🎵 2022-08-31 14:57:00 – Paris/France.
In The Number Ones, I review every #1 single in the history of Billboard Hot 100, starting at the top of the chart in 1958 and working all the way back to the present.
In September 2000, just before "Come On Over Baby (All I Want Is You)" became her third No. 1 hit, Christina Aguilera's first headlining tour took her to the United Kingdom's Fairgrounds. New York State to Syracuse. The opening act was Destiny's Child, a band that has been in this column many times before. The day before the show, Christina's tour bus was parked at a hotel near Syracuse University, where I was just starting my freshman year. Apparently a few students got on that tour bus and spent the evening partying with Christina's crew. I don't know how something like this happens, but some things are just not for us to know.
That night, the party ended around 3 a.m., and as the guys on the team staggered to bed, they left the tour bus unlocked. Later that night, the two students snuck onto Christina Aguilera's tour bus and stole a bunch of stuff. The New York Times report on the theft claims the students were looking for "souvenirs", while Pollstar claimed they obtained "golf clubs, a gym bag and pyrotechnics worth over $1". These two students were quickly arrested, and I don't know what happened to them afterwards.
Christina Aguilera's tour bus robbery didn't become a huge national story, but in Syracuse this shit instantly turned into a local legend of oral lore. The common belief, which I feel like I saw reported somewhere, was that the thieves were frat boys looking for Christina Aguilera's underwear. Raw! Also plausible! Within days, however, I was hearing much wackier stories. The best story was that these two yahoos stole Christina Aguilera's entire tour bus and drove it to different frat parties.
Christina Aguilera did not take the stage at the New York State Fair that night. Instead, she postponed that tour date, blaming laryngitis. Maybe she was really sick, or maybe she just needed to take this day to figure out who should be fired. Either way, this whole episode says a lot about the hold Christina Aguilera had on the young American collective imagination in 2000. Christina Aguilera was selling millions of albums, but numbers are one thing. When you have college assholes willing to risk being arrested and prosecuted for sniffing your drawers, that's another thing altogether.
In July 2000, Christina Aguilera positioned herself, alongside her former Mickey Mouse club her teammate Britney Spears, as one of the biggest stars of a burgeoning teen-pop wave. Christina didn't necessarily want to be part of that wave; she wanted to be seen as a poppy R&B singer. But you can't always fight a wave. Christina had won the Grammy for Best New Artist, beating Britney, and her self-titled debut album had sold six million copies. Two of her singles, "Genie In A Bottle" and "What A Girl Wants," had topped the Hot 100. She followed those songs with the more traditional R&B ballad "I Turn To You," a cover of Diane Warren's composition that former Number Ones artists All-4-One had originally recorded a few years earlier. This ballad had gone all the way to number 3. (It's a 4.)
By the time she had completed those first three singles, Christina Aguilera had other things on the horizon. Before the end of 2000, she will release two other albums, a disc in Spanish entitled Mi Reflejo and a holiday album titled my kind of christmas. But Ron Fair, Christina's A&R rep, thought the self-titled album still contained some pop-chart juice. He thought the album had one more hit, but that hit would need a complete overhaul before it was ready for the pop charts.
One of the tracks of Christina Aguilera The album was 'Come On Over (All I Want Is You)', a sparkling and seductive track from the Swedish team of composers Paul Rein and Johan Åberg. Paul Rein had been a small dance-pop star in Sweden in the 80s, and he had finally gone to work at Eclectic Studios, a songwriting factory in Stockholm that was trying to do the same kind of thing as Denniz Pop and Max Martin had. made with Cheiron Studios. Eclectic founder Anders Hansson paired Rein with producer Johan Åberg, and "Come On Over (All I Want Is You)" was the first song they wrote together.
Paul Rein and Johan Åberg were trying to write a sunny uptempo jam for former Number Ones artists, the Spice Girls, but their track instead found its way to Ron Fair, who was choosing songs for Christina Aguilera's album. Paul Rein had sung on the demo version of the track, and when Christina recorded the track for her album, she just used Rein and Åberg's instrumental with Rein's vocals removed. It was good when "Come On Over" was an album track. But when Ron Fair decided he wanted to make "Come On Over" a single, he decided the song needed to be reworked.
Christina Aguilera had already come to No. XNUMX with a remixed and re-recorded version of "What A Girl Wants," so Fair had been vindicated in his belief that he should try to sell the world a different version of a Christina Aguilera song that had already been out for over a year. This is how Fair describes his thinking in Fred Bronson Billboard Book Of Number 1 Hits“The original version was too ultra-pop for where Christina needed and wanted to go. She felt her legs in a more R&B way and sang more aggressive riffs, but we couldn't deny the hook.
This all seems really weird to me. You don't go to Swedish songwriting factories unless you're looking for something that's by definition ultra-pop. And anyway, the original "Come On Over" was a total bang, a prime example of the kind of giddy direct stuff Swedish songwriters all seem to do so well. The chorus is huge. It's hooks stacked on hooks until all those hooks form the shape of one huge hook. It's joyful, propulsive and energetic. There's electricity in the pounding piano riff, choppy string strikes and booming mechanistic drum sounds. This version of the album also gives Christina ample opportunity to lament, and all the showy vocals never get in the way of the melody itself. The song wasn't broken, but Ron Fair wanted to fix it anyway.
Reading between the lines, I think Ron Fair really wanted to make "Come On Over" more exciting. In Bronson's book, Paul Rein recounts how excited he was to hear that "Come On Over" was about to become a single, "but Ron wanted to update the musical production and wanted the lyrics to be more hot”. Rein and Johan Åberg tried to rewrite the lyrics to Fair's specifications, "but we couldn't find anything good". Instead, Rein brought in a production trio called Celebrity Status to remix the track. "What A Girl Wants" writers Shelly Reiken and Guy Roche also dabbled in the lyrics, and Christina Aguilera and Ron Fair themselves also got songwriting credits. Fair had also credited himself as a co-producer.
In Bronson's book, Ron Fair says, "If you look at the production credits, there are nine authors. And you want to know something? It's a factual and true representation of who really wrote this record. All nine of us had a bit of a hand in it. Fair doesn't say who came up with the idea of adding a superfluous "Baby" to the title - like in "Come On Over Baby (All I Want Is You)" - who accomplished the somewhat confusing task of taking a title from song that was already façon too long and making it a tiny bit longer. Weird choice! I don't understand !
The song could have had even more authors credited. The original "Come On Over" had no bridge. When Christina Aguilera had sung "Come On Over" live, she had moved on to Cheryl Lynn's 1978 disco classic "Got To Be Real" where the bridge would have been. Fair liked the way it sounded, and he wanted the single to be a mix of "Come On Over" and "Got To Be Real," but he couldn't erase the Cheryl Lynn track. ("Got To Be Real," which Cheryl Lynn co-wrote with Toto's David Foster and David Paich, peaked at #12. I wonder which of the rights holders turned down the tween request.)
It should have been too much tinkering. For me, the remixed and re-recorded version of "What A Girl Wants" is façon too much, and the song gets lost in everything that's piled up there. But I don't think that ever happens with "Come On Over Baby." The single version of the song is significantly more cluttered, but the clutter works. No one tries to slow the song down, and no one spoils the bubblegum immediacy of this chorus. You can definitely hear all the different collaborators trying to get their shit in, but their shit never gets in the way of the song's sugar rush joy.
“Come On Over Baby” is definitely a more exciting song than just “Come On Over”. On the original, Christina Aguilera screams, "I want you to know you could be the one for me / You got everything I'm looking for, you got personality." On the re-recorded "Come On Over Baby," these lines change significantly: "I'm not just talking about your sexuali-tayyy / But I can't help it when you put your hands on me." So she kind of is just talking about that person's sexuali-tayyy. She doesn't talk about their personality, anyway. Christina also adds some improvised whispered grunts, in case we didn't get the idea. This is how a love song becomes a booty call song. Fair enough! For most of us, a crush that turns into a booty call is a natural progression, or perhaps an ideal outcome.
The remix also adds a lot more business to the track. There's jerky drum machine stuff that sounds a bit like DJ scratches. There's a strutting, playful bass line on the second verse. There's a screaming guitar solo. There's a bridge where Christina Aguilera does a mumbling chatter that could almost be considered rapping. There's a quick callback to "What A Girl Wants." Christina also does more vocal stuff, but she never loses track of the song's melody. Of both versions of the song, the best vocal moment comes when Christina unleashes a juicy, happy disco high note, stretching it long enough to properly convey the effervescence the song needs. I don't think all those extra keys improve the song, of course, but they don't screw it up either. Whichever way you hear it, "Come On Over" is a total blast.
The "Come On Over Baby" video fits the song's luminous silliness perfectly. Christina made the video with the future bulletproof monk director Paul Hunter, and the clip works like a great little time capsule from a very particular era. The gleaming white backdrop, the navel jewelry situation, the H&M-ad design sensibility — it's all firmly rooted in a specific moment. The video features bleeding neon shades of green, blue and yellow that basically ceased to exist around 2002. I love it. The whole thing has a lively sense of movement and energy, and I never have a bad time when it's on.
In a way, “Come On Over Baby” is the last we hear of…
SOURCE: Reviews News
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