The Number Ones: Sia’s “Cheap Thrills” (Feat. Sean Paul)

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.

Every pop star has beaten the odds. Even when we’re talking about nepotism cases who get major industry pushes, there’s so much that can go wrong, so many cases of supposed sure things who utterly failed to catch on. The people who actually break through and find their way into mass adulation, however brief and evanescent, are the exceptions. But few pop stars are more unlikely than Sia Furler, an artist who had a long and counter-intuitive journey to her own limited moment at the top.

Consider: An Australian singer gets her start working with the sort of British electronic group that makes the background music that plays over the speakers at fashionable boutiques. She goes solo with indie-adjacent art-pop that soundtracks at least one big, emotional prestige-TV moment. It doesn’t make her famous, but it makes her famous enough that she freaks out and plunges into deep depression. From there, she tries to build a behind-the-scenes career where she writes songs for singers far more famous than her. She’s fabulously successful at that, but she accidentally gets shoved back into pop stardom when one of her scratch demos is released against her wishes and becomes a giant global hit.

When this lady finds her way to actual pop stardom, she pulls an MF DOOM, attempting to reclaim her anonymity by wearing a big, weird wig that hides her face whenever she has to be on camera. Something about that presentation and her performance-art modern-dance music videos captures the public imagination, and she briefly becomes just as famous as the people for whom she’s still writing songs. Finally, at the age of 40, she reaches #1 with a track that she originally wrote for one of those other pop stars. The song itself blows up because of a remix with a dancehall star who’s been out of the spotlight for nearly a decade, which itself is pretty unlikely.

The sheer randomness of Sia’s pop stardom is a lot more interesting than “Cheap Thrills,” the song that finally took her to #1. “Cheap Thrills” doesn’t really sound like Sia, and it’s not the song that people are most likely to associate with her. Sia’s backstory and presentation don’t necessarily lend themselves to a song as bland and anodyne as “Cheap Thrills,” but it nevertheless remains her only Hot 100 chart-topper, at least as an artist rather than a songwriter. With all that said, it’s not a bad song.

Let’s get into that backstory. Sia Kate Isobelle Furler comes from an artsy family in Adelaide. She’s the daughter of an art professor and a musician, and her uncle was Kevin Colson, a pretty legendary stage actor. (When Sia was born, Silver Convention’s “Fly, Robin, Fly” was the #1 song in America. In Australia, it was ABBA’s “Mamma Mia.” You win this round, Australia.) In her early 20s, Sia sang for Crisp, an Australian group who, judging by a quick scan through this EP, made some pretty terrible trip-hop. Under the name Sia Furler, she released a solo album called OnlySee in 1997, and then she moved to London.

Sia lived in London with her first serious boyfriend, a guy named Dan Pontifex, and he was killed in a hit-and-run accident soon after they broke up. Sia was already drinking to get over stage-fright nerves, and she used with drugs and alcohol to deal with her grief. She also made connections. She sang backup on some unreleased Jamiroquai records, and she became a frequent collaborator and touring member of Zero 7, the sleekly chilled-out British electronic duo. Sia co-wrote and sang on “Destiny,” a single from Zero 7’s 2001 debut album Simple Things, and it became a minor UK chart hit. Good song!

While working with Zero 7, Sia kept making her own music. In 2001, she released an album called Healing Is Difficult, and she made it to #10 on the UK charts with “Taken For Granted,” a sort of retro-loungey dance-pop track. Over the next few years, she developed a reputation as the kind of vaguely arty singer-songwriter whose music shows up in the background on TV shows like The O.C. and One Tree Hill.

In 2005, Sia caught a real break when her track “Breathe Me” soundtracked the tearjerking grand-finale scene from the HBO show Six Feet Under — the emotionally devastating montage where you see how all the major characters die. It’s one of the all-time great TV-show endings. Stereogum’s own Rachel Brodsky co-hosts In Sync, a podcast that gets deep into big needledrop moments in movies and TV shows, and the first episode is about that “Breathe Me” montage. If this had been the peak of Sia’s career, it would’ve been a pretty good run. Her next album, 2008’s Some People Have Real Problems, came out on the Starbucks-affiliated label Hear Music in the US, and it sold pretty well, largely because Starbucks sold the CD at its counters.

Christina Aguilera, someone who’s been in this column a bunch of times, brought Sia in to co-write a bunch of tracks on her 2008 album Bionic. The record was a big flop, and none of those tracks charted. Still, the prospect of working behind the scenes was increasingly attractive to Sia, whose songs were only chart hits in Australia but who still didn’t like going out and being recognized. In 2011, Sia wrote the topline on “Titanium,” a dance-pop track that was shopped around to different pop singers without success. Eventually, the French producer David Guetta decided that he liked Sia’s demo vocal more than any of the other versions he was hearing, and he released it with Sia’s voice on it. Sia, who was trying to become less visible, didn’t realize that she was the featured artist on “Titanium” until the song came out, and she was upset about it. But “Titanium” caught on globally, becoming much bigger than anything else that Sia had done to that point. (On the US, “Titanium peaked at #7. It’s a 6.)

After the success of “Titanium,” Sia became part of the pop machine. In 2012, she co-wrote Rihanna’s chart-topper “Diamonds” and sang the hook on “Wild Ones,” a #5 hit from Flo Rida, another artist who’s been in this column plenty of times. (It’s a 3.) This music was very different from the emotionally intense electro-pop that Sia had spent her career making, but it was lucrative. Sia racked up songwriting credits for people like Beyoncé, Britney Spears, Eminem, and Katy Perry. In 2014, she started making hits of her own, and she did it by totally changing her public persona, adapting a new identity, and hiding her face.

When promoting her 2014 album 1000 Forms Of Fear, Sia took to wearing a blonde-bob wig that covered her entire face. She recorded much of the LP with Greg Kurstin, a producer who’s been in this column for his work on Kelly Clarkson’s “Stronger (What Doesn’t Kill You)” and Adele’s “Hello,” and she found a wailing, operatic take on that era’s shiny machine-pop. But Sia’s most important collaborators in that moment might’ve been the visual ones. She co-directed a series of videos with the choreographer Daniel Askill. Rather than Sia herself, the clips starred Maddie Ziegler, a talented little kid who Sia had seen on the reality show Dance Moms. The presentation was striking and strange, and it did huge numbers on YouTube. That pushed Sia’s single “Chandelier” to #8 on the Hot 100. If Sia has a signature song, it’s probably that. (It’s a 7.)

1000 Forms Of Fear went double platinum, and the “Chandelier” single eventually went diamond. In the video for follow-up single “Elastic Heart,” which first appeared as a Weeknd collab on the soundtrack to 2013’s The Hunger Games: Catching Fire, Maddie Ziegler starred with a predatory-looking Shia LaBoeuf. This was before most of the allegations against LaBoeuf, but the vibes still weren’t great. That video gave a lot of people intense pedophilia vibes, but it turned the song into another hit. (It peaked at #17.) Sia and Greg Kurstin worked together on the soundtrack for the 2014 Annie remake, a movie that nobody remembers, and then they started making another album together. This one had a concept.

If 1000 Forms Of Fear presented Sia as a kind of mainstream art-pop star, her 2016 follow-up This Is Acting doubled down on the pop side of things. When promoting the record, Sia was pretty honest that it was essentially an album of leftovers — rejected songs that Sia had written with mainstream pop stars in mind. Sia said that she picked the album title because she was essentially play-acting in other people’s voices, singing things that she wouldn’t necessarily want to sing on her own records. But she presented it as a full-on Sia record, with the Maddie Ziegler dance videos and everything.

At first, This Is Acting didn’t look like it would do anywhere as well as 1000 Forms Of Fear. Lead single “Alive” was one that Sia pitched to Adele, and Adele actually got a co-writer credit on it. But while Adele’s own records were selling in ridiculous numbers, Sia’s rejected Adele song was notably less successful; it peaked at #56.

Maybe “Alive” was hurt because it sounded too much like “Chandelier.” When Sia wrote for Adele, the end result sounded a lot like Sia’s own music. But when Sia wrote for Rihanna, something different happened. Sia wrote a handful of This Is Acting tracks with Rihanna in mind, and “Cheap Thrills” in particular was something Sia wrote in hopes of landing on Rihanna’s album Anti. You can tell. “Cheap Thrills” is a clear attempt to tap into the dancehall-inflected pop music that Rihanna would’ve recorded in the early years of her career. By the time she made Anti, however, Rihanna was getting closer to straight-up dancehall, as you can hear on her giant summer hit “Work.” There’s no way in hell she was ever going to record “Cheap Thrills.”

Sia co-wrote “Cheap Thrills” with producer Greg Kurstin, and the track is laser-targeted at mid-’10s pop radio. The lyrics are all about going out clubbing. It’s Friday night, and Sia’s narrator is putting on her makeup and getting ready to go out. She might be broke, but it doesn’t matter because she can keep dancing with you. It’s endearingly impossible to imagine giant-wigged Sia out clubbing, but I guess Rihanna probably wasn’t out clubbing, either. There’s a built-in cynicism to a song called “Cheap Thrills.” We’re supposed to hear the track as product, not as any kind of artistic expression, and Sia steered right into that. She told Rolling Stone, “That one’s not cheesy; that’s straight fluff.”

Pop stars should at least try to convince you that they’re doing something other than mercenary hit-chasing, right? Plausible deniability is part of the social contract between artist and audience, and “Cheap Thrills” violates that. It’s a little rote and robotic and depressing, and that’s before you even get into the slightly trilling Rihanna accent that Sia sometimes adapts. The song is also a pop-machine adaptation of regional sounds. The drum programming is Greg Kurstin’s sleek version of the reggaeton dembow riddim, and the keyboards are clearly intended to evoke dancehall reggae. These were the sounds that everyone was biting at the time, and “Cheap Thrills” has some of the same processed-vocal tricks as the tropical house tracks that dominated the charts at the time.

Still, what can you say? “Cheap Thrills” goes. Even if you can hear the sausage being made, there’s something impressive about the way that the machine functions. On “Cheap Thrills,” the hooks are slinky and effective, and the lyrics are blank enough to be relatable. Sia’s voice has force and presence, and even if she’s not howling the paint off the ceiling, she can sell the fantasy of a big night out, a moment when money-related stresses drop away and all you feel is rhythm and connection. “Cheap Thrills” could easily be an Ace Of Base track, and I mean that as a compliment.

Sia built up the the release of This Is Acting by doing musical-guest duty on the 2015 Saturday Night Live episode that Donald Trump hosted, which is funny to think about. It happened! “Ladies and gentlemen, Sia!” Trump standing next to the be-wigged Sia and waving goodbye at the end of the show! All real! The “Cheap Thrills” single came out in December 2015, and it eventually got its own Maddie Ziegler dance video. But the single didn’t really start to catch on until Sean Paul jumped on a remix.

In retrospect, it’s hard to believe that every tropical house producer wasn’t trying to get Sean Paul guest verses in 2015 and 2016. Sean Paul’s moment of massive crossover success was a distant memory. “Temperature,” his last #1 hit, topped the chart back in 2006, and he hadn’t been much of a Hot 100 presence since then. Still, his voice was familiar to American pop listeners, and he knew how to add playful gravitas to a pop-dancehall hybrid. With the tropical house wave, Sean Paul had a bit of a renaissance. In 2016, he also returned to the pop charts when he guested on Clean Bandit’s #9 hit “Rockabye.” (It’s an 8.) Sean Paul has a short patois verse on the “Cheap Thrills” remix, but he’s all over the track, throwing in ad-libs and coming up with quick little call-and-response hooks with Sia’s vocal. His “more than diamonds, more than gold” part is as memorable as anything Sia sings.

“Cheap Thrills” wasn’t a big hit at first, but it slowly and steadily pushed its way up the Hot 100. When Drake’s “One Dance” finally ran out of steam, “Cheap Thrills” — a track that would’ve made perfect sense next to “One Dance” in a DJ set — was right there, ready to take over. I don’t remember “Cheap Thrills” as a moment-defining anthem, but the history of #1 hits is full of default songs — tracks that hold the top spot while the world waits for something more exciting to come along.

Sia remained invisibly visible all through 2016. She played a prominent set at Coachella and then went out on an arena tour where she shared the stage with Maddie Ziegler and other dancers. Just after “Cheap Thrills” fell out of the #1 spot, she released a new version of her This Is Acting track “The Greatest” with past and future Number Ones artist Kendrick Lamar, and that one peaked at #18. This Is Acting went double platinum. Sia had a real pop-star moment. It didn’t last.

After This Is Acting, Sia jumped from RCA to Atlantic and released a Christmas album. She joined forces with producer Diplo and singer Labrinth to form a supergroup called LSD, and they released an album. (“Thunderclouds,” LSD’s only charting single, peaked at #67.) In 2021, Sia wrote, produced, and directed Music, a famous boondoggle of a musical starring Kate Hudson as a recovering addict and Maddie Ziegler as Music, the autistic sister she’s forced to care for. Music is one of those howlingly obvious terrible ideas that never should’ve gotten past a pitch meeting, but it exists, and this is deeply unfortunate for everyone involved. Sia won the Razzie for Worst Director, and I’m grateful to her for allowing me to write a blog post with the headline “Critics Hate Music.” I was pretty proud of that one.

In the years since Music, Sia has only been on the Hot 100 once — when her This Is Acting track “Unstoppable” reached #28 as a random-ass TikTok hit in 2022, six years after its release. Earlier this year, she released Reasonable Woman, her first proper non-Christmas studio album since This Is Acting. Nobody noticed, and none of its songs charted. These days, Sia is mostly famous as a kooky Survivor superfan who gives giant stacks of money to her favorite contestants, and she doesn’t even do that anymore. Still, for one brief moment of time, everything lined up exactly right, and Sia became a pop star. I can’t say I’m a big fan, but left-field moments like that are still worth celebrating. Sometimes, those moments are more memorable than the songs that they produce.

GRADE: 6/10

BONUS BEATS: Here’s the scene from the 2017 motion picture Pitch Perfect 3 where the Barden Bellas sing “Cheap Thrills,” with Ester Dean doing the Sean Paul bits:

(Ester Dean has been in this column a bunch of times as a songwriter. Her only Hot 100 hit as lead artist, the 2009 Chris Brown collab “Drop It Low,” peaked at #38. Anna Kendrick’s sole Hot 100 hit, 2013’s “Cups,” peaked at #6. It’s a 4. Hailee Steinfeld’s highest-charting single, the 2016 Grey/Zedd collab “Starving,” peaked at #12. DJ Khaled will eventually appear in this column.)

BONUS BONUS BEATS: Here’s former Number Ones artist Patti LaBelle, in costume as the Flower, singing “Cheap Thrills” on a 2019 episode of The Masked Singer:

The Number Ones: Twenty Chart-Topping Hits That Reveal The History Of Pop Music is out now on paperback via Hachette Books. Baby, you don’t need dollar bills to have fun tonight, but you do need them to buy the book.