Do we really want Vengaboys in our room (boom boom boom boom)?

According to Twitter, which is place where all the news is kept these days, today is the anniversary of Vengaboys topping the UK chart with - and let me get the punctuation right - Boom,Boom,Boom,Boom!!

On this day in 1999, the VengaBoys hit the #1 spot on the UK singles chart with 'Boom Boom Boom Boom’. #90s pic.twitter.com/LzJ1OAtopg

— The 90s (@The90sDiary) June 20, 2016

Which rasies an obvious question. Of all the "Boom" number one singles, how successful is that Vengaboys hit?

Let's do some point scoring.

There are five number one singles with "boom" in the title. In alphabetical order of artist, they are:

Black Eyed Peas - Boom Boom Pow (2009)
DJ Jazzy Jeff And The Fresh Prince - Boom! Shake The Room (1993)
Outhere Brothers - Boom Boom Boom (1995)
Shaggy - Boombastic (1995)
Vengaboys - Boom,Boom,Boom,Boom!! (1999)

So these are our contenders. All quality tracks, I'm sure you'll agree.

And now the maths. There are three ways to rate these singles by success: the charts, streaming and popular opinion. In each of these three categories, I will score each single five, four, three, two or one Boom Points, or an average of points if they are tied. The one with the most Boom Points (BPs) wins.

Let's go.

1. Chart success

Firstly, I will look at their original chart run: how long they were at number one, and in the case of a tie, how many weeks they spent in the top 100.

Outhere Brothers get a slam dunk here. They spent four weeks at UK number one. Yeah, amazing, I know. Black Eyed Peas and Jazzy Jeff both spent two weeks at number one for their Boom singles, but the Peas had two more weeks on chart, so the Peas nudge into second place. Joint last are Shaggy and Vengaboys, who spent a single week at the top spot with 17 weeks each on chart.

Chart success results:
Outhere Brothers 5 BPs
Black Eyed Peas 4 BPs
Jazzy Breath And The Fresh Mint 3 BPs
Shaggy 1.5 BPs

Vengaboys 1.5 BPs

2. Streaming

Secondly, I will check the number of current day streams: for this, I will simply note the number of total plays each track has on Spotify.

Poor Outhere Brothers. Only 1.6 million listens. Not many people want to listen to a shaking room either: Jeff and his Fresh Prince pal only get 4.6 million listens. Vengaboys and Shaggy are very close: the vengabussers have 25.5 million streams at the time of writing, while Boombastic has 29.8 million streams. Bossing this category, however, is the much more contemporary Black Eyed Peas. They have 55.9 million streams and score top position in this category for Boom Boom Pow.

Streaming results:
Black Eyed Peas 5 BPs
Shaggy 4 BPs
Vengaboys 3 BPs
Jazzy Thingy And The Will Smith Bloke 2 BPs

Outhere Brothers 1 BP

3. Popular opinion

Thirdly and finally, I will turn to popular opinion: here, I will delve into the last ten (top) comments on YouTube and rate those comments for positivity. I'll include nostalgia as a positive thing because that's basically why YouTube exists.

A lot of comments on the Black Eyed Peas' Boom Boom Pow video are spammers or attention grabbers. Someone is excited about seeing them again ("aguardando ansiosamente o retorno desse grupo incrível<3") and there are two nice nostaglia comments: "my my nostalgia" and "velhos tempos, castanhari fez eu me lembra shsuahu". Three positive comments, then.

The comments on Shaggy's Boombastic are mainly people that have clicked on the track due to commercials. All of those comments seem neutral, apart from one which says "The Chase Bank commercial made me remember this fun song and that cute little pig". They said the song was "fun". Therefore, that's one positive comment. Just. I have no idea who the pig is. Maybe it's Shaggy's DJ, blowing the house down with its cracklin' tunes.

For the Vengaboys, it's all a little vague. One comment just says "nostalgia" while another one gives a little story about hearing this abroad then saying a nice thing about Dutch people: "Ik houd van jullie, dutchies :P". I'll give this two positive comments.

There are no positive comments on Boom Boom Boom by the Outhere Brothers. Someone's a little bit racist, another one's calling for it to be censored, while someone else says "I tweeted 4 days ago that reggie and bollie should sing this on the x factor and they did tonight. Cheryl gave me no credit. Cry for me". Okay, maybe that is positive. Sort of. I'll put this joint last with Shaggy.

People love DJ Jazzy Jeff And The Fresh Prince's Boom! Shake The Room. Hark ye the love of the YouTubers: "this song never gets old woooo" / "Haha it is 1993 again and I am nine years old again at the school disco." / "Just one of those people that is good at everything. Well done Will Smith." / "I love Will Smith" / "The stutter rap at 2:34 is genious". They're right - this track may well be genious. Er. Genius. Clearly, Jazzy Jeff and his alien-fighting buddy are the winners of this category.

Popular opinion results:
Jazzy Jeffrey And The Get-Fresh Prancer 5 BPs
Black Eyed Peas 4 BPs
Vengaboys 3 BPs

Outhere Brothers 1.5 BPs

Shaggy 1.5 BPs

Final results

At the start of this blog post (do you remember that?), I wanted to see how successful the awkwardly-punctuationed Boom,Boom,Boom,Boom!! by Vengaboys was in comparision to other tracks that have topped the charts with the word "boom" in the title.

Here are the final scores:

Black Eyed Peas - Boom Boom Pow (2009) 13 Boom Points - winner!
DJ Jazzy Jeff And The Fresh Prince - Boom! Shake The Room (1993) 10 Boom Points
Outhere Brothers - Boom Boom Boom (1995) 7.5 Boom Points
Vengaboys - Boom,Boom,Boom,Boom!! (1999) 7.5 Boom Points
Shaggy - Boombastic (1995) 7 Boom Points

Oh. In short, Vengaboys are almost half as bad as the Black Eyed Peas and only as good as the Outhere Brothers.

Well that was a waste of an hour.

Further Fats: Crimes against crimes against keyboards - Black Eyed Peas