I’m not a fan of Katie Price, to be honest.
If pushed, I’d admit that I have a certain amount of respect for someone who can create such a lucrative career for themselves despite an obvious absence of talent, but as far as I’m concerned, the sooner people stop talking about her the better.
Except for me, of course.
So I can’t quite explain how I came to be reading about her on Wikipedia. I suspect that it was the result of one of those link-storm sessions where you just quickly pop online to find something, such as the closing time of your local post-office, and two hours later you find yourself with thirty Wikipedia tabs open, reading an article about the Uttar Pradesh Association of Dead People.
Anyway… It turns out that Katie Price released a song in 2010 called Free To Love Again which got to number 60 in the singles chart.
I thought I’d check it out, so I found the song on Youtube. Here it is. On first listen, two things stood out for me. Firstly, it isn’t very good. And secondly, she sings the phrases “Free to love” and “Free to love again” a lot. I mean, a really really ludicrous number of times.
They say that the key to a good pop song is repetition, and the writers of Free To Love Again have certainly taken that maxim to heart. I decided to count how many times the phrases “Free to love” or “Free to love again” feature in the song, and came up with a total of 67 times. It might actually be a few more or possibly a few less, but I started to lose my grip on reality and I don’t really want to have to listen to it again to check.
In a song that’s 226 seconds long, that’s about one occurrence every 3.37 seconds. If that doesn’t seem like a lot, then bear in mind that this song has two verses which, between them, only mention the phrase once. So the other 66 occurrences are all in the choruses and bridge sections.
It struck me that if there was a Guinness World Record for the song which had the easiest-to-guess title, then this song could be a strong contender. This makes it the direct opposite of something like Bohemian Rhapsody, which not only doesn’t say the title at all, but also has no repeating sections.
Another way that Free To Love Again is the direct opposite of Bohemian Rhapsody is that Bohemian Rhapsody is a masterpiece, and Free To Love Again is a pile of shit. I think that tells you all you need to know about the so-called maxims of writing a good pop song.