Chart Review 21st Feb 2005 with DJ Chris Plant (1/2)	(1/2), (2/2).
www.djchrisplant.co.uk Tel: 01482 566566

A titanic tussle at the top that lasted almost the entire week is eventually resolved in favour of the modern generation as for the third week running Elvis Presley is beaten to the top by someone of the current generation. For the second week running the Number One single is a track which has been doing good business online since the start of the year, Jennifer Lopez'Get Right having first hit the online stores back in January. If you want the honest truth this is actually one of her worst singles to date, a tuneless bump and grind track that manages the remarkable feat of failing totally to complement her singing voice.

Nonetheless it benefits from being her first new material in quite some time and becomes what is surprisingly only her second ever Number One single, her biggest hit since Love Don't Cost A Thing topped the charts back in 2001. Since then she has had no less than 8 other Top 5 singles but none that advanced past the Number 2 position.

Elvis single de semaine is Surrender which duly becomes his third Number 2 hit in a row. The track originally came out in May 1961 and quickly advanced to the top of the charts, giving him his fourth Number One hit in a row, far and away the best form of his entire career. The track was a retread of the formula that made It's Now Or Never such a success, an English language rewrite of an Old Italian ballad - in this case Torna A Sorrento, written in 1911.

These last few Elvis tracks are a neat illustration of just what a dire state pop music was in by the early 1960s with the one time King of cool reduced to performing 40-year-old songs in a manner that would not upset your grandparents. 1930s Jazz music had even made a comeback with the likes of the Temperance Seven and Acker Bilk clogging up the charts for weeks on end. It was into this gaping void of inspiration that The Beatles were to arrive a year later - but for the moment the painfully sanitised Elvis reigned supreme.

There is an especially warm welcome back to the chart this week for LL Cool J with his biggest hit single for quite some time. The veteran rapper can legitimately lay claim to being one of the genre's longest serving performers, his association with Def Jam records stretching back to the mid 1980s. His first hit single here was arguably the track for which he will always be remembered, the tender ballad I Need Love which hit Number 8 in October 1987 and showed the entire world that rap did not always have to be about ego and machismo.

In chart terms his biggest hit single came in 1997 when in a slow sales week his rap retread of Rufus' Ain't Nobody spent a week at the top. His last Top 10 hit came back in October 2002 when Luv U Better (Steely Dan the inspiration this time) made a comfortable Number 7. So it is that the laid back groove of Hush gives him his biggest hit single for quite some time, only his second Top 3 hit ever and his best chart performance since that chart-topping week in the late 90s.

There is more rap to follow in the shape of the debut single from The Game, the latest West Coast sensation from the Dr Dre stable that has of course thus far spawned the likes of Eminem and 50 Cent (both of whom make attention grabbing cameos on his debut album Documentary). This is of course where it falls down slightly as the end result is actually nothing we haven't heard before. Debut single How We Do is a case in point as it is actually a two headed duet with 50 Cent that for all the world might as well have walked off one of his own albums.

Instead of demonstrating what a hot new talent he really is, The Game ends up as little more than a guest on his own record. OK, so I'm coming at this from the point of view from someone who isn't exactly deeply in to hip-hop and at the very least the single serves as a nice counterpoint to the sanitised soul fusion of the LL Cool J track above. I've never been good at damning with faint praise but I'm happy to announce that How We Do is as good as all the others.

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