbrella”
9. Sum 41- “Fat Lip”
8. R. Kelly – “Ignition (Remix)”
7. Eminem f/ Dido – “Stan”
6. Avril Lavigne – “Sk8er Boi”
5. Lil’ Jon & the East Side Boyz f/ The Ying Yang Twins – “Get Low”
4. The Rapture – “House of Jealous Lovers”
3. Kanye West – “Through the Wire”
2. Linkin Park – “In the End”
1. Usher f/ Lil’ Jon & Ludacris – “Yeah!”

Over the final months of our fine decade, Intensities in Ten Suburbs will be sending the Naughty Oughties out in style with a series of essays devoted to the top 100 songs of the decade–the ones we will most remember as we look back fondly on this period of pop music years down the road. The archives can be found here. If you want to argue about the order, you can’t, because we’re not totally sure what the qualifications are either. Otherwise, sit back and enjoy.