For a good while now, the pop-culture writer Tom Breihan has been doing a column for Stereogum on Number Ones: he’s going through all the songs that reached the top of the Billboard Hot 100, in order, writing about the songs and their background. If you go back to the very earliest of these, they’re pretty brief— the very first one is all of three paragraphs— but more recent installments have expanded hugely, to cover the full backstories of the band, the song, the producers, and basically every cover version or later song that includes a sample from the track of the moment.
I forget exactly when I discovered this, but I’ve been checking in regularly for a while, as he’s been covering my peak years of Top-40 pop radio listening (roughly 1983-1989). I don’t always agree with his takes— he likes dance music a whole lot more than I do— but they’re generally interesting. And it’s been kind of fun to look back at these songs and be reminded of the very particular times and places I associate with some of these songs. And also the occasional utterly generic track that I have absolutely no recollection of hearing back in the day.
(Some of this probably reflects my location. There’s a line in a Hold Steady song about how “The heavy stuff ain’t at its heaviest/ by time it gets to suburban Minneapolis,” and you can crank that up an order of magnitude or so for Broome County, NY. There was really only one pop station that reliably came in around my hometown— two if the weather was good— so what we heard easily could’ve been skewed if a particular station manager disliked a particular track.)
The column is now entering into the period of my rapid decoupling from Top-40 pop, with the latest entry, a New Kids on the Block song I don’t recall at all, hitting #1 right around the time of my high school graduation. This comes toward the end of a run of songs I didn’t much like at the time, and still don’t care for— in that screenshot, I think the only one I recall fondly is the Fine Young Cannibals track. (Scrolling down another screen gets to tracks from Paula Abdul and Bobby Brown that I despised in 1989, and still pretty much hate today.)
(Around this time, I had started to get more into what’s now called “Classic Rock” and started listening more to a different station playing that format. What was the Top-40 station through high school moved in that same direction a few years later, to the point where when I would come home from grad school, there wasn’t much difference between their playlists.)
It’s also been interesting to see some of the true oddities that pop up in this list— the Roxette song in the screenshot is a filler track with nonsense lyrics that inexplicably took off, and you don’t have to go too far down to get to Bobby McFerrin’s baffling moment in the sun. I’ve had a running joke on Twitter about these, attributing it to the fact that there was just cocaine everywhere in the 80’s. (My father recalls the time we went to the World Trade Center observation deck in the mid-80’s, and some guy in a suit just cut out a line on a brochure and snorted it next to one of the window pillars…)
As amusing as it is to write these off as just decadal weirdness, I’m not entirely sure that’s right. I say that because I’m in the middle of a new peak of Top-40 listening, thanks to having kids. Every morning I drive SteelyKid and The Pip to camp, and almost every afternoon I pick them up from camp, and they want to listen to the pop-music stations on the way. That means I get to hear a lot of current pop in 5-10 minute chunks, and we’ve been doing this for a good while— I’ve got a whole section of radio presets that are stations the kids want to listen to. And, really, I can’t say that the smash success of “Old Town Road” a few years ago is any more puzzling than “Don’t Worry, Be Happy.” Though maybe a better comp would be the odd cowboy song by a hair metal band, particularly given how Lil Nas X has moved into the “going door to door trying to shock people” phase.
As a father of A Certain Age, I’m probably supposed to rant about how these are Just Noise, but I mostly don’t mind it. There are a handful of acts that will get me to flip channels— Cardi B and Megan Thee Stallion immediately come to mind— but my kids mostly don’t like them, either, so that’s fine. There are others that just miss me— I find pretty much every song by Drake or Ariana Grande kind of tedious, and don’t entirely get the appeal of Billie Eilish. There are a handful of tracks that I actively like, though: this one that SteelyKid repeatedly identified as “A TikTok song” to the point where it’s become a running joke between me and The Pip:
and their more recent follow-up:
and this one that SteelyKid insists on singing along to:
It’s also interesting to see how little some things have changed, like the sheer degree of repetition inherent in the format. For a period of several weeks, there was one particular Drake song that played every day when I was picking The Pip up from his after-school program (and is now another running joke between us, which partly makes up for it being an exceptionally tedious song), and while they’ve moved on from that, the general pattern remains— at any given time over a dozen or so weekly trips with the kids to one thing or another, there are a couple of songs that are guaranteed to come up 4-5 times.
I remember somebody who was a DJ back in the 80’s— it might’ve been my cousin who worked at the Top-40 station— responding to a complaint about the overplaying of some song by saying “We could play that song every hour on the hour, and by quarter past, somebody would be calling in to request it again.” I suspect the medium of communication has changed somewhat, but it seems clear that the basic dynamic hasn’t.
One of the things that’s been interesting about reading Breihan’s column these past few years has been how many of these songs evoke very specific time-and-place memories for me. There are songs that conjure memories of listening while reading books in my parents’ basement, others that remind me of bus trips with sports teams, and still others that evoke driving around back roads at unsafe speeds visiting my various high school friends. And it’s been interesting to realize, in the course of writing this, that I’m doing it again, with a new generation of pop songs. Years from now, if “BANG!” plays at some thing we’re at as a family, I would not at all be surprised if the adult Pip turns to me and says “Hey, Dad, you know what?” and I reply “This is a TikTok song!”
The last few days of posts were kind of heavy, so I thought something a little more frivolous was in order. If you’d like this kind of thing delivered to you at irregular intervals, here’s a big button:
If you’d like to earworm somebody else with one of these songs, here’s a different button:
And if you’d just like to complain about my tastes in music, the comments are open.