Now That's What I Call Music! Volume 59

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It was very difficult choosing the most essential song off Now 6, which tells you why it’s ranked so high. I’ll answer that question with a series of questions: How efficiently does the song conjure a sense of time and place?

I wouldnt touch this pile of junk with a barge pole - a few good songs shoved in between a shower of shite to be honest. Another strand of the Now Yearbook series, in August 2022, is the somewhat experimental release of a limited edition, extended play, 7" vinyl single, containing 2 tracks each from the 1983 and 1984 Yearbooks. Also, the fourteenth track, "Just Like Fire", was to promote the 2016 movie Alice Through The Looking Glass. It’s just a whole bunch of boasting—all done in the third person—directed at a woman going through one of the hardest periods of her life. I picked “Cups” as the most essential song over Icona Pop’s “I Love It” and Justin Timberlake’s “Mirrors” because I need us all to never forget the odd state pop music has been in this decade.Beats and boasts rule, with tracks like Sia’s fun-on-a-budget anthem “Cheap Thrills,” Fifth Harmony’s sneakily seductive “Work from Home,” and Mike Posner’s head-spinning “I Took a Pill in Ibiza” providing sing-along choruses and body-rocking rhythms. Taking those questions into account and assigning each song an Essential Score, I—again, I am the authority here, which is valid because as Now doctrine states, all people who started the sixth grade three or four years before or after the first Now are Now experts—averaged those numbers to arrive at an Essential Score. The 4-CD series follows the same general format of the original Special Editions series, with genre, era, and decade collections, but over four compact discs (there is also an abridged vinyl version of Punk and New Wave and Rock), meaning they contain more tracks than the original special editions, but fewer than the Now 100 Hits, which preceded this series. November 2020) David Bowie, Patti Labelle and Michael McDonald, and the Real Roxanne are the tracks that are missing.

That “Incomplete” by Sisqó landed on Now 5 is the most solid evidence we have pointing to the Now religion including karma—it’s on there because “Thong Song” is not on Now 4, or any Now for that matter.

Lo’s “Ain’t It Funny,” Ja Rule’s “Livin’ It Up,” Nelly Furtado’s “Turn Off the Light,” and Petey Pablo’s “Raise Up,” the most prominent song to ever advocate for using one’s shirt like a helicopter. Also, on LMFAO’s 2011 album Sorry for Party Rocking—look at this cover art—the song “Sorry for Party Rocking” appears before “Party Rock Anthem. Towards the end of the series, 3-CD digipak sets were issued, but in 2010, the long-running title was retired, and all subsequent dance-themed Now collections have been issued under the Special Editions series.

I could simply print the entire tracklist of Now 37 and it would be a sufficient explanation for why this ranks at the top of this list. because Now 8 selected the original “I’m Real” by Jennifer Lopez instead of the Murder Remix of “I’m Real” featuring Ja Rule. Mya’s inclusion on Now 14 (“My Love Is Like … Wo”) brings us to the most egregious case of “I Can’t Believe That’s Not Music.No alternative stuff in there at all, except for the Libertines and they're just a joke that's backfired. Initially, a special edition of a Now compilation was quite rare, and between 1994 and 2002, there weren't any released at all. And because of the micro-era it encapsulates, almost all of the songs are nostalgia-heavy and essential-feeling—for good and bad reasons.