What the song is about
Structurally it is a boast record. The narrator arrives, the room reacts, and the song spends three minutes establishing that she is the most interesting person present. There is no plot beyond that, and no other character with a speaking part.
The context is what gives it force. Fergie had spent years as one voice in the Black Eyed Peas, a group with three other members and an established identity. "London Bridge" was the first thing anyone heard from her alone, and she has described it as a punch in the face — deliberately abrasive, deliberately unlike what people expected, and designed to make the transition impossible to ignore.
Which leaves the question everybody actually arrives with: what does the bridge going down mean? Fergie has declined to answer it directly, saying the song pokes fun at things rather than referring to anything literally. Readings circulate, most of them crude, and none of them are confirmed by anyone involved. The honest position is that the phrase is doing the work of a hook — a nursery rhyme everyone already knows, bent just far enough to sound suggestive without committing to a meaning.
That ambiguity is not a failure of the writing. A line that everyone can hear something in is worth considerably more on radio than a line that says one thing plainly.
How it came to be made
It was released on 18 July 2006 through A&M, Interscope and will.i.am Music Group, as the lead single from The Dutchess, her debut solo album.
The credits are wider than usually reported. Fergie — Stacy Ferguson — wrote it with Sean Garrett and Mike Hartnett, with Polow da Don producing. Garrett was one of the most in-demand hook writers of the period, and Polow da Don's production sits squarely in the brash, horn-driven club sound he was building a career on.
The track is built on a sample of Tower of Power's "Down to the Nightclub", a 1972 funk record. That is the source of the horn stabs that carry the song, and it means the most aggressive-sounding pop single of 2006 rests on a thirty-four-year-old Oakland funk band.
What it did on the charts
Its chart run is more dramatic than a simple number one. It entered the Billboard Hot 100 at No. 84 on 5 August 2006, then jumped seventy-nine places to No. 5 the following week — at the time the second-largest leap in the chart's history. It reached No. 1 in its third week and stayed there for three consecutive weeks.
That pattern is worth understanding, because it is a snapshot of the download era arriving. The low entry reflects radio adding the record slowly; the enormous jump reflects paid downloads landing all at once when it went on sale. Chart movements like that were essentially impossible a few years earlier.
Internationally it reached No. 1 in New Zealand, No. 2 in Norway and Canada, and No. 3 in Australia, the United Kingdom, Denmark and Germany. It is certified 2× Platinum in the United States, Diamond in Brazil, Platinum in Australia and New Zealand, and Silver in Britain.
How it is put together
The arrangement is deliberately sparse and deliberately loud. The Tower of Power horn figure does the work a melody would normally do, punched out over a heavy, slow-tempo beat with a great deal of empty space around it. There is very little harmonic movement anywhere in the record.
Fergie's delivery is closer to rapping than singing for most of its length, and pitched to sound unbothered rather than eager. The chanted repetition of "London, London, London" is the record's other hook, and it works the way crowd chants work — nothing to learn, impossible to mishear.
The bridge drops the arrangement out almost entirely before the final chorus returns at full volume. That is a standard device, but it matters more here than usual: in a song with this little melodic variation, the sudden absence of the horns is the only real dynamic event, and it is what makes the last chorus land.
Why it says "Oh Snap"
Many copies of the single, and the official video, carry the subtitle "(Oh Snap)". It is not an alternate song.
The album version opens with an expletive. The radio edit replaces it with "oh snap", and the subtitle exists to tell programmers and shops which version they are handling. Clean and explicit releases went out separately, which is why the same track appears under two names depending on where you find it.
The video, and the wrong bridge
Directed by Marc Webb — later the director of (500) Days of Summer and two Spider-Man films — and shot in mid-June 2006 at Woolwich Barracks in south London, with Fergie performing in front of ranks of guardsmen.
It also contains a detail worth knowing, because once seen it cannot be unseen. The sequence on the Thames is filmed in front of Tower Bridge — the ornate Victorian one with the two towers and the raising roadway — not London Bridge, which is the plain concrete span slightly upstream. This is the single most common landmark mix-up in London, and a song called "London Bridge" committed it in its own video.
Directed by Marc Webb, 2006 — the official upload on Fergie's VEVO channel.
What critics made of it
Reviews were mixed, and the most-quoted verdict was hostile: Rolling Stone called it a total ripoff of Gwen Stefani's "Hollaback Girl", released the previous year. The comparison is not unreasonable — both are slow, horn-forward, chant-driven records by a woman stepping out from a band, aimed at the same audience.
Other critics objected to the suggestiveness of the lyric, and several praised exactly what the detractors disliked: that it is blunt, extremely catchy, and built for a club rather than for the radio's comfort.
It is a useful case of reception and performance pulling in opposite directions. The record was widely dismissed as derivative and went to No. 1 anyway, which suggests the audience was buying the thing the reviews were complaining about.
The lyrics
The writing is almost entirely assertion. She arrives somewhere, people notice, and the song lists the evidence of her status rather than describing an event. There is no narrative development between the first verse and the last.
Everything turns on the hook, which asks why, every time this person comes around, her London Bridge wants to go down. Read literally it is nonsense — bridges do not want things — and that is precisely the point. It borrows a nursery rhyme every English-speaking listener learned before they could read, and repurposes it as a euphemism whose content is left to the audience.
The chanted "London, London, London" that answers it has no semantic content whatsoever. Between them, those two elements are most of what anyone remembers of the song, and neither of them says anything. For a record whose job was to announce that Fergie was now a solo artist, being unforgettable mattered considerably more than being meaningful.