THE 1000 BEST SONGS IN THE WORLD EVER.

998-Icona Pop featuring Charli XCX-I Love It.

2013-Number 1 single.

Best Bit-At 0.22. It’s Pop. It’s Punk. It’s Electro. It’s Rock N’ Roll, I Love It.

It was the Swedish songwriter/producer Patrik Berger who initially sent the English singer/songwriter Charli XCX two ‘beats’ to work on. One of those ‘beats’ became ‘You’re the One,’ which would later appear on her debut studio Album ‘True Romance’ in 2012, it would also be released as her fifth single also in 2012, but failed to reach the charts. The other ‘beat’ which Charlie XCX worked on became this song, ‘I Love It.’ At that time Charlie XCX felt that the song didn’t fit with the image she was trying to portray, so after writing and singing the vocals she gave it back to Berger, who presented it to the Swedish Pop duo Icona Pop, who immediately fell in love with the song. Icona Pop then took the song to the Swedish music producer John Eklow, who is better known by his stage name ‘Style of Eye.’ Caroline Hjelt of Icona Pop described Charli XCX’s original demo as ‘More cute, in a way, really cool and cocky,’ she told ‘Style of Eye’ to make a rougher version of the track,’We want the punkiness. We want the ‘f..k it’ feeling.’

Charlie XCX was born Charlotte Emma Aitchison on August 2nd, 1992, in Cambridge, England, when she began performing live at the age of 14 she was billed on the flyers under the stage name ‘Charlie XCX’ which had been her ‘MSN Messenger’ display name when she was younger. The discography of Charli XCX includes five studio Albums released between 2013-2022, and 47 singles issued between 2008-2022. In the UK, she has achieved eight top 40 singles as the lead artist, and a further five as a featured artist, while in America on the Billboard Hot 100 singles she has chartered within the top 40 on three occasions, including being the featured artist on the 2014 Iggy Azalea Number 1 hit ‘Fancy,’ a song she also co-wrote. Charli XCX also has dozens of other songwriting credits to her name.

Icona Pop are an ‘Electropop’ duo who formed in 2009, in Stockholm, Sweden. The two members are Caroline Hjelt, who was born on November 8th, 1987, and Aino Jawo, who was born on July 7th, 1986. Although the pair had both attended the same music school in Stockholm, it wasn’t until February 2009 that they met by chance at a party. To date Icona Pop have released two studio Albums in 2012 and 2013, and 21 singles between 2011-2022. In their native Sweden four of their singles have made the top 40, with ‘I Love It’ charting the highest at Number 2. In the UK they have charted on two occasions, and in America on Billboard, ‘I Love It’ remains their only hit, when peaking at Number 7.

‘I Love It’ was first released by Icona Pop as a single in Sweden, in May 2012. After it’s success it was issued in America in February 2013, and in the UK in June 2013, where it entered that chart at Number 1, it has gone on to sell in excess of 4.3 million certified downloads worldwide. Charli XCX has said that she got the inspiration for writing the lyrics having had bad memories of dating an older man for a little while. On hearing the lyrics both members of Icona Pop said that they could also identify with the sentiment. Charli XCX has said,’I just sat down and wrote it in half an hour. I knew straight away that it wasn’t right for me as an artist, but when Icona Pop came down to the studio a few weeks later and Patrick played them the song, they were really into it. They kept my vocal in there and put a whole new twist on it and took it to this crazy, amazing place. The rest is history.’ Caroline Hjelt of Icona Pop explained,’It’s a song about getting out of a really bad heartbreak, and how you slowly, slowly get up on your feet again, and then one day you feel a little bit stronger, and then you start to realise like, ‘you know what, I deserve better’ and you feel kind of empowered again.”

‘I Love It’ (in my opinion) is one of the best songs of the 21st Century, but the best description of the track was written by the music critic Lindsay Zoladz, who wrote that the song was, ‘Basically just two-and-a-half minutes of ‘drop.”

‘You’re on a different road, I’m in the Milky Way, you want me down on Earth, but I am up in space. You’re so damn hard to please, we gotta kill this switch, you’re from the ’70’s, but I’m a ’90’s bitch.’