I thought The X Factor was actually better than usual this year. The most striking thing to me was that the final four acts - Misha B, Amelia Lily, Marcus Collins and eventual winners Little Mix - were all people who I could actually imagine being potentially great contemporary pop artists. For me, that's unprecedented. My tentative theory on the matter is that, with audience figures and voting numbers substantially down, this series has belonged far more to actual fans of pop music and pop culture, and far less to the Saturday-night crossover audience.
That Little Mix won the competition is certainly a symbolic victory for pop as such - they are colourful, vibrant and youthful, basically the polar opposite of last year's winner, Matt Cardle. The only successful groups to come out of The X Factor so far have been boybands JLS and One Direction (and, I suppose, now-defunct operatic quartet G4, who did manage three platinum albums after coming second in the first series). Little Mix are not only the first group ever to win the competition, they are the first girl group to finish higher than fifth place. And they are already positioning themselves as perhaps the most ideological and symbolic British pop group since the Spice Girls. Aged 18-20, they have talked about wanting to be seen as positive role models for young girls. They have refused to be presented in an objectifying way; they want to symbolise love and friendship between girls ("no boys for us," insists Perrie Edwards). Now they are the first all-female group to be number one in the UK since Girls Aloud over three years ago. I absolutely love them. They have the potential to be one of the best and most exciting pop groups in the world; in every respect other than their own, original music - which doesn't exist yet - they already are.
Which brings me, I suppose, to 'Cannonball'. The Damien Rice cover, which had been set in place as the winner's single for whichever artist ended up winning, is very much not Little Mix's kind of song. Through the course of the X Factor, they performed songs by current pop superstars like Beyoncé, Lady Gaga, Nicki Minaj and Rihanna, and also by legends of US urban music like En Vogue and Salt-N-Pepa. The only time they ever seemed slightly out of their comfort zone was doing Motown; any music made before the late-'80s golden age of house and hip-hop is somewhat outside of their continuum. Ballads were thin on the ground; when Little Mix did perform them, they were contemporary soul ballads by artists like Alicia Keys.
Giving them this, a plodding acoustic ballad by an Irish folk singer, then, seems like a marriage made in pop hell. 'Cannonball' as a song - to my ears - is plodding, dull, melodically uninteresting and lyrically vacuous. It commits all the worst sins of the post-'Wonderwall' glut of navel-gazing landfill-indie dirges that plagued the late 1990s and early-to-mid 2000s. So I love Little Mix, but I hate 'Cannonball', and in evaluating this record, it's ultimately the latter impulse that wins out.
I do have enough goodwill towards Little Mix that they get me to enjoy the song more than most artists could. For the first half of the song, the arrangement serves them well - we start out with Jade Thirwell singing entirely a cappella, and for a while the arrangement stays minimal and muted. Until the beginning of the second verse, there is no percussion at all; when it arrives, it's just a subtle heartbeat pulse in the background. If the whole record sounded like this, I'd probably actually like it. Obviously, though, it doesn't: a weak, synthetic version of power-ballad enormity eventually kicks in, complete with incongruous of-the-moment trance riffs bubbling around the edges. There's a staggeringly ineffective quiet-then-loud key-change moment. But the whole thing has an oddly muted air around it; it's like the music knows what sort of stadium-pop moves it's supposed to be pulling, but is almost too weary to commit to it fully.
As for Little Mix themselves, they do fine with what they are given. But watching their second performance of the song on the X Factor final, after they have just been crowned winners, is telling. Clearly bewildered and emotional, Jade Thirwell has trouble getting through her opening a cappella with a straight face, just about cracking up with nervous laughter when she gets to her final line, "hard to say what's going on". Perrie Edwards is next, powering her way professionally through her part, before breaking on that final line, into a quipped, spoken-word interjection in some affected Australian-Cockney hybrid accent - "what's goin' on?" The rest of the band burst out into relieved peals of laughter. That performance captures the group's personality far more closely than their studio recording of 'Cannonball' does - they are unable to take the song's grandiose and empty melodrama seriously, and when the song is juxtaposed with their own heightened emotions, it is revealed to be inadequate and ridiculous. It's also a moment that a solo singer could never have pulled off - it is all about the interaction between the members of the group, Edwards clearly offering a punchline in response to Thirwell's wavering performance, the rest of the band clearly grateful that the ludicrous solemnity of the song has been disrupted.
All of which says something about why Little Mix are plainly the best X Factor winners ever - this is exactly the kind of song that X Factor winners sing, and the fact that they are so spectacularly unsuited to it highlights exactly what sets them apart from their predecessors. Now that this whole "winner's single" business is out of the way, I look forward to seeing Little Mix get started on their pop career proper, and get on with being this decade's answer to Girls Aloud. No pressure or anything.
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