What’ll be interesting now is what Jesy does next (Picture: YouTube/Jesy Nelson)
Jesy Nelson’s new single has not charted in the UK Top 100.
From the moment Bad Thing was revealed to be at No98 in the midweeks, it seemed inevitable that it would have slipped out altogether by the time the final listings were announced last Friday – and when that happened, the glee from some corners of the internet was loud.
Now look, I’m a total chart nerd: I can tell you where any Girls Aloud song peaked in the UK, I can rank all the Radio 1 Chart Show hosts by how much I felt they cared about the rundown, and I’m deeply invested in making sure Kelly Clarkson’s perennial Christmas banger Underneath The Tree reaches the Top 10 at some point before the world burns.
Combined with the fact I’m a big Little Mix fan, I had been very keen to see where Jesy’s new single would end up.
Bad Thing arrived almost two years after her solo debut Boyz, which was both A) controversial, and B) not very good – but it was also C) a hit.
Despite Jesy facing widespread allegations of blackfishing (in which a white artist is accused of appropriating elements of Black culture, sometimes to the point where their own race is ambiguous), it blasted in at number four upon its release and currently has 38.9million streams on Spotify, and 25million video views on YouTube.
Compare and contrast those numbers with Bad Thing – which, almost two weeks in, has yet to top the half million mark on either Spotify or YouTube – and you’d be forgiven for believing the negativity and thinking things for Jesy were looking very grim indeed.
But in fairness, that’s not necessarily the case.
In 2023, it’s getting harder and harder to judge an artist’s success on the chart placement of one single – especially artists who, like Jesy, are not signed to major record labels and are working independently.
In a way, Boyz was a trend-bucker: it had a massive first week, helped by both the excitement around Jesy’s post-Little Mix career and the ensuing controversy (video plays have counted towards the UK singles chart since 2018).
Songs entering high before slowly falling were much more common in the pre-streaming era.
Nowadays, although blockbuster artists can and do make major first-week impacts (Lewis Capaldi flew in at No1 just last week), it’s much more common for new releases to start low and gradually rise.
I’m a huge Little Mix fan and I wish Jesy well (Picture: David M. Benett/Dave Benett/Getty Images)
That’s not to say that I expect Bad Thing to become a global phenomenon in the next month or two – in fact, I would be surprised if it ever graced the Top 100.
But artists – especially independents – are much more likely now to release a slew of songs over time, and perhaps only see one or two gather any serious pace.
Let’s take Raye. She parted ways with Polydor (the same label Jesy departed) in 2021, and her first two solo singles as a free agent – Hard Out Here and Black Mascara – both failed to chart.
After that, she released the chart-topping Escapism, and… well, the rest is history.
Even long-standing stars with major record deals don’t bother the singles chart these days: in the same week Jesy released Bad Thing, new singles by Jessie Ware and my beloved Kelly Clarkson were also MIA from the bestseller list. Yet all three artists are, all things considered, thriving.
And Bad Thing doesn’t feel like it’s necessarily trying to be a hit.
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It’s everything Boyz wasn’t; more a ballad than a hooky uptempo belter, and it lacks the head-turning boost of a superstar feature (Boyz, lest we forget, had Nicki Minaj).
In short, although I am surprised Bad Thing didn’t grace the Top 100, this was never a song that was going to make anywhere near as much noise as Boyz.
The ‘JESY’S A FLOP!’ tweets and comments were pretty much guaranteed anyway – so the singer and her team clearly opted to focus instead on just releasing a song she cared about.
What’ll be interesting now, though, is what she does next.
Though she has to provide all her budget herself, and it’ll be much harder to secure things like radio play, the lack of a major label’s interference actually frees her.
She can continue releasing music she properly cares about without having to worry about being dropped, or having to compete with acts with seven-figure deals.
It is possible for her to still have a long solo career (Picture: Ricky Vigil M / Justin E Palmer/GC Images)
I’m a huge Little Mix fan: I wish Jesy well, I love her voice, and I’m well aware that she’s had to deal with a lot of BS in her career – especially at the hands of online trolls.
Jesy left Little Mix with a huge amount of love and support, and it was the furore around Boyz that squandered a lot of that goodwill – it may well be why there’s been so much gleeful commentary around Bad Thing’s lack of a chart position.
Though I don’t doubt that she never meant to cause offence and that she only had love for the culture she was accused of appropriating (as she highlighted in one of her only comments on the matter), there’s a lingering sense that pop fans needed more of an acknowledgement that mistakes were made and lessons would be learned.
There are signs that evolution is happening: Bad Thing is very different to Boyz, both sonically and aesthetically, and Jesy has also used it as an opportunity to raise awareness for the work of domestic violence charity Women’s Aid.
Whether or not she can, in time, win back the people that felt alienated by the way 2021’s controversy was handled, that’s not for me to say.
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But other artists’ trajectories prove that it is possible for her to still have a long solo career, and she has the creative freedom to do whatever she wants. Bad Thing is an intriguing start.
Its chart position doesn’t matter – it never really did.
But what she goes on to do in the long run? That does.
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What’ll be interesting now is what Jesy does next.