Now That's What I Call Music! 67

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Then there’s “It Wasn’t Me” by Shaggy, a song in which a man is caught literally having sex on the floor of a bathroom, and when that man asks Shaggy for advice, Shaggy just says, “Lie about it, bro. This CD includes five number ones on the UK Singles Chart: Umberella, Shine, Beautiful Liar, Give It To Me and Baby's Coming Back. Lo’s “Ain’t It Funny,” Ja Rule’s “Livin’ It Up,” Nelly Furtado’s “Turn Off the Light,” and Petey Pablo’s “Raise Up,” the most prominent song to ever advocate for using one’s shirt like a helicopter. In between there’s Fastball, Tonic, “Flagpole Sitta,” the Cherry Poppin’ Daddies, and “Barbie Girl” by Aqua.

The longest song is track 8, "Boo'd Up" and the shortest song is track 17, "All The Kids Are Depressed". Turn Down for What” is Lil Jon’s revenge on the Now god after it somehow determined that both “Get Low” and “Yeah! This means two things: That some of the album’s iconic songs surprisingly didn’t chart very well, and that the highs of the album were dragged down by much lower lows (I’m looking at you, “Everything” by Fefe Dobson). An earlier compilation tie-in with Smash Hits from 1987 did, however, include tracks from those years. The presentation of each release has evolved notably over time: from 1986 through to 2013, all double and triple CD sets were released in chubby Jewel cases which could hold up to 6 discs.Ultimately though, I went with “Bye Bye Bye” because it’s the song that helped ’NSync snatch the boy band belt from the Backstreet Boys once and for all. Well, they’re a band that sounds very much like Dashboard Confessional, which—welcome to another round of “I Can’t Believe That’s Not Music! It’s strange: People are pretty rude about mumblerap, but I don’t remember anyone throwing their hands up about Mystikal yelling “Danger! Here’s another fun fact: If you invite me to your wedding and don’t play “24K Magic,” I am taking my gift back.

Speaking of actresses making bizarre forays into the music world: Now 32 includes “Good Girls Go Bad” by Cobra Starship and Leighton Meester. A hot take: “Need You Now” is one of the best songs of the decade, across all genres; it’s probably top five. The thesis of “Chanté’s Got a Man” is “Oh dang, it’s really too bad your boyfriend is cheating on you, but guess what: I’m in a very stable, rewarding relationship. Mya’s inclusion on Now 14 (“My Love Is Like … Wo”) brings us to the most egregious case of “I Can’t Believe That’s Not Music. The tie-in television programmes are a month by month video playlist of tracks, from one year previously featured on a Now Yearbook album, with Bruno Brookes presenting.

I had a hard time choosing my Disc 1 favourite as nothing was a glaringly obvious leader of the pack, but I eventually plumped for Kate Nash - 'Foundations'! This was a mistake: “Move It Like This” did not chart, and as of today, still does not have more than a million plays on Spotify. Now 60 is the worst-case scenario for that strategy, as it features an irrelevant song from the “All About That Bass” girl, a useless track from the “livin’ like we’re renegades” band, and an even worse song from the guy who sings in seven-year intervals.

We as a culture need to take responsibility for our turn toward canine-related party jams, rather than hold Now accountable for its inability to predict that rather embarrassing phenomenon. For the 30th anniversary of Now in 2013 and the release of Now 100 in Summer 2018, the first Now album was re-compiled and re-issued. Sample lyrics from “BareNaked”: “Sometimes I think I’m the only one/Whose day turned out unlike it had begun.To appropriately rank the Now albums, I devised a formula to take into account the commercial success, accolades, and feeling of essentialness of each song featured.

Now 12 marked the first time both he and Justin Timberlake appeared on the compilation as they embarked on post-’NSync solo careers. Since “How You Remind Me” landed on Now 10, Nickelback has appeared on 12 editions of Now—more than 20 percent of the time. These were all released on CD and magnetic cassette, but with the 1993 and 1994 volumes also being released on the vinyl format.The series is then moved forward again, with the release of Now Yearbook 1992 in July 2023 (an Extra followed in August). If your song ends up on a commercial, especially one featuring a person dancing, congrats, dude—your song is probably music. Where the albums differ is in the aggregate quality of the music they contain—while all Now albums have definitively told us what music was in a given three-to-four-month span, they have never guaranteed that that music would be necessarily good. Stephen Thomas Erlewine of AllMusic says the album is "a terrific time capsule, at the very least, capturing what American pop radio sounded like in the late '90s" and "an entertaining snapshot of a fleeting era in pop music history".