Natasha Bedingfield: My Guilty Pleasure
More specifically, ‘These Words’— an absolute banger off her debut album.
In 2004, I was just a little league baseball-playing, brown bag lunch-eating scamp who listened to almost exclusively classic rock and Top 40 radio. Weird combination for sure. But, like everyone and their mother in 2004, I was introduced to Natasha Bedingfield and her debut single & album Unwritten.
“Unwritten” was, and still is, a pretty solid song. Although it has been absolutely pounded into our brains through romantic comedies (Because I Said So, The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants); TV (The Hills, Degrassi: Next Generation, Pretty Little Liars); and according to Wikipedia the song is, “very popular at special events such as graduations, Sweet 16s, and weddings.”
But I’m not here to talk about “Unwritten”. I’m here to tell you about the greatest Natasha Bedingfield song of all time.
Let’s start with the video. N-Dog (yeah, we’re on a nickname basis) begins by DJing a picnic, scratching cucumbers, and stacking cups to the beat. It’s perfectly corny.
Dressed in an outfit that falls somewhere between Phoebe from Friends, and a YMCA martial arts instructor, she dances around in front of laughable CGI on a beach, in a field, in some sort of concrete labyrinth, on a tiled roof, and on a couch that makes her multiply into four different versions of herself. It’s all nonsense and I love it. Also, for some reason she punches dramatically at the camera over and over on beat. I don’t understand it but… you go Natasha.
As far as the actual song goes, “These Words” is the most meta pop track of all time.
“Threw some chords together/ The combination D-E-F/ It’s who I am it’s what I do/ And I was gonna lay it down for you”
Apparently at the time, Bedingfield was suffering from writers block and the pressure of writing a song — so she wrote “These Words” about suffering from writers block from the pressure of writing a song. Not to mention, the 808 sample is absolutely filthy, pure fire. However, my favorite part of the song comes a few minutes in on the line:
“I’m getting off my stage/ The curtains pull away/ No hyperbole to hide behind/ My naked soul’s exposé”
Now, the reason I bolded “hyperbole” is because if you listen to the track Bedingfield actually mispronounces it as “hyperbowl.” How many people heard that and let it slip through the cracks? It’s a perfect cherry on top of this early-2000s classic.
I will forever cruise to this song with my windows down, queue it at barbecues, and blast it at parties without hesitation. Few songs can truly capture the sound of a moment in time, but the genre clash between pop, hip-hop, and singer-songwriter somehow recreates the year 2004 in three minutes and forty seconds.
“These Words” may have been the second single off Unwritten, but it’s first in my heart.
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