(When Furtado was born, Barbra Streisand and Neil Diamond’s “ You Don’t Bring Me Flowers” was the #1 song in America. Nelly Furtado comes from Victoria, British Columbia, and she’s the daughter of Portuguese immigrants. From where I’m sitting, selling out was the best thing that Nelly Furtado could’ve done. I like flirty lyrics and clubby aesthetics and Timbaland beats. For me, she got a whole lot better when her music became more crassly commercial. I wasn’t into Furtado’s singer-songwriter phase. Sometimes, her changes took her toward the pop center. She wrote personal lyrics and sang over acoustic guitars. But when Furtado first arrived, her music gestured toward commonplace notions of integrity. Nelly Furtado always made commercial pop music she went top-10 with her very first single. It’s probably a bit inaccurate to use the term “selling out” here, but I can’t help myself. With “Promiscuous,” Furtado streamlined and foregrounded a few elements that had existed in her music from the beginning. “Promiscuous,” Nelly Furtado’s first chart-topper, was a clear bid for the mainstream success that she’d seen slip away. A few years and one sophomore slump later, she was half-rapping about being horny over a clattering club beat. Her music was giddy and eclectic, but it seemed to have some basis in idealistic coffeehouse folk-pop. Furtado first came into the mainstream in the dying days of the whole Lilith Fair MOR singer-songwriter boom. If you weren’t paying close attention to Nelly Furtado’s whole arc, “Promiscuous” must’ve seemed like a wild, out-of-nowhere zag. You can’t just attempt to meet the mainstream where it is you also have to move the mainstream closer to where you are. That’s one of the secrets to selling out. Together, they nudged pop music in a slightly different direction. The combination might’ve seemed random, but the two of them clicked.Īt the moment that they made their first big hit together, Furtado and Timbaland were both coming out of minor career slumps, so they helped each other with the process of reinvention. Furtado and Timbaland had already worked together, which helped. In Timbaland, she found a simpatico collaborator who had some similar ideas about rhythm and playfulness. She found a sound that was still emerging, one that would colonize the pop charts over the next few years. But when Nelly Furtado sold out, she surfed the cultural wave just right. Most sellout attempts sound like they’re at least a couple of years out of date when they first arrive. And you have to understand and even anticipate the zeitgeist. You have to find a way to get excited about the prospect of becoming a centrist pop figure. People can tell when you’re faking, so you have to find a way to inject your actual personality - or, at least, some version of your actual personality - into music that’s engineered to pop off. Instead, you have to walk a delicate line. When you come from somewhere even slightly left of center, you can’t just suddenly flip a switch and start making mainstream pop music. In The Number Ones, I’m reviewing every single #1 single in the history of the Billboard Hot 100, starting with the chart’s beginning, in 1958, and working my way up into the present.
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