There’s a specific place in pop music heaven for Elton John. No one since The Beatles had made such gripping melodies and owned the charts the way he did, but for someone who has been etched into pop history, John also knew when things started to overstay their welcome on the charts as well.
Then again, this is coming from a guy who made hits faster than most radio stations could keep up with them. ‘Your Song’ may have got the ball rolling when he first started to see success, but almost every year, you would be hearing the next gem that John and Bernie Taupin were weaving together. Even if a song like ‘Tiny Dancer’ was six minutes, it was impossible to resist that sing-along chorus whenever it came around.
That’s not to say he always had the best business mindset when working on some of his greatest albums. He knew he needed to be happy with the music he was playing, but even when crafting his masterpiece Captain Fantastic and the Brown Dirt Cowboy, the idea of him playing the album in full during one of his shows when no singles had come out yet left more than a few confused faces in the crowd, many of which realised it was a good time for a bathroom break.
But whereas John had gone past the common radio format by the 1990s, things had already started to change. Many artists had dominated the charts before, but now that people were living off the royalties of one massive album, John thought it had started to get a bit overdone by the time the 2000s rolled around and people started fawning over the new pop stars.
No matter how much people like a song like ‘Toxic’ by Britney Spears, John felt that its constant exposure on the charts could only be a bad thing, saying, “I mean ‘Toxic’ by Britney Spears, you switch on the radio and it is toxic, no reflection on her because it’s a good pop record. It’s not her fault, it’s the radio stations. It’s the worst I can ever recall it, and now you listen to satellite radio and think, ‘Thank God for that.’”
Despite the fact that the entire music world had a strange preoccupation with Spears throughout most of the 2000s, it’s not like John had a problem with her specifically. He even made a remake of one of his songs with her, but he seemed to be pointing out an issue that has only worsened as the years have passed.
Granted, the radio doesn’t have the same kind of clout nowadays in the age of streaming, but now that album bombs are taking over the charts, it’s hard not to think of songs like ‘Toxic’ as the blueprint for it. Now you can have everyone from Morgan Wallen to Drake to Taylor Swift put out a new album and basically own all of the top ten because that’s all that fans want to hear when the album drops.
It’s nothing but a good thing for the artists in question, but in the future, it will be harder for new artists to gain a foothold on a chart dominated by people that fans are already familiar with. John may have grown up in an era when radio was like the Wild West, but if it swings too far back the other way, there’s no reason to think that new artists aren’t going to get the same kind of exposure as they should.
