2003: The Good Old Days? - May

In May 2003 if you asked me what my music taste was I would have said dance, rap and R&B. I count almost half of the new entries for May to come under those genres so on paper this should be a great month. Is it though?

Lets start with dance and we have full marks for Groove Armada with "Easy". Also getting full marks are Kid Creme with "Hypnotising" and Saffron Hill with "My Love Is Always". There's also a couple of UK Garage records a year or so after it's presence in the charts more or less died. We have a decent record in "Everybody Come On (Can U Feel It)" by Mr Redz vs DJ Skribble which is a Stanton Warriors remix. Not keen on "You Didn't Expect That" by Billy Crawford though, it's more like a modern pop singers take on a garage record.

The latter is an example of why lots of dance music in the charts isn't always a good thing. In addition to this we have vocal trance records which are cheesy commercial crap. Most notable of these was "Loneliness" by Tomcraft which really irritated me at the time.

Onto rap and overall it's looking pretty good. We have an unlikely collaboration between Bone Thugs-N-Harmony and Phil Collins with "Home" which is excellent. DMX had his biggest hit with "X Gon' Give It To Ya", I had all his albums at this point and loved this record straight away. Then we have "ADIDAS" by Killer Mike which reminds me of Channel U in a good way. The only rap record to get no marks is "The Jump Off" by Lil Kim.

Onto R&B and it's more of a mixed bag but it does give us the best record which is "Ignition Remix" by R Kelly. I remember some saying why Mr I Believe I Can Fly being a bad boy all of a sudden, I would point out he was always like that. We also have "Rise & Fall" by Craig David & Sting which is perhaps the best thing he did after the garage era.

However R&B also gives us the worst record which is "Can't Nobody" by Kelly Rowland. I always hated Destiny's Child and was surprised to find myself liking her debut "Dilemma". Next record "Stole" wasn't great but nowhere near as bad as Destiny's Child. However "Can't Nobody" was as bad.

Outside dance, rap and R&B we have full marks for Sean Paul with "Get Busy" and for Less Than Jake with "She's Gonna Break Soon" plus there's half marks for a few other records.

Here's a list of the records with the best on top, worst at the bottom and the good ones in green, OK ones in amber and rubbish ones in red (and in no particular order):

Score: 30%

Here's a look at the chart:

The best month of 2003 so far and second best month we've looked at so far. Is this a one off though?