2002: The Good Old Days? - January

The first thing that strikes me about January is the number of new entries which are dance records. Over half of them are dance, the first time we've seen a genre be so dominant is this series.

With that sort of quantity the quality is inevitably a mixed bag. The Chemical Brothers are an act who I've always seen as a mixed bag, but with "Star Guitar" we have one of their better records. It's a move away from their big beat sound to house music.

Another great record is "It's Yours" by Jon Cutler featuring E-Man. We also have solid efforts from Lange with "Drifting Away" and DJ Garry with "Dream Universe". Most of the records to get half marks are also dance records.

There's just the one UK garage record this month which comes from the So Solid Crew with "Haters". It is the sort of tune that was responsible for the demise of UK garage but I do quite like this one.

One of the factors killing dance music in general in the charts was the trance/eurodance remakes of older records done in a lazy way. Well this month we have examples of this in house music with "Love Is In The Air" and "Love & Affection" which are crap.

The best record is a rap record which is "Bad Intentions" by Dr Dre & Knoc-Turn'al which I bought the single of in the knowledge it probably wouldn't appear on a Dr Dre album. It did however appear on the soundtrack to the film "The Wash" which I later bought.

No points for the other rap record which come from P Diddy and Jay-Z who are amongst the worst rappers of all time in my opinion.

R&B wise we have "Shit On the Radio" by Nelly Furtado and "More Than A Woman" by Aaliyah. Both records had an impact on me and I remember buying both of their respective albums at the same time.

However R&B also give us the worst record which is "AM To PM" by Christina Milian. Given she'd previously featured on "Between Me and You" by Ja Rule I really tried to like this. It's just a silly pop record with a bit of an R&B beat to it though. The fact it was always on the music channels at the time didn't help.

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: 32%

Here's a look at the chart:

What we can say about 2002 is that it got off to a solid start but went downhill pretty quickly. This score is on a par with the final week of 1993 but lower if we use the same measuring criteria for December 1993. What we need to do now is go back to 2001 to see if these were the good old days.