[The Beatles' extremely posthumous] “Now And Then” got the most press coverage of a No.1 this year, just like “Running Up That Hill” did last year. But the biggest No.1 of the year was surely “Sprinter”, a track by UK drill artist Central Cee, which was at the top all summer – ten weeks all told, racking up close to half a billion streams just on Spotify, with another 146 million plays on YouTube. It took me three plays to even like “Sprinter” – if I had to sit down now and write about it, I would do a terrible job. But it’s objectively a huge, year-defining hit among people who are still engaged with current pop. There are 125 news results for “Sprinter” on Google. There are 22,400 news results for “Now And Then”. Relevance is a media choice. The charts still matter when somebody decides they matter. I’m not naive: I do not think there is a world where Central Cee gets as much press as The Beatles. But I can imagine ones where the ratio isn’t pushing 1:200. And I think there’s a starker truth behind questions of relevance, and canon, and what the charts mean now.
Let’s admit that the charts stopped telling a grand story of pop, if they ever did. And let’s admit that the fact there are more fans of old pop music than the current stuff makes it harder for newer pop to get attention. Why keep paying attention to the charts? Because of this: there may not be a story of 21st century pop music, British and global, but the charts are full of a rainbow of new stories, overlapping and contradicting, sprawling out like side-quests in an open-world videogame.
... And this is why I’m so wary of the idea that the tech, not the music, is the only real story. The logistics, economics, and technology of music are massive concerns – they always were. In fact the pendulum used to swing too far the other way, with the perfume of artistry concealing the stench of exploitation. We now live in an age where the people who run the pipelines by which music reaches us are more powerful than ever, and they need – somehow – scrutiny and accountability. But in the end a pipeline is just a pipeline: what it carries – what people listen to and latch on to – still matters. The reason the Number One was irrelevant in 2005 was because only 20,000 people bought it? Fair enough. The reason the Number One is irrelevant in 2023 when it gets 470 million streams is… because Spotify is a racket? Because TikTok is annoying? Because 99% of over-40s don’t know who Central Cee is?
-Tom Ewing, still one of the best pop music writers around