Absolutely awful number-one songs of the 2000s

8. “This is the Night” by Clay Aiken (2003)

I don’t want to say too much about American Idol and its marginal impact on American pop music in the aughts. At least not right now. I’m going to save that for later. Suffice it to say that Aiken was the runner-up to Ruben Studdert in the second season of the show when it was a major cultural phenomenon. Even though he didn’t win, he got a coronation song that was released immediately after the show.

One thing to understand – American Idol coronation songs, as a general rule, suck. This one may have been the worst. Idol judge Randy Jackson certainly thought so. He said it out loud on the show. But it was released and for some reason, it went to number one. One popular theory is that Aiken’s fans, feeling so bad for him at missing the crown when it had seemed he was going to win all season, flocked to buy his first single. That’s as good a reason as any.

The song, like the performer, would have been more at home on a Broadway stage. It’s theatrical. Overly theatrical, you might say. The type of chorus that may stick in your head after you hear it but will never get anyone tapping their toes or singing along while actually listening. It requires a big voice, and Aiken is capable of pulling that off, but it is all in service of a bland, generic show tune.

I mean, here’s one more thing to describe just how – incongruous, I’ll go with incongruous – it all was. Just before Aiken hit number one, 50 Cent had a couple of tunes in that spot. Right after Aiken’s two weeks on top, Beyonce had a couple, including “Crazy in Love” which replaced “This is the Night.”

How does the same culture go from “In Da Club” to “This is the Night” to “Crazy in Love” over the course of a few months? The cultural divide that is much in the news in 2024 is nothing new. As a nation, we’ve been schizophrenic for a long, long time. Of course, that incongruousness does not make “This is the Night” a bad song. The song itself takes care of that.