In a recurring feature, we analyse the latest Number One single in Australia so you don't have to.
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‘Good Night’
Reece Mastin
(Sony Music Entertainment)
Reece Mastin’s ‘Good Night’ has debuted at #1 in the Australian charts this week, after displacing
‘Sexy And I Know It’ by LMFAO, which reigned supreme for 6 weeks. You may already be aware that Mastin has just won
The X-Factor, the Channel 7 music talent quest. I personally try to remain blissfully unaware of such things, and, as far as I can tell, had never heard of him before yesterday.
Reece Mastin - 'Good Night'
Mastin is a seventeen year old living in suburban Adelaide, who emigrated from the UK when he was eleven. ‘Good Night’ is Mastin’s first entry in the charts, released the day after he emerged as
The X-Factor winner. The song was written by former
Idol contestant Hayley Warner and Sydney-based songwriter/producers Anthony Egizii and David Musumeci, who run a production company called DNA Songs. Egizii has written an audio engineering textbook, and DNA Songs’ credits include Brian McFadden, as well as a long list of
Idol and
X-Factor alumni (Shannon Noll, Guy Sebastian, Kate Alexa, Jessica Mauboy, etc.). Most oddly, their credits also include a ‘We Are The World’/’Sending Our Love Down The Well’ style celebrity-fest for the 2000 Sydney Paralympics called ‘Spirit Of Life’ (below), which featured Dionne Warwick, Jermaine Jackson, Ray Charles and Jimmy Barnes amongst others. ‘Good Night’ most likely was originally co-written by Warner, Egizii and Musumeci as some sort of sequel to Warner’s original single ‘Good Day’, which got to #11 in the charts.
'Spirit of Life'
A single released to cash in on winning
The X-Factor doesn’t actually have to be very good to turn a profit. It doesn’t need to be as catchy as
‘Dynamite’ or
‘California Gurls’. It doesn’t need the kind of dancefloor zing that makes a song like
‘On The Floor’ or
‘Party Rock Anthem’ a hit. Nor does it have to be able to pull at the heartstrings the way that
‘Somebody That I Used To Know’ or
‘Someone Like You’ do. And the reason it doesn’t have to have any of these qualities? It’s because it has the numbers on its side.
Most people don’t really pay much attention to music. They’re not following the charts, they’re not looking at blog hype, they’re not reading
Rolling Stone, they’re probably only half-listening to radio now and then in the car (and half the time that’s ads anyway, or the likes of Kyle Sandilands being prats, rather than actual new songs). But if you have
almost 2 million people actively watching you win a TV show, your music is getting heard by
shitloads. Put it this way: an article about Mastin in the Adelaide
Advertiser had a statistic that, in the first 24 hours the single was available, they were
‘selling a single every 2.7 seconds'. This sounds pretty impressive on first glance! But a single being sold every 2.7 seconds in its first day of release only adds up to 32,000 singles being sold that day. This means that, of all the people who watched the finale, only 1.6% of them loved Reece and/or the song so much that they went to iTunes and bought the single the day it came out. In contrast, a song like ‘California Gurls’ or ‘Somebody That I Used To Know’ has to appeal by sheer brute force, by craftsmanship and hookiness – if those songs get to #1, I’s because they are striking a chord in people who usually have little prior reason to give a shit.
Tom Ewing once observed that pop music is a sort of ‘Goldilocks medium’:
"It’s not too big - interesting stuff can happen fast within it, it’s still easier to get big quickly in pop than it is in most other areas of pop culture. And it’s not too small - for all the declining sales it’s not a total niche thing, the people who get big in pop do still break through to a wider consciousness." And one of the side-effects of pop music being this Goldilocks medium, is that the usual fare on the pop charts can fairly easily be trampled over by bigger media.
The upper reaches of the charts in the 1990s were very often full of mawkish power ballads that were attached to blockbuster movies – think
‘Everything I Do (I Do It For You)’ by Bryan Adams (from
Robin Hood: Prince Of Thieves),
‘I Will Always Love You’ by Whitney Houston (from
The Bodyguard),
‘My Heart Will Go On’ by Celine Dion (from
Titanic), or
‘I Don’t Wanna Miss A Thing’ by Aerosmith (from
Armageddon). Similarly, the first flush of
Australian Idol was incredibly popular, and overran the charts for a while. Think about it this way - iTunes in Australia only launched in 2005, a couple of years after those dark days when
Australian Idol had first become a massive ratings success. As a result, much of ARIA’s
biggest selling singles chart of the 2000s is strongly skewed towards 2007-2009, when iPods and iPhones and iTunes really started to revive the market for singles. Yet, three of the top five biggest selling singles of the decade are by
Idol winners from before 2005 –
Guy Sebastian’s ‘Angels Brought Me Here’,
Anthony Callea’s ‘The Prayer’, and Shannon Noll’s ‘What About Me’. That’s how big Idol was for the Australian music industry. And it’s also why ‘credible’ musicians cry foul at such talent shows -- people who appear on them get a big leg up that sometimes has more to do with sheer numbers as opposed to the quality of the music.
Still, being attached to very popular TV talent quests isn’t necessarily a guarantee that your music will be popular.
‘Yes I Am’, the single by Jack Vidgen, who won
Australia’s Got Talent earlier this year, only got to #35 in the charts - a lot less than 1.6% of the TV show's audience bought it. Vidgen, a blonde teenager who had Bieberesque looks and the voice of a black woman from the USA, may have bombed on the charts because his music
sounded much less remarkable than it
looked – his music and singing is much less impressive when you can’t see the juxtaposition between his face and his throat. And let’s not mention Casey Donovan. So what makes ‘Good Night’ one of the TV talent quest success stories that gets to #1?
To my ears, it’s mostly that because it has hooks, and those hooks sound quite a lot like the ones in
‘Raise Your Glass’ by Pink. When Mastin sings
“good night, oh-oh” – the song’s main hook - it’s noticeably got the same rhythm and melody as Pink singing
“raise your glass” in the chorus of ‘Raise Your Glass’. The song also starts with a similar guitar part, has a similar tempo, has a similar Dr Luke-ish production style, and generally has similar lyrical themes about mindless celebration.
Pink - 'Raise Your Glass'
I am definitely not alone in noticing this similarity between the two songs; there’s a predictably lulzy flame war raging in the comments sections of the various unofficial YouTube uploads of the song between fans and detractors of the song. YouTube user elnyancat says “
Sounds way too much like "Raise Your Glass" by pink lol”, to which YouTube user bevck41 replies “
and to all the dickheads that are saying it's RAISE UR [sic] GLASS (YOU ALL NEED HEARING AID'S!!!!!! [sic]
REMEMBER JEALOUSY IS A CURSE :)”. Where YouTube user DanyahTheGreat says “
He’s got a good voice but the song is so generic and forgettable. It sounds like a somewhat lamer version of Pink’s Raise Your Glass”, YouTube user SuperCrazzybunny responds
“What is with retards that dont [sic]
understand HE DIDNT WRITE THIS SONG HE WAS GIVEN IT BY A SONG WRITER TO SING so its [sic]
not his fault its [sic]
a rip off spastics”. As you can see here, Reece Mastin fans seem to be torn between completely denying the similarity, and denying that the similarity matters. If they deny that the similarity matters, they mostly seem to either argue that the similarity is not Reece Mastin’s fault – that he didn’t write the song, and had no choice about singing it – or argue that it doesn’t matter if songs sound like other songs.
(Continued next page)