![]() Why don’t we write a song to take everyone’s mind away from being down?'” That means “Down” is a pretty definitive recession song - an escapist trifle, served up to a world that seemed to really, really want escapist trifles. When the song was still rising up the charts, Jay Sean told Billboard, “The news was on, everything was depressing, and we were like, ‘Look at this, man - everything’s so down in the dumps. Even if the sky is falling down, baby, is she down down down down down? The lyrics are pure club-pop boilerplate: Tonight’s the night to let it go, to get away and make an escape, to turn this place into their private getaway, etc. It’s Jay Sean asking a girl if she’s going to be with him through whatever terrible things might happen in the future. “Down” isn’t really a song about anything. Maybe he regrets that, or maybe he’s just happy that he managed to make a real impact for a brief minute. That song gave him a global hit, but it also made it virtually impossible for him to transcend that hit. In his moment of greatest visibility, though, Jay crafted a wildly average track. ![]() That’s a shame, since Jay Sean’s origins are a lot more interesting, and since he started out making a kind of fusion pop music that was truly exciting in its time. If you remember the man at all, you remember him for “Down,” a remarkably unremarkable piece of music. Today, Jay Sean’s name rings no bells, at least in the US. You couldn’t hang a career on a song like “Down.” But “Down” was always fated to be Jay Sean’s one big moment on the US charts. Through some fluke of timing and canniness, Jay Sean was able to do something that none of them could manage. Plenty of artists much more famous and distinctive than Jay Sean - Jamie Foxx, Taylor Swift, Miley Cyrus, Jay-Z, Jay Sean’s ascendant labelmate Drake - had seen their hits stall out at #2, failing to dislodge those unstoppable BEP smashes. As a result, “Down” became the song that finally ended the Black Eyed Peas’ six-month reign of terror atop the Hot 100. Jay Sean and his collaborators definitely understood what the market wanted, and they supplied it. Plenty of great songs started off as anonymous work-for-hire pieces. The sleek emptiness of “Down” isn’t a bad thing, necessarily. In the context of “Down,” even Lil Wayne, a certifiable freak, almost becomes faceless. It’s like someone expressly set out to make the most pleasantly bland and forgettable piece of uptempo, life-affirming late-’00s pop music that anyone could imagine. If Jay Sean sounds like anyone, it’s probably Akon, a singer who managed to make his own blankness into a commercial selling point in the years just before Jay Sean recorded “Down.” The frictionless, anonymous qualities of “Down” seem intentional, maybe even studied. ![]() Listening to “Down,” you get absolutely no hint of personality from Jay Sean - no backstory, no distinct viewpoint, no sense of where he might exist in the musical continuum. “Down” is an anodyne piece of work, a song that resists context. It’s also got lyrics that couldn’t possibly mean less. It’s got bright, giddy synth-strings and hammering 808s, but it’s not quite club music. ![]() It sounds a bit like a late-’90s boy-band record, with its streamlined hooks and its pleading tone, but it’s got levels of Auto-Tune that would’ve sounded positively experimental in the late ’90s. “Down” isn’t really R&B or dance-pop, either. “Down” came out on Cash Money Records, and Lil Wayne is on it, but it’s got nothing to do with the New Orleans bounce that built the Cash Money brand or even with the bugged-out arena-rap that Wayne was making at his commercial peak. “Down,” the only real American hit from the British singer Jay Sean, is effectively a song with no genre. Book Bonus Beat: The Number Ones: Twenty Chart-Topping Hits That Reveal the History of Pop Music. DO NOT SHOW ADS 0Verse: D 0 Em7 1 1You ought to know, tonight is the night to let it go, D 2 A 3 2Put on a show, I want to see how you lose control, 3 4Bridge: Em7 4 D 5 A 6 5So leave it behind ’cause we’ve got a night to get away, Em7 7 D 8 A 9 6So come on and fly with me, as we make our great escape.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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