Song 15:
"Addicted” by Saving Abel
Peak: 20
Year: 2008
Year end position: 97
Alphabetical Songs by Artist: 1/1
Chronological Songs by Artist: 1/1
Video?: Yes
Spotify?: Yes
As of
this post, there are 77 acts where their only song we will cover just barely
snuck into consideration. Today is the first of those songs:
“Addicted” by Saving Abel. I was looking into the distribution of these
77 songs, and I came across a very interesting pattern. If you break it
down by decades if breaks down like this:
1950s:
20
1960s:
19
1970s:
8
1980s:
6
1990s:
5
2000s:
11
2010s
(so far): 8
If
you extrapolate the 2010s out another 5 years, the distribution looks more
parabolic. My theory for this is that, in the 1950s and 1960s, the volume
of songs on the charts was much, much higher than it is today. Just by
sheer number of songs, there were more songs by one-hit wonders that only hit
#20. The 2000s phenomenon is a little different. I feel like there
is a real splintering of the genres that make up the pop chart. For
example, country acts rarely make the top 20 but when they do, they barely get
in (Brantley Gilbert, Sam Hunt). Another group of sub-genre acts that fit
this description are American Idol contestants (Dia Frampton, Lauren
Alaina). The genre that Saving Abel falls into has a similar problem.
The song can be big enough to make the charts, but not played enough on
mainstream radio to get much higher than #20. There are a number of acts
that fall into this category other than Saving Abel. The Ataris, Good
Charlotte, and Seether also had their only hit song reach #20 since 2000.
Songs in this sub-genre often do very well on the Rock Charts (as the country
acts do well on the country charts), but that only translates to moderate
success on the pop charts.
When
I first saw the name of the band, I thought it might be a Christian-rock
band. Even the first few times I heard this song, my Christian-rock radar
was on high, trying to figure out how they were subliminally slipping in a
“Love Jesus” message into this song. Turns out that was a total waste of
time. This song has absolutely nothing to do with Christian rock, and
neither does the band. The story I found about the name of the band is
Bible-related, but it was more because the phrase sounded cool rather than any
over-arching religious reason.
From
what I could gather, Saving Abel worked on this song for quite a while, and it
is largely responsible for getting them a record contract. I think a lot
of acts have this similar experience. They spend years honing a
particular song, which become their first hit, and then have a hard time
replicating that success. It becomes very hard to craft another hit song
when you have so much less time to do it. They did have the one song
though, so they should be given credit for at least that.
As
for this song, I’ve heard it described as a sex song, and I don’t think I
totally agree with that. There will be plenty of songs that you would put
on when you want to get into the mood. When I hear this song, I think it
is probably not heard so much in the bedroom as it is in the strip club.
The song is essentially about a guy who is “Addicted” to some girl. There
is some talk of walking away from the relationship, but the sex is so good that
he feels that he can’t leave. That makes me think that the singer is not
addicted to the woman specifically, but he is addicted to the sex he is having
with this woman. There’s even a line at the end where the singer says
“There’s just gotta be / more to you and me”. This line reads more like a
question to me. It sounds like he is questioning if there really is more
to them than just great sex.
That
brings me to a pet peeve I have with this song (and with a lot of other
songs). There are two versions of this song. There is a PG version
where the lyric “When you’re goin’ down on me” is replaced with “When you’re
rollin’ round with me”. I understand that radio censors make it so that
the act almost has to record songs with this change, but I hate it. This
example is actually one of the better examples of this, since the PG version
really does sound a lot like the original. I just don’t like that the PG
version has to exist at all.
I
guess there are two videos to this song (one for each version). The one I
saw was for the PG version, and “PG version” is really stretching the
definition of “PG”. About half the video is the band playing the song,
the other half is what looks like a photo shoot for a porn site. There
are 2 hot scantily-clad women and a cameraman in a loft somewhere. I
don’t think this has anything to do with the context of the song, but it does
jive with my theory that this is a song best played at a strip club.
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