At Uncle Darryl’s 60th birthday in March, I was reminded of the power of the universal hit song
There was drink, sushi and karaoke when Uncle Darryl, my mum’s brother, turned 60 last month. In the three hours I was at the party (I ducked out at 9.15pm), at least 30 songs had been played, all of which were consensus hits: songs that everyone knows and loves, even if they say they don’t.
The hits were a mix of songs from long ago and from more recent years: Rule the World by Take That, Angels by the most successful former member of Take That, and songs not by Take That. All You Need Is Love from 1967, Bohemian Rhapsody and Dancing Queen from the mid-1970s, Livin’ on a Prayer and Summer of ’69 (never a UK Top 40 hit, actually) from the mid-1980s, Yellow and Mr Brightside from the early 2000s; all we needed for the full house was bloody Sweet Caroline.
At some point I realised that all these songs, which without exception are in major keys, were versions of Molly Malone or God Save The King: folk anthems to be sung in celebration of being alive. I remember people bellowing along to Bon Jovi at a wedding and realising that the band may have written it, but it belonged to the audience now. All those songs do: Robbie Williams has said how Angels has become ‘the world’s biggest karaoke session’, while the abovementioned Rule The World was built for the stadiums Take That were playing at the time.
I asked a black friend what sort of consensus hits soundtrack gatherings of black people who have grown up with hip-hop (Eminem, for instance, is notoriously hard to do karaoke to). She asked around and came back with Before I Let Go by Maze and Frankie Beverly, which failed to reach the top 10 of the US R&B charts but came back in a big way in 2019 thanks to Beyoncé including a version of it in her Homecoming concert movie aka Beychella. And what about in Australia? Apparently there’s a line dance for Nutbush City Limits by Tina Turner, and of course there’s the unofficial national anthem You’re The Voice by John Farnham.
Consensus hits extend to books, movies and TV too. I’ve just started listening to a podcast about How I Met Your Mother, a sitcom that ran on CBS between 2005 and 2014; I came to it after the show had finished, and appreciated the acting, writing and storylines. It also acts as a warm hug or hot toddy, full of earnestness and lessons learned.
Episodes of the How We Made Your Mother podcast, which mentions in its third episode how the show belongs to its audience, begin with superlatives and anecdotes from fans who feel comforted by the show and its characters: single guy Ted, young couple Marshall and Lily, Canadian TV host Robin and besuited bro Barney, played against type by Broadway star Neil Patrick Harris.
The show’s success coincided with the Obama administration, as did Parks and Recreation, where lovely Leslie Knope strove for positivity against the show’s antihero, Parks Director Ron Swanson. Amy Poehler, who played Leslie as an extension of herself, links that show with the Pixar movie Inside Out, which was imagineered to perfection and was a critical hit; the sequel was the world’s biggest movie of last year, even though it lost the novelty factor of the first movie, which took the novel approach of personifying emotions like Anger, Sadness and Joy.
Despicable Me, with its irritatingly adorable yellow Minions, helped Steve Carell move on from Michael Scott, the American equivalent of David Brent, and I can’t wait to watch the movies with my nephew. It’s already cued up in my mind alongside the other Pixar animations that were, and still are, consensus hits: Toy Story 1 and 3, Up, Wall-E and Coco. You know what the films are doing to you, but once your prefrontal cortex latches on to them, you are powerless to stop the tears from flowing.
Humans like stories and feeling involved in them, a literal consensus that gives such a status to these pieces of art. None has been more successful in my lifetime than the saga of the wizard boy who came of age at boarding school alongside his two best friends; almost 30 years after the first book in the heptalogy came out, Harry Potter still casts his spells upon the children and grandchildren of the book’s first readers. I suppose part of the series’ success is, like the Bible or Torah, to do with the shared nature of it, with readers of every creed and colour feeling kinship with the characters.
There’s a difference between niche causes and epochal artworks like Guernica or the Mona Lisa, which at this point in their lifetimes are seen to be seen, for a photo op, rather than to be understood. Much of the coverage of Taylor Swift’s Eras tour, which I think of as a giant niche even though she has sold more records than anyone else in the last few years, focussed on how much money she took in, or how much money was added to the GDP of the city she played in, or how long the set was. Consensus isn’t about how big your appendage is, however, but how you wield it.
I always remember a review of a Kings of Leon gig which, to paraphrase, noted that the band would love not to play Sex On Fire, but they would also like to pay the man who cleans their swimming pools. The consensus hit entraps the movie studio or the performing artist, boxing them in and forcing them to do the same thing over and over again until it falls out of fashion; no Kings of Leon song has been anywhere near as successful since Sex On Fire, even if it didn’t even breach the US top 50. It means they can tour Australia and the UK, both of whose charts it topped, until the end of time.
NOW 120 is out on Friday, gathering a few dozen tracks that have been popular in recent months, and I am running over the final edits of a book that tells the story of pop music through four decades of NOW compilations. Back in 1999, they could afford to omit Genie In A Bottle, Livin’ La Vida Loca and Flying Without Wings, which are all consensus smashes, because they could include Baby One More Time, S Club Party and Tragedy by Steps. There were more chances for consensus when there were fewer opportunities to hear a song via a personal feed on TikTok.
Last month the Netflix hit Adolescence got people talking about teenage mental health, and TV shows or podcasts about scandals or evil men can become global topics of discussion. It is ironic to note that R Kelly, whose music will never again be heard in polite society, is Track One on Disc Two of NOW 44; another of his songs, the remix to Ignition, was a party staple before it very quickly wasn’t. Luckily, we have Uptown Funk, Livin’ on a Prayer and bloody Sweet Caroline.
Consensus is cross-generational, after all: this year, Baby One More Time passed a billion Spotify streams, although we didn’t sing that at Darryl’s 60th.
Now That’s What I Call Now: A History of Pop Music in Britain from 1984-present is out as an eBook later this month, but you can read original versions of the pieces at nowthatswhaticallnow.com.