In The Number Ones, I’m reviewing every single #1 single in the history of the Billboard Hot 100, starting with the chart’s beginning, in 1958, and working my way up into the present. Book Bonus Beat: The Number Ones: Twenty Chart-Topping Hits That Reveal the History of Pop Music.
The pop charts are so weird. They can be exciting or frustrating. They can also be predictable. But when they get too predictable, something comes along to fuck up all the forecasts. In the mid-’10s, the Hot 100 was as ossified as it’s ever been, with songs routinely racking up months-long stays at #1. For the first half of 2015, two songs pretty much ran the table, with the reigns of “Uptown Funk!” and “See You Again” broken only by a one-week stay for Taylor Swift’s Kendrick Lamar-assisted version of “Bad Blood.” But then something random snuck through and stole song-of-the-summer honors away from the big blockbusters.
The random thing wasn’t entirely unpredictable. Omi’s “Cheerleader” was a gigantic European hit for nearly a year before is started making noise in America. When it started its American push, the track steadily rose up the Hot 100, until plenty of interested parties predicted that it would eventually hit #1. Still, we’re talking about a German DJ’s bubbly house remix of a Jamaican reggae single that was already three years old by the time it reached the summit of the Hot 100. The two artists with their names on “Cheerleader,” singer Omi and remixer Felix Jaehn, were decidedly non-famous in the US, and both of them would remain that way. Neither of them ever scored a remotely notable American hit again. “Cheerleader” was a one-off, and it was about as big as a one-off can get.
When “Cheerleader” took off, plenty of critics compared it to Magic!’s “Rude,” another random-ass reggae-adjacent late-summer jam that became a shockingly huge chart hit the previous year. The comparisons make sense. They’re both laid-back vacation tracks with indelible hooks, and they both come from artists that fit the one-hit wonder definition perfectly. But there’s a crucial distinction between the two of them: “Rude” is fucking garbage, and “Cheerleader” slaps.
For a such a lightweight song, “Cheerleader” has a long and twisty backstory. If I’m being honest, that’s probably one of the things that I like about it. The mere existence of “Cheerleader,” at least in its final form, is deeply unlikely. The song started off with Omi, the singer born Omar Samuel Pasley in the rural Jamaican province of Clarendon. (When Omi was born, Steve Winwood’s “Higher Love” was the #1 song in America. I’d love to tell you want was at #1 in Jamaica, but I can’t find a chart archive.) Omi’s father was a musician who went by the name Jah Ken; he died when Omi was still a kid. Omi grew up singing in church, and he eventually caught the ear of the reggae kingmaker Clifton “Specialist” Dillon.
Clifton Dillon was around for the first crossover moment of dancehall reggae, and he produced or co-produced huge early-’90s dancehall anthems like Mad Cobra’s “Flex,” Shabba Ranks’ “Mr. Loverman,” and Patra’s “Worker Man.” Some of those songs became global hits. (On the Hot 100, “Flex” peaked at #13, “Mr. Loverman” at #40, and “Worker Man” at #53.) Buju Banton’s ragingly homophobic “Boom Bye Bye,” another Dillon production, wasn’t the same kind of crossover hit, but it catalyzed a whole lot of conversation about the lyrical content of dancehall.
After the mid-’90s, Dillon wasn’t making global hits on the same level, but he kept working with artists like Ky-Mani Marley and the Italian-born dancehall deejay Alborosie. His cosign meant something. Clifton Dillon signed Omi to Oufah, his indie label and management company. In 2012, Omi released his Dillon-produced debut single “Standing On All Threes.” It’s a sweetly sung love song with deep, rumbling dancehall bass. I think it’s pretty good.
In a 2015 Tonight Show interview, Omi said that he had the initial idea for “Cheerleader” when he was 21, which would be at least a few years before he started releasing music. The melody, built on a melodic nursery-rhyme idea, popped into his head one morning, and he started to write the lyrics in a taxi while on his way to an underground studio. At first, he only wrote two verses, figuring it might work as an a cappella interlude on a Clifton Dillon album. Dillon convinced him that the song could be a hit, so he wrote another verse. They recorded it with Sly Dunbar and the late Robbie Shakespeare, the legendary reggae rhythm section and production duo. (Sly & Robbie have already appeared in this column for their work on Maxi Priest’s “Close To You.”) Dean Fraser, a veteran session saxophonist with a ton of experience, also played on the track.
The original “Cheerleader” is very much a reggae song, and it’s a whole lot slower than the remix that later took the world by storm. It’s a gentle ode to a woman who supports and nurtures the narrator. There’s a blank simplicity to Omi’s lyrics, and when the song blew up, plenty of people criticized it for misogyny. The cheerleader of the song’s title is only ever described in relation to the narrator. She’s always right there when he needs her, she grants his wishes like a genie in a bottle, she’s always in his corner right there when he wants her, etc. I would prefer to think that he’s also her cheerleader, but the song never mentions that. It seems fair to suppose that the various people involved in writing “Cheerleader” never expected the song to reach the point where it might inspire a Bustle op-ed.
Five different writers are credited on the first version of “Cheerleader”: Omi, Clifton Dillon, Sly Dunbar, and two guys named Ryan Dillon and Mark Bradford who don’t have a whole lot of other prominent credits. (Is Ryan Dillon Clifton’s brother? Son? No relation at all? I can’t figure it out.) The first time that Omi ever visited the US, it was a trip to Oregon to film the original “Cheerleader” video. In the clip, Omi and his girlfriend rob a bank. She seduces a teller into giving up the key, and then they lock him in the vault, dancing in the lobby on their way out. Omi’s mob-boss mother approves, and the two of them make their getaway, driving a convertible off into the wilderness and throwing cash out onto the side of the road. This does not seem like an effective heist strategy, but it’s a pretty fun video.
The original “Cheerleader” did what it was supposed to do. It was a hit in Jamaica, and it apparently also did well in a few of the places where reggae singles sometimes do well: Hawaii, Dubai, New Zealand. A while later, Patrick Moxey, founder of the dance label Ultra, happened to hear “Cheerleader.” He was on vacation in Montreal, and it was playing on a reggae-themed radio show. Moxey liked the song, and he liked that his colleague Clifton Dillon was involved with it. The Nas/Amy Winehouse producer Salaam Remi was also considering a bigger international push for Omi, so Moxey got together with Dillin and Remi, working out a deal for a larger “Cheerleader” release. As part of that deal, Moxey commissioned a couple of remixes.
One of those remixes came from Brooklyn-based dancehall producer Ricky Blaze, who made the song harder and choppier. The other came from Felix Jaehn, a German dance producer who was working in a niche subgenre that came to be known as tropical house. I’d never heard of tropical house before the “Cheerleader” remix blew up, and I can remember cycling through playlists dedicated to the genre, disappointed that I couldn’t find more stuff that scratched the same itch. I’m still a little hazy on how you’d define trop-house, but I’ll give it a shot here.
Tropical house, a sort of laid-back and vibey take on deep house, had very little in common with the hammering EDM-pop anthems that dominated the charts in the first half of the ’10s. Instead, the music was slower, slinkier, and more melodic. It owed at least a few ideas to dancehall, which helped the “Cheerleader” remix work so well. In 2014 and 2015, songs with those characteristics swept across the world, bubbling up on the streaming services that were only just becoming big parts of the music business.
“Rather Be” isn’t generally considered to be tropical house, but that’s a song that I remember as a personal aha moment. The British group Clean Bandit, working with the singer Jess Glynne, came up with a giddy, joyous dance track that was full of violins and heady keyboards. It sounded like summer. “Rather Be” was huge across Europe, and it made it to #10 on the Hot 100 in the fall of 2014. (It’s a 9. Clean Bandit’s highest-charting Hot 100 hit, the 2016 Sean Paul/Anne-Marie collab “Rockabye,” peaked at #9. It’s an 8.)
Diplo, a dance producer who always paid attention to emerging trends, was all over this shift. Early in 2015, Jack Ü, the short-lived duo of Diplo and his colleague Skrillex, released their one album, and they brought in Justin Bieber to sing on “Where Are Ü Now,” its best song. That track peaked at #8, and it spurred a major comeback for Justin Bieber, a pop star who’d suffered a few PR calamities. (“Where Are Ü Now” is a 10. Bieber will appear in this column a few times, including with some tracks that flirt with that trop-house sound.)
A couple of weeks after “Where Are Ü Now” came out, Diplo’s group Major Lazer released “Lean On,” a track that they made with the French EDM star DJ Snake and the Danish singer MØ. That song became another summer anthem, ultimately peaking at #4 on the Hot 100. (It’s a 9. Major Lazer’s highest-charting single, the 2016 Justin Bieber/MØ collab “Cold Water,” peaked at #2. It’s a 5. Just last week, Sam Smith claimed the song was originally offered to them before Bieber got to it.)
Do any of those big pop hits qualify as tropical house? I have no idea. The people who pay close attention to dance music can be awfully didactic about barriers between subgenres, and I’d rather not wade into those waters. But as a total dilettante, I really liked all those tracks that crossed over to the mainstream. This version of EDM seemed a lot goofier and more playful than the militaristic, anthemic rave-pop sound that preceded it. If you were outside in the sunshine, those tracks sounded awesome. 2015 was the one year that I ever went to Coachella, and that whole sound was all over the place that weekend. Maybe that stuff laid the groundwork for the “Cheerleader” remix to take off in the US.
In any case, Felix Jaehn, who uses they/them pronouns — or I guess dey/denen pronouns, since they’re German — was born in Hamburg. (When Jaehn was born, Boyz II Men’s “I’ll Make Love To You” was the #1 song in America. In Germany, it was All-4-One’s “I Swear.”) Jaehn studied classical violin and did a little bit of college in London before coming back to Germany. At some point, Jaehn got into DJ’ing, and they released their debut single “Sommer Am Meer” — that’s German for “Summer By The Sea” — in 2013. In 2015, they got together with the British singer Jasmine Thompson to record a new version of the Rufus and Chaka Khan classic “Ain’t Nobody.” That single became a #1 hit in Germany, and it charted all across Europe. (The original “Ain’t Nobody” peaked at #22 on the Hot 100, and it’s such a fucking banger.)
With their “Cheerleader” remix, Felix Jaehn makes the song so much better. It’s an ideal remix, a total reinvention that still keeps everything that was good about the original. Jaehn speeds Omi’s vocal up, rendering an already-high voice a half-step higher. They ditch the reggae instrumentation and add in rippling, thunking beach-house programming. A warm, contented trumpet tootles all through the track, even taking a solo near the end, while congas dance around the central beat and a piano sounds out the simplest melody imaginable. In this context, Omi sounds like a fully-engaged lounge singer. The humid beat-drop after the opening is satisfying on a deep, elemental level.
“Cheerleader” is a witless, lightweight song, and that’s not a problem for me. Sometimes, a song needs to be small and simple. Omi paints a picture of a relationship that isn’t remotely sophisticated, and he goes back and forth between full commitment and something else. On the pre-chorus, he focuses on all the girls out there who are apparently longing for his own affections. They want to know if Omi wants to cheat, and his answer — “no, not really” — isn’t quite definitive. But by the end of the song, he’s ready to get down on one knee and propose. Through it all, he maintains the same flirty tone, never getting even the tiniest bit emotional.
If you think too hard about the “Cheerleader” lyrics, the song suffers terribly. But you can get lost in the sheer pleasantness of that beat. Omi’s tone is clear and soft, and I like the quiet celebration in his highest note: “Oh, I think that I’ve found myself a cheer-lead-errrr.” He also says that he’s the wizard of love and he’s got the magic wand. He’s clearly not taking himself too seriously, but there’s no irony in the delivery. Could you deliver that line without irony? I couldn’t, and I admire that skill.
Ultra wisely started pushing the Felix Jaehn “Cheerleader” remix over the Ricky Blaze one, and the track first took off in Sweden early in 2015 before spreading through Europe, topping charts all over the place. From what I can tell, they don’t actually have cheerleaders in most European countries, or in Jamaica for that matter. Cheerleading seems like a distinctly American phenomenon, but I guess it’s ubiquitous enough in movies that everyone knows what it means. And anyway, “Cheerleader” feels like one of those songs that’s built to transcend language barriers, since the actual lyrics are such an afterthought. It’s all melody, all beat, all vibes.
It took a long time for “Cheerleader” to reach the US. The UK held out longer than most of the mainland, but Simon Cowell’s Syco label struck a deal to promote the song in the UK. Thanks in part to a viral video of Cowell reciting the lyrics in full spoken-word deadpan, the track exploded in the UK, topping the charts there for a month in spring. “Cheerleader” also got a new video, filmed in Florida, that made it look like generic European dance-pop. This time, the love interest is a pretty, model-looking girl who hangs all over Omi at some beach. They sadly don’t rob any banks together. It’s less fun.
Plenty of songs take off in Europe and never do shit in the US. “Cheerleader” is exactly the kind of clubby novelty that tends to fall flat over here, but it came along just as that tropical house sound was picking up steam and I guess people were getting sick of mourning Paul Walker. After steadily rising up the charts for months, Omi shouldered his way past a chart full of superstars and took his spot at the top. It would be his last time on the Billboard Hot 100. Felix Jaehn’s, too.
When “Cheerleader” was sitting at #1 over here, I spent a week in an extremely dumpy and roach-infested Chincoteague Island motel room with my wife and our two very young kids. Neither of them had ever seen the ocean before, so we had to make that happen. The vacation was a bit of a disaster — illness, shitty weather, general brokeness, the aforementioned roaches in the motel room — but we still had a great time. We played “Cheerleader” so many times on that trip. It’s ideal beach music, especially when you’re trying to convince yourself that you’re actually having fun.
We still think of “Cheerleader” as our beach song. Just last week, we went back to Chincoteague for the first time in nine years, and it was way better this time. We rented a house, brought our dogs, hit the beach everyday, saw a bunch of wild ponies, and landed on the dreamy time-melting-away state that you’re supposed to find when you’re on vacation. Once again, we played “Cheerleader” a million times. We made sure to turn it on every time we crossed the bridge into Chincoteague, and it continued to sound great.
Omi did not have another “Cheerleader” in him. Months after the song fell out of the #1 spot, Omi released his debut album Me 4 U. It had the “Cheerleader” remix, a few reggae tracks, and a lot of extremely generic global pop music. Magic! singer Nasri Atweh co-wrote one of the songs. The “Cheerleader” single went triple platinum, and Me 4 U eventually went gold, probably largely thanks to “Cheerleader” streams. Omi’s wildly forgettable follow-up single “Hula Hoop” did pretty well in Australia and parts of Europe, but it missed the Hot 100 entirely. There hasn’t been a second Omi album.
Omi continues to make music and play shows, and he did some kind of “Cheerleader” anniversary tour earlier this year. Felix Jaehn landed another German chart-topper later in 2015, when they and singer Mark Forster formed a duo called Eff and dropped a track called “Stimme.” Jaehn released their debut album I in 2018, and one of its tracks features Gucci Mane, which is weird. (Gucci will eventually appear in this column, at least in a guest-rapper capacity.) Jaehn came out as bisexual in 2018 and nonbinary in 2024. They’re still making music now, too. There’s always a chance that Omi or Felix Jaehn, separately or together, could stage an American chart comeback. But “Cheerleader” has left very little cultural imprint, and those guys have absolutely zero public profile over here, so don’t bet on it.
“Cheerleader” didn’t exactly introduce the tropical house sound to the American charts, though it played some role in that bigger story. The song did not lead to more reggae-flavored hits over here. There’s nothing important about “Cheerleader.” It wasn’t any kind of fulcrum point or cultural reset, and its success would not be repeated. But when you’re on the way to the beach, you don’t need to hear an important song. You just need to hear a jam. “Cheerleader” qualifies.
GRADE: 8/10
BONUS BEATS: At a San Diego show a couple of weeks after “Cheerleader” fell out of the #1 spot, Taylor Swift brought out surprise guest Omi, and he sang “Cheerleader.” Swift didn’t help with the singing much, but she did some endearingly terrible dancing and created the impression that Omi’s presence was a big deal, which was nice of her. Here’s the fan footage:
(Taylor Swift has been in this column a bunch of times already, and she’ll be back a bunch more.)
BONUS BONUS BEATS: Here’s UK indie rockers the Vaccines doing what amounts to a fun, possibly drunken karaoke version of “Cheerleader” in a 2015 visit to the BBC Live Lounge:
The Number Ones: Twenty Chart-Topping Hits That Reveal The History Of Pop Music is out now on paperback via Hachette Books. Oh, I think that I’ve found myself a bookreader. Buy it here.
