2006: #6 - "Crazy"

Ignoring all the undeserved hyperbole critics heaped on it in the last 5 years, "Crazy" is actually a great song, and it did have the whole country singing in the summer of 2006.

We can remember a 6-year old boy nailing the falsetto as he roamed around a Subway, and the song wasn't even on in the store, and we remember a 60-year old Pathmark cashier humming it as she rung up our groceries.

Nothing earth-shattering - to name a few offhand, Michael Jackson, Madonna, Bruce Springsteen, Dr. Dre, The Backstreet Boys have all had similar, longer, and more widespread runs of cultural dominance - but pretty phenomenal in this very splintered, post-filesharing music world.

So it was big. And in a way, its mashup of Spaghetti Western film scores, 60's soul, 70's disco and 90's hip hop beats, was indicative of our fragmented music culture, and possibly the reason for its mass appeal. But what the song did not do is change the world. It's merely a near-perfect pop song - catchy, evocative and accessible for kids aged 6 to 60.

P.S. - Their ridiculous record label has disabled YouTube embedding of the actual video, so we posted the next best thing (Gnarls Barkley had covered their "Gone Daddy Gone"; perhaps this is a return favor).