::start transcript::

Welcome! This is the Chartcrush Top Ten Countdown Show and I’m your host, Christopher Verdesi. Every week on Chartcrush, we do a deep dive into a year in Pop music and count down the top ten songs according to our exclusive recap of the weekly Pop charts published at the time in Billboard magazine. This week on Chartcrush it’s 1956.

Do ya like Elvis? Well, ’56 was Elvis Presley’s breakthrough year on the charts, and he has four songs in our Top Ten Countdown.

Now here at Chartcrush, we’ve ranked every year since Billboard started doing weekly Pop charts in 1940 using the same ranking method for every year. For pre-Hot100 years, we combine Billboard’s weekly Best Sellers, Jukebox and DJ charts into a unified Hot100-style ranking, just like Billboard did in 1958 when it created the Hot100, and then do the ranking just like Hot100 years after 1958. Besides Jimmy Dorsey and his Big Band in 1941, Elvis is the only act in chart history with four records in the top ten on a year. The Beatles in ’64, Bee Gees in ’78, Ace of Base in ’94, Usher in 2004, they all had three.

Now Elvis, or Rock ‘n Roll for that matter, couldn’t have dominated the Pop charts the way it did without cheap, unbreakable vinyl 45 singles. 45s brought record collecting within budget for teenagers for the first time. They cost about 65 cents apiece in the ’50s, which was a little over $7 adjusting for inflation. And the portable record players teens got to play them on ran between $20-50. They made great gifts for Christmas, birthdays, graduations. By ’56, 45s had been around a little over six years, and teens were buying boatloads of them.

But not only that: the Seeburg Company in 1955 introduced the first 200-selection jukebox. With two songs per record, side A and side B, that’s 100 45s, and with three quarters of a million jukeboxes out there in the wild, that’s a lot of records. And more slots to fill in jukeboxes meant more variety, so Billboard kept having to increase the number of positions on its Pop charts in the ’50s.

45 changers and 45s selling like crazy, but jukeboxes, a huge part of the record biz. “Put another dime in the jukebox,” as Joan Jett once said. Or you could “turn up the radio” as glam rockers Autograph sang around the same time, and tune in to your local Top 40 station.

Top 40, a format pioneered in the Midwest just after 45s debuted, by Todd Storz, who, legend has it, noticed customers in a bar across the street from his radio station in Omaha, Nebraska playing the same record over and over again on the jukebox.

Now the oldest Baby Boomers in 1956 were only turning ten, so the generation buying all these Rock ‘n Roll records and putting all those dimes in jukeboxes was the one that came before Boomers, the Silent Generation aged 11-31 in ’56, so-called because they tended to keep their heads down and work within the system to build comfortable lives and nest eggs. But as teens, music, Rock ‘n Roll, especially, was their outlet.

Comprising the adult 30- and 40-something demographic in the mid ’50s, of course, was the “Greatest” or “G.I.” generation that’d fought and won World War 2, raised in the era of Victrolas and scratchy-sounding shellac 78s. But in the ’50s vinyl records and electronics revolutionized the quality of sound for home audio. If you could afford it, you geared up your swanky mid-century living room with a hi-fi system. Albums of course became the preferred format for audiophiles, especially once stereo hit, which made singles even more the domain of young people, but in the mid ’50s, grownups were buying lots of 45s too, preferring ones that made their expensive new hi-fi’s sound like the money they cost.

#10 Nelson Riddle and His Orchestra – Lisbon Antigua

And one of those is our #10 song: the first of two instrumentals we’re gonna hear this hour. He became Frank Sinatra’s top arranger and bandleader with Capitol Records in the ’50s, but even before that, he’d worked under Les Baxter on Nat King Cole’s early ’50s smashes “Mona Lisa” and “Too Young,” and some say he was the arranger on those records even though Baxter got the conductor credit. But like Baxter, plus Columbia’s Percy Faith, RCA’s Hugo Winterhalter, Decca’s Frank Chacksfield and others, he also got to put out his own records, and this one was huge: piano, string section, brass, and a wordless male chorus. It’s Nelson Riddle’s version of an old Portuguese children’s song, “Lisbon Antigua.”

Nelson Riddle’s “Lisbon Antigua,” the #1 Best Seller for four weeks, March into April, but it didn’t fare quite as well on the Jukebox or DJ charts. Which was the pattern for so-called “hi-fi hits.” In the Summer, after it was a chart hit, it showed up theaters, in Ray Milland’s film noir Lisbon.

#9 Elvis Presley – Hound Dog

So Elvis! Four songs in our 1956 Chartcrush Top Ten Countdown, and at #9 is what some say is his signature song, not just because it was a huge hit, but because his performance of it on TV in June caused such an uproar across the media and instantly transformed Elvis from just the latest in a string of fleeting and essentially harmless Teen fads to the personification of the whole Rock ‘n Roll movement and a cultural phenomenon. At #9, “Hound Dog.”

Performing “Hound Dog” for 40 million viewers on comedian Milton Berle’s very mainstream prime-time TV variety show on June 5, 1956, Elvis abruptly stopped, waved his arm and commenced a slow, grinding version that he accented with some, ahem, very suggestive body movements. Ben Gross of the New York Daily News wrote that popular music “has reached its lowest depths in the ‘grunt and groin’ antics of one Elvis Presley. … Elvis, who rotates his pelvis … gave an exhibition that was suggestive and vulgar, tinged with the kind of animalism that should be confined to dives and bordellos.” And that’s just one sample. You should see what the Times said!

“Hound Dog” was Black slang for a ladies man who tries to schmooze his way into a woman’s life so she’ll take care of him and he doesn’t have to work. A male gold digger! Which made total sense sung by female singer Willie Mae “Big Mama” Thornton, for whom songwriters Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller wrote it in 1953 and scored a #1 R&B hit.

Lieber and Stoller, a pair of East Coast Jewish guys who bonded over their obsession with Black culture and R&B as students in Los Angeles in 1950, and started writing songs together. They wrote over 70 chart hits early in the Rock Era including #1’s for The Coasters, Drifters and Elvis.

Lieber and Stoller knew what a “hound dog” was. Did Elvis? Did Freddie Bell & The Bellboys, the White vocal group whose version he copied after seeing them at the Sands in Vegas? And how about all the DJs and teens who turned it into an iconic early Rock ‘n Roll hit? Probably not! And for all the day-after outrage in the press over Elvis’s gyrating on Milton Berle, no one really bothered to explore the lyrics!

Elvis recorded his version in New York a month after that Milton Berle appearance, and it was originally the “B” side of the 45! But that record with not one but two hits on it simultaneously topped the Pop, Country and R&B Best Sellers charts from mid-August to the end of October. We’ll hear the A-side a little later in our 1956 edition of The Chartcrush Top Ten Countdown Show.

#8 Kay Starr – Rock and Roll Waltz

Now Rock ‘n Roll was 1955’s big headline on the Pop charts, with Bill Haley & The Comets’ “Rock Around the Clock” first to hit #1 in August, then Pat Boone’s version of Fats Domino’s “Ain’t That a Shame,” a #1 Jukebox hit in September while Chuck Berry’s “Maybellene” was also in the top ten. When the weather cooled off in the Fall of ’55 though, so did Rock on the charts. As it turned out, it was the calm before the storm.

While America’s biggest record label RCA was busy poaching Elvis from Sam Phillips’ indie Sun Rockabilly label outta Memphis, they scored the first hit with “Rock ‘n Roll” in the title by a veteran Pop Singer who’d been at it since the ’30s and was one of the top Pop acts of the early ’50s, with nine top10s to her name including the #1 “Wheel of Fortune,” which was the #2 hit in our 1952 countdown.

It’s a Novelty number about oldsters trying to dance to their teenage kids’ Rock ‘n Roll records, and it replaced The Platters’ “The Great Pretender” at #1 in March, right as Elvis was debuting on the charts. At #8 it’s Kay Starr’s “Rock and Roll Waltz.”

Pop singer Kay Starr’s “Rock and Roll Waltz,” Billboard’s #10 Best Seller, but #1 on their year-end ranking of 1956’s Jukebox hits. Combining those, plus the DJ chart, it lands at #8 on our Chartcrush Top Ten Countdown Show ranking we’re counting down this hour.

Before Rock ‘n Roll, the last dance craze to sweep the nation: Mambo, but mostly with adults. Cuban bandleader Perez Prado’s “Cherry Pink and Apple Blossom White,” the #1 song of 1955, beating “Rock Around the Clock” at #2, and veteran Crooners Perry Como and Vaughn Monroe both scoring in ’54 with “Papa Loves Mambo” and “They Were Doin’ the Mambo,” respectively, both on RCA by the way. So it made a lot of sense to repeat that trick with Rock ‘n Roll and Kay Starr.

#7 Elvis Presley – Love Me Tender

And speaking of Crooners and Crooning: still mandatory for male Pop Singers even after Rock ‘n Roll broke through, to reach that next level of popularity, just like Female vocal chops were in the ’90s. Well, Elvis of course was a natural. Three of his chart hits in ’56 were Croons, and the biggest of those was Civil War-era song updated with new lyrics by the guy whose “Singers” backed up Bing Crosby on “White Christmas,” Ken Darby.

It was written for Elvis’s first movie, a Musical Western, working title The Reno Brothers. But it was released ahead of the film, and when record sales hit a million, producers decided to release the film with the same title as the song.  #1 Best Sellers and Airplay for all of November, then Jukeboxes for a week after that, our #7 song of 1956 is Elvis Presley’s “Love Me Tender.”

They easily could’ve fleshed out that arrangement with lush strings and a chorus typical of Pop Ballads at the time. And an instrumental version by Orchestra Leader Henri Rene issued by the same label (RCA) while the Love Me Tender movie was in theaters in the Fall, did just that. But in an era before producers dominated recording sessions, Elvis was in control in the studio, so the sound of his records? It’s all Elvis.

And not just that. Early on, manager Col. Tom Parker required Songwriters to put Presley down as a co-writer if they wanted him to cut their songs so Elvis would half the publishing royalties. He was a shrewd operator, that Col. Tom! But in many cases Elvis earned that co-credit by changing up lyrics on the fly in addition to being the de facto producer and arranger at his sessions.

#6 Dean Martin – Memories Are Made of This

Well, we’re gonna stick with Crooners for the #6 hit on our Chartcrush Top Ten Countdown for 1956: the first #1 for an Italian-American Rat Packer who’d nearly topped the charts in ’54 with his breakthrough, “That’s Amore.” He’d been on the charts since 1949, though, so the #1 in ’56 was a long time coming. #6, it’s Dean Martin’s “Memories Are Made of This.”

The top song on the charts for five weeks January into February of 1956, before Elvis, and #6 on our Chartcrush Top Ten Countdown for 1956, Dean Martin’s “Memories Are Made of This.”

And Deano was far from done: “Return to Me” and his version of “Volare” were massive hits in 1958, both with verses sung in Italian. And in 1964 at the height of Beatlemania, he actually made good on his wild boast that his latest record was gonna knock his Fab Four-obsessed son’s “pallies” off the top of the charts.

“Everybody Loves Somebody” bumped “A Hard Day’s Night” from the #1 spot in August! One of the last oldskool Crooner hits on the Hot100, but Martin was dominant on the Easy Listening chart for the rest of the ’60s while he hosted his top-rated prime-time variety show on NBC all the way into the mid-’70s, and then his series of celebrity roasts into the mid-’80s.

#5 Jim Lowe – The Green Door

But back to 1956. Dot Records was the Gallatin, Tennessee label that’d unleashed Pat Boone’s “Ain’t That a Shame” in ’55, the second big Rock ‘n Roll hit after “Rock Around the Clock.” And Boone followed it up with four more top10s, all on Dot, including a #1 with his “whitewashed” cover of Bluesman Ivory Joe Hunter’s “I Almost Lost My Mind.” That’s #19 on our 1956 Chartcrush ranking.

But Elvis, Carl Perkins, Sun Records and Rockabilly had changed the game, so Dot scrambled for Elvis-style material and found Sanford Clark’s “The Fool,” which got to #8 in September, then an even bigger hit that was by a New York DJ! After Archie Bleyer’s “Hernando’s Hideaway” in ’54, it’s the second #1 hit in the mid-’50s about the mysterious goings-on at secret members-only after-hour clubs. At #5, Jim Lowe’s “The Green Door.”

33-year-old Missourian Jim Lowe had just started his long career in New York radio when Dot put out “The Green Door” and it dislodged Elvis’ biggest hit of ’56 from #1 in November, and then Elvis’ “Love Me Tender” replaced it two weeks later. Some have called it a Novelty. Most records by radio guys are, including Lowe’s first Dot Record in 1955, “Close the Door (They’re Comin’ in the Windows).” But Novelty hits rarely spark as much speculation about what inspired them.

Theories about “The Green Door” abound, ranging from a Chicago speakeasy, to a lesbian club in London featured in the 1968 Robert Aldrich movie The Killing of Sister George, to “The Shack” in Columbia, Missouri where Lowe went to college. Covers over the years include Country singer Crystal Gayle in the ’70s, Welsh singer Shakin’ Stevens, fresh from playing Elvis in a West End musical. His was a #1 hit in the U.K. in 1981. And a surprisingly faithful rendition by New York Horror Rockers The Cramps.

Incidentally, don’t look for “The Green Door” on Billboard’s Top Ten lists for ’56 because its chart run goes seven weeks into 1957: just one of dozens of songs throughout the history of Billboard’s year-end charts whose runs straddled two different years, so they fell through the cracks. At Chartcrush, though, we rank every song’s full chart run in whichever year it earned the majority of its ranking points.

#4 Les Baxter, His Chorus and Orchestra – The Poor People of Paris

OK, so we heard Nelson Riddle’s “Lisbon Antigua” at #10; at #4, the record that 1956’s newly-minted hi-fi enthusiasts made the year’s biggest instrumental hit, by the conductor/arranger I mentioned who mentored Nelson Riddle at Capitol.

He scored his first top10 under his own name in ’51 with a chorus-and-strings rendition of “Because of You,” the Tony Bennett hit. “April in Portugal” and the first hit version of “Unchained Melody” followed, both among the top ten Best Selling singles of 1953 and ’55, respectively, and he kept the streak going into ’56 with the record that Elvis’ first hit replaced at #1. It’s Les Baxter: “The Poor People of Paris.”

Les Baxter’s last chart hit, the million-seller “The Poor People of Paris,” #4 as we count down the biggest hits of 1956 here on the Chartcrush Top Ten Countdown show. Capitol continued putting out Les Baxter singles, but he shunned Rock ‘n Roll, and after “Poor People of Paris,” he disappeared from the charts completely, even the album charts, despite averaging over three LP’s of new material a year on Capitol from ’56 to ’62, mostly in a subgenre of Easy Listening lounge music called Exotica that was especially popular with hi-fi-equipped 30- and 40- something War vets, many of whom had visited or served in “exotic” locales like the Caribbean and South Pacific.

A resurgence of interest in Exotica in the ’90s, after Baxter’s albums had been languishing in thrift shop bins for 25 years, got Capitol to release its two-disc Exotic Moods of Les Baxter anthology in ’96, as it turned out, just before he died at 73. And Silicon Valley’s culture gazette, Wired magazine eulogized him. Writer David Toop snarked that Baxter “offered package tours in sound, selling tickets to sedentary tourists who wanted to stroll around some taboo emotions before lunch, view a pagan ceremony, go wild in the sun or conjure a demon, all without leaving home stereo comforts in the white bread suburbs.” Not unlike more recent hipster coffee-shop fare like the Putumayo World Music series for example.

#3 Elvis Presley – Heartbreak Hotel

Well we’re down to #3, which Billboard named the #1 Best Seller of the year in its recap, since it was #1 on the weekly Best Sellers chart for eight straight weeks. But radio wasn’t quite as enthusiastic, so when you factor in the DJ chart, other songs outrank it. It’s Elvis’s first #1 record and his first single for RCA after leaving Memphis’s legendary rockabilly label, Sun, a few months prior. With lyrics inspired by a newspaper story about a lonely man who jumped to his death out a hotel window, it’s “Heartbreak Hotel.”

Like nothing heard in Pop music up ’til then or since: Elvis Presley’s “Heartbreak Hotel.” It gets your attention from the first syllable with its sparse and bleak intensity, and doesn’t let you go until the bitter end. Imagine how that must have sounded up against the other songs you’ve been hearing in our 1956 Chartcrush Top Ten Countdown so far! Even in Elvis’s own repertoire it stands alone in its desperation. It reached the top five on the Country, Pop and R&B charts from April to July.

Carl Perkins was still on Sun Records, and his “Blue Suede Shoes” hit the charts the same week as “Heartbreak Hotel,” and they were neck-and-neck all of March into April with Perkins even leading two of those five weeks, until “Heartbreak Hotel” shot to #1. “Blue Suede Shoes” shakes out at #26 on our Chartcrush ranking.

#2 Gogi Grant – The Wayward Wind

At #2 we have a song that veteran Western singer Tex Ritter took into the top ten in the U.K. in 1956. But the version that was a hit in the U.S. was the first one that was recorded, by the singer who beat out Doris Day for most popular female vocalist in Billboard’s DJ poll: the only year Day didn’t win from 1949 all the way to ’58. And it’s the song that knocked “Heartbreak Hotel” out of the #1 spot in June: Gogi Grant’s “The Wayward Wind.”

#1 on the nation’s airwaves in 1956 according to Billboard’s year-end DJ chart, Gogi Grant’s “The Wayward Wind, which came out on the indie Era label out of Hollywood, who signed Grant after her first two singles in 1952 had failed to chart for RCA. But her first record on Era was a top 20 hit in 1955, “Suddenly There’s a Valley,” and then “The Wayward Wind” caught fire, just a few months after the mania over Disney’s Davy Crockett miniseries had died down a bit.

By the way, ’56 was the last year any record sung by a female made the top ten on Billboard’s year-end chart ’til Brenda Lee’s “I’m Sorry” in 1960. Our Chartcrush rankings have Debbie Reynolds’ “Tammy” at #4 for 1957, but no females in ’58 or ’59 on our rankings either.

#1 Elvis Presley – Don’t Be Cruel

And we’re down to #1 here on our 1956 edition of the Chartcrush Top Ten Countdown Show. It’s the A-side of the B-side that was our #9 song of the year, “Hound Dog.” For the fourth time in our countdown, here again, Elvis Presley: his biggest hit the year he notched four of the top ten records. At #1, it’s “Don’t Be Cruel.”

It took 28 takes to get “Don’t Be Cruel” how Elvis wanted it. He perfected the arrangement on a piano right there in the studio. “Hound Dog” took 31 takes the same day. Despite all that, RCA’s Stephen H. Sholes got the production credit on the record. Elvis did “Don’t Be Cruel” all three times he appeared on CBS’s top-rated Ed Sullivan Show in ’56 into ’57.

Well, there you have ’em: the top ten songs of 1956 here on the Chartcrush Top Ten Countdown Show. Now there are several songs that made the published year-end top ten on one of Billboard’s three chart categories (Sales, Jukebox Plays and Airplay), yet missed the top ten on our combined ranking. In the time we have left, let’s give some of those a listen, shall we?

#12 The Platters – The Great Pretender

Billboard’s #4 Jukebox and DJ Airplay song of the year narrowly missed the year-end Best Sellers ranking at #12, which is where it lands in our Chartcrush ranking: #12 on the year. It’s the Black vocal group that bridged the gap for Teens between Rock ‘n Roll’s first hits in the Summer of ’55, and Elvis in early ’56, prominently featured in the first B-movie Rock exploitation film, Bill Sears’s Rock Around the Clock. Here’s The Platters’ biggest hit, “The Great Pretender.”

Platters, “The Great Pretender,” #1 for two weeks in February between Dean Martin and Kay Starr. Their “My Prayer,” also hit #1 for two weeks later in the year, in August, and that one was Billboard’s #4 Best Seller of 1956.

#15 Doris Day – Whatever Will Be, Will Be (Que Será, Será)

But instead of a Platters twofer, we’re gonna move on to Billboard’s #8 Best Seller, which was #13 and 12 on the year-end Jukebox and DJ rankings, respectively, and our Chartcrush #15 song of the year, from the Alfred Hitchcock picture The Man Who Knew Too Much, starring Jimmy Stewart and the singer, also an A-list leading lady, who made it her signature song for the rest of her career. It’s Doris Day’s “Que Será, Será (Whatever Will Be, Will Be).”

Doris Day’s hitmaking career goes all the way back to 1945 when she was the singer on two of the iconic homecoming anthems for troops returning from World War 2, “My Dreams Are Getting Better All the Time” and “Sentimental Journey,” both with the Les Brown Big Band, with whom she continued to perform and record ’til her first movie and solo records in 1948.

#16 Morris Stoloff Conducting The Columbia Pictures Orchestra – Moonglow and Theme from ‘Picnic’

#5 on Billboard’s year-end DJ chart was only #27 on Jukeboxes. Maybe because it was always on the radio! It’s an instrumental medley from the blockbuster movie Picnic starring William Holden and Kim Novak and our #16 hit of 1956: Morris Stoloff with the Columbia Pictures Orchestra, “Moonglow and Theme from ‘Picnic.'”

Composer George Duning wrote the Theme from Picnic as a musical counterpoint to the 1933 tune “Moonglow,” so musically it made sense to mash ’em up as a medley. In 2004, director Martin Scorsese used the same recording to score a key romantic scene in The Aviator where Leonardo DiCaprio as Howard Hughes and Cate Blanchett as Katherine Hepburn fly over Los Angeles at night in one of Hughes’ private planes.

#21 Perry Como – Hot Diggity (Dog Ziggity Boom)

Next we return to Croonerdom and a record that hit #1 on the DJ chart for a week and was Billboard’s #9 DJ song of the year. But it stalled at #2 Sales and Jukeboxes behind “Heartbreak Hotel” and shakes out at #21 on our combined yearly ranking here on the Chartcrush Top Ten Countdown show. The Singer was the first to get his own TV show in 1948, and now, at 44, he was back on NBC doing his live one-hour variety show on Saturday nights that, in the Fall of ’56, became the first to be broadcast in color! Of his four top10 hits in 1956, this was the biggest. It’s Perry Como’s “Hot Diggity.”

“Hot Diggity, subtitled “Dog Ziggity Boom,” Perry Como here on our 1956 edition of the Chartcrush Top Ten Countdown Show. Singer Al Jolson coined that phrase in 1928 and anyone who watched TV in the late ’70s no doubt remembers the Oscar-Meyer hot dog commercial that repurposed the song.

#24 Four Lads – No Not Much

Finally Billboard’s #3 DJ Airplay song of the year, which was #20 and 10 on the year-end Best Sellers and Jukebox charts respectively, and #24 on our combined Chartcrush ranking.

Fresh-faced Canadian Vocal Quartet, The Four Lads, coming off their massive 1955 hit “Moments to Remember,” “No, Not Much,” wrapping up Chartcrush Top Ten Countdown Show look back at 1956.

I’ve been your host, Christopher Verdesi, and I want to thank you for listening this hour. On our website, chartcrush.com, you can get a written transcript and streamable Spotify versions of this and other Chartcrush Countdown Shows, plus chart run line graphs and other jazzed extras. Also, check us out on TikTok, @chartcrush. Every week, we count down a different year from the beginning of the charts in the ’40s all the way up to the present, so tune again, same station, same time, for another edition of Chartcrush.

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::start transcript::

Welcome to the Chartcrush Top Ten Countdown Show, I’m your host, Christopher Verdesi. Every week on Chartcrush, we dive deep into a year in Pop music and count down the top ten songs according to our recap of the weekly Hot100 charts published at the time in the music industry’s top trade publication and chart authority, Billboard magazine. This week, we’re turning the clock back to the year 2000, the first year of the new century and the new millennium.

But actually, fun fact: 2001, not 2000, was the turn of the Millennium, since there was never a “year zero.” (People liked to point that out). But 2000 was the first year that started with two. And that alone could’ve been catastrophic had $100 billion with a “b” not been spent in the last years of the ’90s to upgrade computers that stored years with just the last two digits of the year, and avert the Y2K computer disaster.

But having dodged that bullet, the first 21 months of the new decade seemed a lot like the 1990s! Until the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks marked the start of the ’00s as a distinct cultural “decade.”

One thing though already coming into focus: music! Unlike Gen-X, Millennials didn’t waste any time imprinting themselves on pop culture. The late ’90s Pop explosion (Britney, Christina, Boy Bands and MTV’s Total Request Live afterschool show, TRL for short): going strong. Boy Band N’Sync (featuring Britney Spears’ then-boyfriend Justin Timberlake), had the #1 album of Y2K, No Strings Attached. Media-dubbed “Bad Girl” Christina Aguilera, who didn’t perform at the Grammys, won Best New Artist over “Good Girl” Britney Spears, who did.

Britney beat Christina on the album chart for a second straight year, but Aguilera flipped the script on the Hot100, 2000 vs. ’99, in addition to that Grammy win. The rivalry, still front and center in Y2K. Backstreet Boys (another Boy Band), also in the top ten on Billboard’s year-end album chart.

The music mogul behind both Backstreet Boys and N’Sync though? Lou Pearlman? Losing control and soon to be sued for fraud and abusive management by both. All those cases settled out of court, but Pearlman, eventually convicted for conspiracy and money laundering.

Divadom was in transition in 2000, as the last of mainstream R&B’s long resistance to Hip-Hop dissolved. Top ’90s Divas Whitney Houston and Toni Braxton took big steps in the direction things were going on “Heartbreak Hotel” and “He Wasn’t Man Enough,” respectively, but Singers like Celine Dion and Mariah Carey had nowhere to go but the Adult Contemporary charts. And the full-on merger of R&B and Hip-Hop became unstoppable in the ’00s.

But there was a lot more happening on the charts in Y2K. And lots of surprises! No one from 1999’s top ten repeated in 2000.

#10 Vertical Horizon – Everything You Want

Now as we kick things off at #10, did you know, there’s a whole subreddit (an entire category within the Reddit discussion website) devoted to #niceguys? Think relationships: these are guys who present as gentle, compassionate, sensitive, vulnerable.

Well within that subreddit is a thread about how our #10 song is the theme song of nice guys. It was the commercial breakthrough for a ’90s Indie-Rock band that formed at D.C.’s Georgetown University and relocated to Boston, and although these nice guys are finishing last on our countdown, #10 on the year (#5 going by Billboard), on the strength of 19 weeks in the top ten? That’s not bad! Here’s Vertical Horizon. “Everything You Want.”

Vertical Horizon, “Everything You Want,” #10 on our Chartcrush Top Ten Countdown of 2000’s biggest hits. At the end of the video, a message appears: “Everything you want is not everything you need.” Songwriter and group leader Matt Scannell explains: “I was in love with this girl, and she was just a broken person. She kept turning to everyone except me for love and acceptance, and I wanted so much to help her, but I couldn’t.”

Aw. Theme song for nice guys. Not technically a one-hit wonder. Vertical Horizon’s follow-up, “You’re a God” got to #28 and is in the Jim Carrey flick, Bruce Almighty.

#9 Matchbox Twenty – Bent

So as we just heard, a new sweet spot for Rock on the Pop charts came into focus after big hits in the late ’90s by Hootie & The Blowfish, Goo Goo Dolls, Third Eye Blind and others that blended Grunge’s sound and aesthetic with melody and Emo first-person songwriting that would’ve made Kurt Cobain cringe, to create “Post-Grunge.”

Y2K saw the most Rock acts hit #1 on the Hot100 since the height of Hair Metal in the ’80s. But another thing that made that possible: Billboard dropping its requirement for the Hot100 at the start of the 1999 chart year that songs had to be in stores as physical singles to chart.

Since the demise of 45s and vinyl in the early ’90s, there hadn’t been viable format for Rock singles. CD singles, great for genres like Dance, R&B and Hip-Hop that’d been putting out multiple mixes and extended 12-inch club versions for years, but in Rock, the song’s the song; who needs a CD with just two tracks?

But starting in 1999 songs could make the Hot100 on just Airplay. No single release required. And sure enough, the three biggest Rock acts on Hot100 in ’99, Goo Goo Dolls, Smash Mouth and Sugar Ray, all bands that’d had major Airplay hits earlier in the ’90s that couldn’t chart on the Hot100.

Well in 2000, another band in that category scored their first #1 hit. Their melodramatic, guitar-driven “3AM” had been the #4 Airplay hit of 1998, but no single release, so it didn’t chart on the Hot100. Their 2000 sophomore album Mad Season, three years in the making, disappointed hardcore Rock fans with its horns, keyboards, sophisticated melodies and toned-down vocals, but it hit the Pop-Rock bullseye and produced a #1 hit. The first of two songs in our countdown sung by matchbox 20’s Rob Thomas, here’s “Bent.”

matchbox 20’s “Bent” only peaked at #16 on Billboard’s Modern Rock chart. Even Vertical Horizon beat that. But it was in the top ten on the Hot100 for 14 weeks, #1 for a week in July, and the #9 song of the year 2000 according to our ranking here on the Chartcrush Top Ten Countdown Show. And the follow-up, “If You’re Gone,” also from Mad Season, was also a top five hit.

#8 Savage Garden – I Knew I Loved You

Now for all the hype about Boy Bands ‘NSYNC and Backstreet Boys I mentioned at the top of the show, ‘NSYNC’s biggest 2000 hit, “Bye Bye Bye,” and Backstreet Boys’ “Show Me the Meaning of Being Lonely” only shake out at numbers 27 and 43 on our 2000 Chartcrush ranking, respectively. Their albums No Strings Attached and Millennium, respectively, more than picked up that slack.

But an Australian, call them a “Boy Duo”, did make our top ten Hot100 songs of 2000 at #8. They first came to Pop fans’ attention in 1996 with a big Dance-Pop hit called “I Want You” off their debut album, and followed it up with the love song ballad on the album, “Truly Madly Deeply,” and that shot all the way to #1.

So in ’99, they’re finishing up their second album, and the suits at Columbia Records are like: “Where’s the next ‘Truly Madly Deeply?'” because the album didn’t have a love-song ballad. Now, label-coerced follow-ups aren’t always hits, but this one sure was was! #1 for four weeks in January and February and #8 on our countdown, it’s Savage Garden’s “I Knew I Loved You.”

Savage Garden, “I Knew I Loved You,” #8 on our 2000 edition of the Chartcrush Top Ten Countdown Show: the last song by an Australian artist to top the Hot100 until Gotye’s left-field hit, “Somebody That I Used to Know,” in 2012.

Darren Hayes and Daniel Jones (the Duo comprising Savage Garden) went their separate ways in ’01 at the peak of their fame, with Hayes going on to a pretty successful solo career. Asked in ’07 if he and Jones would ever consider reuniting, Hayes said “only if it cured cancer.” OK then.

#7 Joe – I Wanna Know

The year 2000 wasn’t a big year for soundtrack albums, but it was a big year for songs from soundtracks. Two in our countdown of the year’s biggest hits, the first at #7 from The Wood, the coming-of-age movie about three guys growing up in the L.A. suburb of Inglewood in the ’80s.

It had the most weeks in the top 40 of any 2000 song: 38, largely thanks to its ubiquitous airplay on R&B radio. It was Billboard’s #1 R&B Airplay song of the year. But it was especially big on “Adult R&B:” a format that got its own Billboard chart in 1993 as the home of Neo-Soul and smooth Contemporary R&B, but boomed as older listeners sought a refuge from harder Hip-Hop inflected sounds that were becoming the default at the turn of the millennium.

Adult formats in every genre thrived in the ’00s. Savage Garden was Billboard’s #1 Adult Contemporary artist of 2000, but on the Adult side of R&B, it was all Joe, and “I Wanna Know.”

After it was already in the top 20 as a soundtrack cut, “I Wanna Know” was included on Joe’s 2000 album, My Name Is Joe, which included the follow-up hit, “Stutter” (featuring Rapper Mystikal). That became his only #1 hit in 2001. “I Wanna Know” peaked at #4 in July.

#6 Lonestar – Amazed

Now even though there were two Country acts in the top ten of Billboard’s 1998 Hot100 recap (Shania Twain’s “You’re Still the One” at #3 and LeeAnn Rimes’ “How Do I Live” at #5), in his “Year in Charts” feature, Billboard writer and chart guru Fred Bronson expressed surprise that there were two Country songs in the year-end top ten for 2000.

Well, here at Chartcrush, for what we like to call “the broken Hot100 years” (’95 to ’98), we go by the Airplay chart, not the Hot100, so in our rankings there’s no Shania or LeeAnn in 1998 so you have to go all the way back to Kenny Rogers and Dolly Parton’s “Islands in the Stream” in 1983 to find a Country song among the top ten hits of any year.

So yeah, Bronson was more right than he could say in print in a Billboard feature, without repudiating four years of Hot100 charts! Two Country songs, and here’s the first at #6: also the first Country song to get to #1 on the Hot100 since “Islands in the Stream.” It’s Lonestar’s “Amazed.”

Well after a whole decade of Garth Brooks, Shania Twain, Toby Keith, The Dixie Chicks and others incorporating Rock and Pop, Country in Y2K had its strongest showing on the Pop charts since before Disco. Lonestar’s “Amazed,” the #6 song of 2000 here on the Chartcrush Top Ten Countdown Show, with one more Country hit to go.

Now if that version of “Amazed” sounded different than what you remember, you were probably listening to Country radio in the ’90s, where it was the #1 song of 1999. But even the original with its pedal steel intro was in the top 40 on the Hot100 for 15 weeks, prompting the Pop remix, complete with a new key change at the end that transformed it into a Power Ballad and gave it a whole new life as a #1 Pop hit for two weeks in March 2000.

#5 3 Doors Down – Kryptonite

Now back at #9 (Matchbox Twenty), I mentioned that unlike their previous hit “3 AM,” “Bent” barely scraped the Modern Rock chart. Well our next song isn’t just the #5 Pop hit of 2000 according to our Chartcrush ranking; it was also Billboard’s #1 Modern Rock song of year: a true, massive Alternative crossover. And also one of the longest chart runs on the Hot100 in 2000, 53 weeks, which took it well past the end of Billboard’s 2000 “chart year” all the way into the Spring of 2001.

Now, a baked-in flaw with Billboard’s year-end charts is that for songs like that, whose chart runs straddle two different chart years, the points get split and the song’s true popularity isn’t reflected in either year’s year-end ranking. So at Chartcrush, we correct that by counting every song’s full chart run in whichever calendar year it earned the most ranking points.

So while our next song was only #15 on Billboard’s 2000 ranking (because the last 19 weeks of its chart run were kicked into Billboard’s 2001 chart year), with our method it comes out #5. It topped out at #3 for three weeks in November, but spent 18 weeks in the top ten. It’s the debut single by a band from Escatawpa, Mississippi: 3 Doors Down, “Kryptonite.”

“Kryptonite,” 3 Doors Down. It took off after their local FM Rock station in Mississippi started playing it in ’99 and the requests poured in. By November, other Gulf Coast stations had gotten a hold of it and in the beginning of February, it cracked the Mainstream Rock chart. Then in March the Modern Rock chart. They were back in the top ten in ’03 with “When I’m Gone,” the lead single from their second album. And then “Here Without You” in ’04 was a #5 hit that stayed on the Hot100 for 51 weeks, just shy of “Kryptonite’s” 53.

Ranking early ’00s Hot100 Artists, Nelly, Usher and J-Lo are the top three, and 3 Doors Down comes out seventh (ahead of even Matchbox Twenty) as the top Rock Band on the Hot100 the first half of the decade. Creed, Nickelback, Linkin Park and Train, also in the top 40 on that list.

#4 Faith Hill – Breathe

You’re listening to the Chartcrush Top Ten Countdown Show, and we’re counting down the top ten hits of the year 2000 this week. At #4 we have the second of the two Country songs in our countdown! We heard Lonestar’s “Amazed” back at #6. Billboard with its chart-run splitting between different “chart years” named it the #1 song of 2000 because all but the first four weeks of its 56-week chart run were in its 2000 chart year. Same can’t be said for two of the three songs that beat it in our Chartcrush ranking.

By the way, 56 weeks? That’s even more than “Kryptonite.” The most weeks of any 2000 song. But like “Kryptonite,” our #4 song never got to #1. For four of the five nonconsecutive weeks it was #2, it was kept out of the top spot by the juggernaut that was our #3 song we’ll hear in a few minutes.

But even after said “juggernaut” suddenly dropped down to #8 in June, Aaliyah’s “Try Again,” from the action movie Romeo Must Die moved up to become the first #1 in history not out as a commercial single; that a full 18 months after Billboard’s rule change allowing Airplay-only hits on the Hot100. But all those weeks at #2 and 19 in the top ten made it Billboard’s #1 song of the year and our #4. OK, enough suspense: here’s Faith Hill’s “Breathe.”

“Breathe,” Faith Hill, #4 on our Chartcrush Top Ten Countdown of the year 2000’s biggest hits, and the first Female vocal we’ve heard so far. Which is odd since 1999’s top ten was so skewed towards the ladies: nine of the ten songs! Still one more Female act to go as we close in on #1.

Faith Hill, of course, one of a whole crop of Female Country- or Country-influenced Singers in the mid-to-late ’90s that crossed over to the Pop charts. Shania Twain, LeeAnn Rimes, Jewel, Sheryl Crow, and 2000’s top-performing act on the Billboard 200 Album chart (all albums combined), The Dixie Chicks.

“Breathe” was Faith Hill’s second Hot100 top10. The upbeat “This Kiss,” her first in 1998, and then she followed up “Breathe” with another upbeat song, “The Way You Love Me,” a #6 hit later in 2000, and “There You’ll Be” from the Pearl Harbor soundtrack in ’01.

#3 Santana featuring The Product G&B – Maria, Maria

At #3 the aforementioned “juggernaut” that kept “Breathe” from reaching #1, and the first of two hits in our countdown by the act who took the “Latin Invasion” torch into the 2000 yearly top ten from 1999’s torch bearers Ricky Martin and J-Lo.

That’s not to say that other “Latin Invasion” stars faded. Far from it. Marc Anthony’s “I Need to Know” is our #13 hit of the year, and Enrique Iglesias’s “Be with You” was #1 for three weeks in June. Shakira was on tour and her MTV Unplugged set was on the album chart. J-Lo was between albums, but dating Bad Boy Records mogul Sean “Puff Daddy” Combs and forcing Google to develop Image Search thanks to the plunging green Versace dress she wore to the Grammys.

No, the Latin invasion? Still going strong: 68 straight weeks with at least one song by a Latin artist in the top ten, Spring ’99 to well into 2000, thanks largely to the most spectacular comeback on the Pop charts by a veteran Artist in history. And the song at #3 was the follow-up: #1 for 10 weeks April to June. It’s Santana featuring R&B duo The Product G&B, “Maria, Maria.”

Santana with The Product G&B, “Maria, Maria.” Santana, of course, guitarist Carlos Santana’s namesake group, around since the late ’60s: played at Woodstock, and a staple of early ’70s FM Rock radio with Latin-influenced hits like “Evil Ways,” “Black Magic Woman,” “No One to Depend On” and “Oye Como Va.” They got back into the top ten in the early ’80s with Soft Rock hits “Winning” and “Hold On,” but by the mid-’90s, they didn’t even have a label.

In ’97, Santana pitched Arista CEO Clive Davis, probably the greatest talent and trend spotter in Rock history who’d first signed them in 1969, the idea of updating the vintage Santana sound with contemporary influences and squeezing it all into concise, radio-friendly songs. And they recruited collaborators from across the musical spectrum for Supernatural, Santana’s 18th album.

On “Maria, Maria”, the Product G&B duo (G&B short for ghetto & blues) came in via Haitian rapper Wyclef Jean, part of his extended musical family centered around his trailblazing New Jersey alt-Hip-Hop group The Fugees, who co-produced the song and convinced Davis to plug it to radio as a single.

#2 Destiny’s Child – Independent Women, Part 1

Our #2 song notches in at #97 on Billboard’s year-end Hot100 chart for 2000, and #10 on its ranking for 2001. Yep, it’s another Billboard chart year straddler! Again, how we do it at Chartcrush: we look at every song’s full chart run, and rank it in whichever calendar year it earned the most points.

Well this one entered the chart in late September and peaked at #1 in November, just a week before the cutoff issue for Billboard’s 2000 chart year, and stayed on top all the way to the end of January 2001: the second #1 hit of the year for a R&B Girl Group right on the cusp of superstardom.

Billboard had that first Y2K #1, “Say My Name,” at #6 on the year. That slips to #16 on our ranking, but one this moves into the #2 spot. From Charlie’s Angels, the second soundtrack hit in our countdown, it’s Destiny’s Child, “Independent Women.”

Destiny’s Child re-grouped at the start of 2000, letting go LeToya Luckett and LaTavia Roberson and bringing in Michelle Williams. “Independent Women” was their first hit as a trio: Beyonce Knowles, Kelly Rowland and Michelle Williams, and it was later included on their blockbuster 4X platinum album Survivor, along with three others that became top10 hits. “Bootylicious,” their next #1.

In ’02, Kelly Rowland teamed up with Rapper Nelly on “Dilemma” and that was #1 for 10 weeks. And Beyonce’s “Crazy in Love” with future hubby, Rapper Jay-Z, in ’03 was the first of her six career #1’s as a solo artist.

#1 Santana featuring Rob Thomas – Smooth

And that, folks, gets us to #1: the song that launched Santana back to superstardom and secured Carlos Santana’s legacy. But not only that, it catapulted Santana’s collaborator on the track, who co-wrote and sang it, to new heights: Matchbox Twenty’s Rob Thomas.

Remember, we heard Matchbox Twenty’s “Bent” at #9, so that’s two of the year’s biggest hits, including the biggest by a mile that we’re about to hear, sung by the same dude. It entered the chart at the end of July 1999 and hit #1 in October ’99. But it stayed #1 for 12 weeks into January 2000, and then on the chart all the way to September of 2000: a 58 week chart run. This song was everywhere! The #1 song of 2000, Santana with Rob Thomas on vocals, “Smooth.”

“Smooth,” Santana with Rob Thomas, the #1 song here on our Chartcrush Top Ten Countdown for 2000. Before Supernatural, Santana’s last #1 album was in 1971. 29 years. That’s the longest time between #1 albums ever.

Bonus

Well that’s our countdown. Two songs from Billboard’s year-end top ten that got bumped from our ranking, so let’s shout those out.

#17 Toni Braxton – He Wasn’t Man Enough

At #10, Billboard had a ’90s Diva updating her sound for the ’00s with an upbeat Dance Hit.

Toni Braxton’s “He Wasn’t Man Enough,” her last top 20 hit before Vegas, lots of lawsuits, and Braxton Family Values on WeTV, notches in at #17 on our Chartcrush ranking.

#16 Destiny’s Child – Say My Name

And as I mentioned, Billboard had Destiny Child’s other 2000 #1 hit at #6.

“Say My Name” shakes out at #16 on our Chartcrush ranking.

Well, thanks for listening to our 2000 edition of The Chartcrush Top Ten Countdown Show. I’ve been your host, Christopher Verdesi. On our website, chartcrush.com, you can find a written transcript and a link to stream this and other Chartcrush countdown shows on Spotify, plus chart run line graphs and other bumpin’ extras. Also, check us out on TikTok @Chartcrush. Every week, we count down a different year from the beginning ofthe charts in the 1940s all the way up to the present, so tune again, same station, same time, for another edition of Chartcrush.

::end transcript::

::start transcript::

Welcome! I’m Christopher Verdesi, and this is the Chartcrush Top Ten Countdown Show. Every week, we take a look back at a different year in Pop music history and count down the top ten hits according to our recap of the weekly Pop charts published at the time by the music industry’s leading trade publication and chart authority, Billboard magazine. This week on Chartcrush, we’re counting down 1982.

So, Sony sold 20 million of its Walkman portable cassette players in 1981: MSRP $179: about what a good smartphone cost in the early 2020s, adjusting for inflation. They would’ve sold even more if the U.S. hadn’t been in a bad recession weathering President Reagan’s drastic inflation-fighting, money-tightening policies, but they did once the economy started booming in ’83.

A major theme of Sony’s advertising for the Walkman? Exercise! With the Walkman you could take your tunes with you, for the first time, out for a jog, roller skating, aerobics, even the gym. What a game-changer!

Olivia Newton-John’s “Physical” hit the charts in October of ’81 and by the end of November it was the #1 song in the land, where it stayed for ten solid weeks: one of the biggest hits of the ’80s. Coincidence? Both “Physical” and the Sony Walkman have been linked to the early ’80s fitness craze, but would “Physical” have been such a big hit without the Walkman?

Well, we can’t say for certain, but ’82 was the last year that vinyl LPs were a majority of music industry revenue. Cassettes took the lead in ’83 and were the dominant format for music until 1990! So it stands to reason that such a big development in the way people consumed music–right up there with the 45 rpm single in the ’50s or affordable stereo headphones in the late ’60s–would also have a pretty sweeping effect on the kinds of songs and albums people bought and propelled up the charts.

Of course, people listened to their Walkmans riding buses and subways, sitting at home or in hotels, or, yes, just walking. So to just consider workout type songs when thinking about its impact would be oversimplifying things. But Billboard Chart Beat columnist Paul Grein noticed that “Pop music got tougher in 1982.” There was still plenty of room for ballads, he conceded, but “Most of the year’s biggest hits were hard-driving, rock-inflected records that might have had trouble garnering as much airplay even a year or two ago.”

Was that because of the Walkman? MTV launched in ’81 with a Rock format, and the first MTV-fueled chart-toppers were in 1982. MTV played the heck out of most of the songs in our countdown. So again, hard to say. Just a couple things to keep in mind as we count down the hits here on our 1982 edition of the Chartcrush Top Ten Countdown Show.

Now just to let you know, over on Billboard, they had “Physical” as the #1 song of 1982 because of how they shift their “chart year” back several weeks into the previous year so they can get the issue with their year-end charts printed and mailed well before New Years. That’s so networks, DJs and other magazines and newspapers have time to get their countdowns ready. “Physical,” however, hit #1 and saw most of its chart action in 1981, not ’82, so for ’82, we have a different #1 hit.

With that, let’s start counting down some songs, shall we? Starting with #10.

#10 Laura Branigan – Gloria

It’s the second single (after a lukewarm debut) by a former Leonard Cohen backup singer who got a record deal after auditioning for legendary Atlantic Records co-founder and A&R legend Ahmet Eturgun. The song had been a big hit in Europe in ’79, and her producer had played on that record, and wanted her to cover it. But with lyrics about a guy obsessed with the woman whose name is the song’s title, she needed some convincing. So they tweaked it to be about a woman counseling her friend (whose name is the song’s title) about her obsession with a guy.

Once out, the record debuted at #84 and took over four months (July to November) to reach its peak of #2, where it stayed for three weeks, it’s Laura Branigan’s “Gloria.”

“Gloria,” Laura Branigan, #10 on our Chartcrush ranking of 1982’s top hits. “Gloria’s” chart run started in the middle of ’82, but went all the way to March of ’83, so on Billboard’s year-end rankings it wound up in the lower half of both the ’82 and ’83 year-end Hot100 charts. But combining its chart run and ranking it in the year it was strongest (what we do for every song), it gets its due.

In 2019, the St. Louis Blues NHL hockey team started playing it at games. Then they started winning, and they took it all the way to their Stanley Cup victory over the Boston Bruins. Laura Branigan continued scoring hits through the ’80s, notably “Solitaire” and “Self Control” in ’83 and ’84. Things cooled off in the ’90s though, and sadly, she died of a brain aneurism in 2004 at just 52.

#9 John Cougar – Jack & Diane

When we think of Roots Rock or Heartland Rock in the ’70s and ’80s, we think of, who? Well, a few names come to mind, but if this were Family Feud, Bruce Springsteen would probably be the #1 answer, right? Get this, though: in his entire career, Springsteen never had a #1 Pop hit. Closest he got was #2 in ’84 with “Dancing in the Dark.”

Different story on the album chart: Born in the U.S.A. was the #1 album of 1985. But in 1982 on the singles chart? This next act from small-town Indiana, who’d already had a handful of minor hits starting in 1979 with “I Need a Lover,” broke out and became a superstar with two top ten hits off his fifth studio album, American Fool. Here’s the second of those on the calendar: #1 for four weeks in October ’82: It’s John Cougar, “Jack and Diane.”

In ’81, The Rolling Stones had broken all kinds of records with their North American Tour, and their album Tattoo You was #1 on the album chart for nine weeks. Well, John Cougar, after his first big hit in ’82, was close to being dismissed as a Stones wannabe, but “Jack and Diane” showcased his depth, authenticity, and distinctly American voice. Not cynically putting down or criticizing small-town American life, but celebrating its simple pleasures right at the dawn of the Reagan era.

He scored seven more top ten hits in the ’80s, but that was his most successful single, about two American kids growing up in the heartland. The song was unfinished and not going anywhere ’til producer Mick Ronson suggested the choir part, “let it rock, let it roll.” Well, that was the missing ingredient, and the rest is history

#8 Hall & Oates – Maneater

At #9 is a record that was one of the top ten hits on Billboard’s 1983 year-end Hot100, but it hit #1 in mid-December ’82, so when you do things the Chartcrush way (by the calendar), it’s a 1982 hit: the fifth #1 by a duo from Philly that first hit the charts in 1976 with a pair of soft Blue-Eyed-Soul top tens. They slumped in the Disco years, but came back strong with a more upbeat sound epitomized by the first of their three #1 hits in 1981, “Kiss on My List.”

They were on a roll before there even was such a thing as “Yacht Rock.” Daryl Hall and John Oates, more commonly known during their heyday as just Hall & Oates, from their album H₂O, “Maneater.”

“Maneater,” the biggest hit of Hall & Oates’s career and the #8 song on our Chartcrush Top Ten Countdown for 1982. And they were just getting started. Their next six charting singles in ’83 and ’84? All top ten hits. And Billboard proclaimed them the most successful duo of the Rock era, beating out Simon & Garfunkel and even The Everly Brothers.

#7 The Human League – Don’t You Want Me

In 1982, Time Magazine, still a relevant source in news and culture in those years, would feature a person, group, idea, or object that “for better or for worse… has done the most to influence the events of the year.”

In 1982, after tapping Reagan and Polish Solidarity trade union leader Lech Walesa in ’80 and ’81, respectively, Time’s editors named The Computer as person of the year. Not surprising then that the first synthpop track to top the Hot100 was this next one at #7. It was the fourth single from the group’s third album. Rolling Stone later flagged it as the “breakthrough song” of what became a Second British Invasion in the early ’80s, and it was one of the first hints of MTV’s growing power in the music biz. It’s the Human League, “Don’t You Want Me?”

The Human League, #7 on our Chartcrush Top Ten Countdown of 1982’s biggest hits, virtually unknown in America until MTV started playing that video just as cable systems coast-to-coast were adding MTV to their channel lineups.

Now, if you listened Phillip Oakey’s lyrics in that song, it’s not a love story; it’s a song about sexual power politics, and the group’s original demo version was sparse and dark and kinda creepy. But Synthpop producer Martin Rushent transformed it into an upbeat Pop song, which Oakey hated and didn’t even want included on the album, let alone released as a single. Rushent though, was working for the label, not Phillip Oakey, so he got the final say and the version we just heard was not only The Human League’s breakthrough American hit, it was their first UK #1 too. Today, even Oakey begrudgingly acknowledges that his initial problems with the track may’ve been a little misguided.

#6 Steve Miller Band – Abracadabra

Here’s a fun fact: the entire month of August of 1982, four weeks, the top five songs on the Hot100 were the same. 1, 2, 3, 4 and 5: no changes. First time ever!

Our song at #6 was #3 those four weeks, and broke the logjam when it moved up to #1 the first week in September. It was by one of many big ’70s Rock acts who re-tooled their sound in the early ’80s, not just to stay up-to-date, but to stay on the air at all. Top40 radio, the so-called CHR (or Contemporary Hits) format that traces its lineage all the way back to Todd Storz in the mid-’50s, switched bands in the early ’80s. Radio bands, that is, to FM.

Staticky, mono AM radio, OK for the car when that’s all there is to listen to, but just not cutting it anymore sound-wise once the Walkman came along. Most Walkman models after ’81 were radios too. And many of the FM stations that switched to Top40 had been Rock stations before.

AllMusic critic Stephen Thomas Erlewine, in his review of the album our #6 song is on, refers to a subgenre of early ’80s Rock he calls “faux new wave AOR:” AOR (album-oriented rock) updated with a veneer of synthesizers, gimmicky effects and slick production: just enough to stay relevant on the changing FM dial. #1 for two weeks and 14 weeks in the top 10, it’s The Steve Miller Band’s “Abracadabra.”

“Abracadabra. I wanna reach out and grab ya:” the lyric came to Steve Miller after seeing Diana Ross skiing. Miller, the ’60s and ’70s San Fran “space cowboy” who did “The Joker,” “Fly like an Eagle,” “Rock ‘n Me,” and “Jet Airliner.” His longtime fans were surprised (that’s putting it nicely) at how “Pop” Miller sounded on his ’82 album. But he scored the hit, his biggest ever on chart points, and his first #1 since “Rock ‘n Me” in 1976. On his next album, Miller was done reacting and adapting and wanted to innovate. Bad idea. Ever hear of the 1984 album Italian X-Rays? Yeah, exactly.

#5 John Cougar – Hurts So Good

At #5 in our Chartcrush Top Ten Countdown for 1982, the #2 song all four of those weeks in August when the top five stayed the same, and the breakthrough hit I mentioned earlier that could’ve been John Cougar’s last had he not unveiled his own distinctive on “Jack and Diane,” the follow-up. Unlike “Jack and Diane,” this one, the first single off his American Fool album, never got to #1, but on total ranking points it was the bigger hit with 16 weeks in the top ten. That’s the most of any hit in the 1980s decade. Again, John Cougar with “Hurts So Good.”

John Cougar, later John Cougar Mellencamp. By the end of the ’80s going just by his given name John Mellencamp: by far the most successful of the Heartland Rock or Roots Rock acts on the singles chart, up against Bruce Springsteen, Tom Petty, Los Lobos, Bob Seger, even Jim Croce going back to the early ’70s. In ’83 with his next album, he repeated the one-two punch of “Hurts So Good” and “Jack and Diane” with the rocker “Crumblin’ Down,” followed by the rootsy Americana of “Pink Houses.” Both were top ten hits. And in ’85 he co-founded Farm Aid, a festival-style benefit to help financially-strapped family farmers stay on their land.

#4 Paul McCartney and Stevie Wonder – Ebony and Ivory

’82 was a pretty lean year for Black artists on the charts. It got so bad in the months before Michael Jackson’s Thriller dropped in November that for three consecutive weeks in October, not a single record by a Black artist in the Top 20 on the album or Hot 100 singles charts, as a Billboard piece celebrating the 30th anniversary of Thriller’s release noted in 2012. That hadn’t been seen since the early ’50s.

On the Hot100, the week of June 19th, Juneteenth, was the only week before Thriller with more than three Black artists in the top ten. They were Deniece Williams, The Dazz Band, Ray Parker, Jr., and at #1 that week for the fifth of its seven weeks on top, the #4 song in our 1982 Chartcrush Top Ten Countdown, which is a superstar duet. A Motown legend and a former Beatle, on a song that frames racial harmony in musical terms. It’s Paul McCartney and Stevie Wonder, recorded live in the studio as only consummate professionals can pull off: “Ebony and Ivory.”

McCartney got the idea for that song from a trope he’d heard repeated by British-Irish comedian named Spike Milligan: “Black notes, White notes, and you need to play the two to make harmony, folks!” “Ebony and Ivory,” the #4 song here on the 1982 edition of the Chartcrush Top Ten Countdown Show.

Once MTV added Michael Jackson’s videos to its rotation in ’83, other Black artists followed and the charts reflected that diversity. So instead of contributing to the fragmentation of music already underway with AM Top40 dying out, MTV wound up replacing AM’s role as a unifier and extending the notion of a gravitational center in Pop for another ten years.

#3 Joan Jett and The Blackhearts – I Love Rock ‘n Roll

OK, we’re down to #3. Now, straight-up Punk Rock never caught on commercially in the U.S. the way it did in the U.K. Ironic because it was a New York band, The Ramones, that invented Punk and exported it to Britain, where the Sex Pistols and The Clash and others took the ball and ran with it. That’s not to say, though, that American kids didn’t have the same spirit of anarchy and rebellion as British kids at the end of the ’70s. It just expressed itself differently.

New Wave, of course: the artsy, more accessible Pop-oriented version of Punk. But also, the new wave of Heavy Metal and Hard Rock groups gave the Rock audience a bridge from ’70s “Denim and Leather” era sounds, eliminating the mysticism and “Progginess,” and cranking up the urgency and the energy-level. Well, right in the sweet spot between New Wave and Metal in ’82 was the song at #3 by a former member of an all-girl L.A. Glam Punk band, The Runaways, that put out its first album all the way back in 1976, year-zero for Punk. It’s a cover of Alan Merrill & The Arrows 1975 UK non-hit, “I Love Rock ‘n Roll.” It’s Joan Jett & The Blackhearts.

Joan Jett & The Blackhearts, “I Love Rock ‘n Roll,” #3. Critics hated it almost as much as they hated the new wave of British Metal acts: panned as crude and amateurish. But of course, like Punk, that was its appeal, and it was one of the videos (along with “Don’t You Want Me”) that people saw as soon as they got their MTV, an exclamation point on Disco Demolition, and Rock replacing Disco on the Pop charts at the start of the ’80s.

#2 J. Geils Band – Centerfold

You’re listening to the Chartcrush Top Ten Countdown Show, 1982 edition, and we’re down to #2.

Back at #6 we heard Steve Miller’s “Abracadabra:” a big ’70s AOR act adding New Wavey sprinkles to stay on FM radio as stations switched formats from Rock to Hits. At #5 another group that had been around for years. Not as successful as Steve Miller in the ’70s, but finally hitting pay-dirt after a decade of nearly constant touring.

On their tenth album, Freeze-Frame, they added some New Wavey touches to their R&B-derived Party-Rock sound, but tastefully (Party Rock was still the name of the game). At #2, the earliest song in our countdown on the calendar, entering in November ’81 and peaking at #1 for six weeks in February and March of ’82, the J. Geils Band’s song about a guy who can’t believe his eyes when he sees his high school crush in a men’s magazine: “Centerfold.”

“Centerfold,” from the J. Geils Band’s Freeze-Frame album: their last featuring longtime front man Peter Wolf, who exited in ’83. The band wanted to move further into New Wave and Techno sounds, and Wolf was having none of that. He had a pretty successful solo career for the rest of the ’80s, hewing pretty close to the Freeze-Frame formula, while the Geils Band barely dented the charts with their follow-up.

#1 Survivor – Eye of the Tiger

Now I led off the show talking about the impact of the Walkman, and how Sony especially targeted fitness nuts in its advertising. So it seems obvious that “workout music” would get a boost on the charts with Walkmans flying off the shelves. I mentioned that Olivia Newton-John’s “Physical” was Billboard’s #1 song of 1982 since their 1982 “chart year” stretched back multiple weeks into ’81 when “Physical” was #1. Again, at Chartcrush we do things by the calendar, so “Physical” moves into 1981 on our rankings and leaves the #1 spot on our 1982 rankings open, as it turns out, for another big motivational workout song.

The third film in Sylvester Stallone’s Rocky franchise was one of the most hotly-anticipated box office releases ever. The original Rocky in ’76 won Best Picture and its sequel in ’79 completed the story arc with a rematch between fictional boxers Rocky Balboa and Apollo Creed after the split decision at the end of the original movie. Rocky III in 1982 pitted Rocky, now the heavyweight champ for a few years, against his first serious challenger, the ruthless Clubber Lang played by Mr. T.

Now the big training sequence in the middle of all three films, where Rocky gets serious about the big fight, soundtracked by Bill Conti’s “Theme from Rocky (Gonna Fly Now),” and culminating in the first two films with Rocky’s triumphant climb up the steps of the Philadelphia Museum of Art. “Gonna Fly,” a #1 hit in 1977, but to catch moviegoers up on Rocky’s career since the Apollo Creed rematch and introduce Clubber Lang, Rocky III opens with a montage.

Stallone couldn’t get his first choice, Queen’s “Another One Bites the Dust” for that, so instead he plucked a Chicago Hard Rock group out of relative obscurity and made them superstars. Our #1 song of 1982 from Rocky III: Survivor’s “Eye of the Tiger.”

Survivor’s “Eye of the Tiger” from Rocky III, 1982’s #1 song according to our ranking here on the Chartcrush Top Ten Countdown Show, and the only soundtrack hit in the top ten for ’82. “Poor Man’s Son” #33 in 1981, Survivor’s biggest hit up to then, and how they got on Sylvester Stallone’s radar. After “Eye of the Tiger’s” amazing success, Survivor struggled to get back in the top ten, but they finally succeeded in ’85 and ’86 with a string of top tens including “Burning Heart,” their biggest career hit that wasn’t “Eye of the Tiger.”

#11 Chicago – Hard to Say I’m Sorry

Now besides “Physical” getting bumped out of our 1982 ranking because it was actually a 1981 hit, only one other song from Billboard’s year-end top ten didn’t make our countdown.

Chicago, one of the biggest chart acts of the ’70s, but they hit a slump after their guitarist Terry Kath accidently shot and killed himself in 1978. They tried to carry on with Jazzy Pop Rock singles like their early ’70s stuff, Soft Rock like their later ’70s hits, and they even dabbled in Disco.

But their run seemed to be over until producer-songwriter David Foster came along. Rolling Stone in 1985 called Foster “the master of bombastic Pop kitsch,” and once he teamed up with Chicago’s Peter Cetera, together they relaunched the band as a Pop Power Ballad group that scored eight top tens in the ’80s, starting with “Hard to Say I’m Sorry,” which was Billboard’s #10 song of 1982, but just misses our top ten at #11.

And that’s gonna have to wrap things up for our 1982 edition of the Chartcrush Top Ten Countdown Show. I’ve been your host, Christopher Verdesi. Be sure and check us out on the Web at chartcrush.com, for written transcripts and streaming links for this and other Chartcrush shows, plus chart run line graphs and other tubular extras. We’re also on TikTok (@chartcrush). Every week we count down a different year from the beginning of the charts in the ’40s all the way up to the present, so be sure and tune in again next week, same station, same time, for another edition of Chartcrush.

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Welcome to the Chartcrush Top Ten Countdown Show. I’m your host, Christopher Verdesi. Every week on Chartcrush, we do a deep dive into a year in Pop music and count down the top ten songs according to our recap of the weekly Pop charts published at the time in the music industry’s top trade publication and chart authority, Billboard magazine. This week we’re counting down 1967, the most geographically lopsided top ten in chart history. Of the ten records in our countdown, seven came out of just one place: Los Angeles, California, by six different Southern California-based acts.

L.A. in the ’60s, the epitome of a modern, forward-looking American city: drenched in sunshine, spectacular beaches, young, tanned, beautiful people everywhere, futuristic architecture, multi-lane freeways. And Cars! Cars! Cars! “Suburb as city,” sprawling by design, no building taller than the 28-story City Hall downtown by law until 1958, and none was until 1966.

And glamorous industries: aerospace, TV, motion pictures, and of course music, especially since American Bandstand moved there from Philadelphia, and L.A.’s homegrown record label, Capitol, with its cool cylindrical tower at Hollywood and Vine, embraced youth culture and started putting out records by The Beach Boys and Beatles. The title of Dick Clark’s L.A.-centric Bandstand spinoff had it right: L.A. was Where the Action Is.

But over 150 other U.S. cities saw a very different kind of action in 1967. Almost everywhere but California was a “Long, Hot Summer” of racial unrest and urban riots, the worst in Detroit and Newark, New Jersey in July: dozens killed, hundreds injured, entire neighborhoods looted and burned.

Emerging Black leaders weren’t talking about reforming the system anymore, but overthrowing it. In a CBS interview in late ’66, Martin Luther King, Jr., called riots “the language of the unheard” and admitted that the voting rights and anti-poverty measures he’d helped secure in ’64 and ’65 hadn’t made much difference. Cries of “Black power” were a reaction to White America’s reluctance to “make the kind of changes necessary to make justice a reality,” he said.

But he couldn’t and wouldn’t condone the violence, so he pivoted in ’67 to opposing the war in Vietnam as his core issue. Heavyweight champ Muhammad Ali had just forfeited his title and boxing license refusing his Army induction after being drafted.

The first major anti-Vietnam Peace protest was in New York in April, organized by Mobe (short for Spring Mobilization Committee to End the War in Vietnam): a coalition of radicals, clergy, pacifists and MLK. Dozens of men burned their draft cards in Central Park and a crowd of 300,000 rallied at the U.N. A march the same day in San Francisco was only a third as big after Folk singer Joan Baez was quoted on the front page of the San Francisco Examiner urging people not to show up because the rally was really a cover for communist support of the Viet Cong.

But the protests put the Peace movement front and center, and soon, Mobe was hunkered down planning its Fall wave of protests in 30 cities in October, culminating with the main event in D.C.: 100,000 on the National Mall, then on to the Pentagon, where poet Allen Ginsberg led chants to levitate the building and “exorcise the evil within,” as chronicled in Norman Mailer’s Pulitzer-winning The Armies of the Night.

California though, with its new Republican governor, Ronald Reagan, seemed almost exempt from all the chaos and violence, and was a magnet. In May, Folkie Scott McKenzie put out a record written and produced by John Phillips of the Mamas & Papas beckoning kids from “all across the nation” who were looking for “a new vibration” to come to “San Francisco,” and “be sure to wear some flowers in your hair.” Tens of thousands did, descending on ‘Frisco’s Haight-Ashbury district to get in on what Time had already heralded two months before as “the center of a new utopianism, compounded of drugs and dreams, free love and LSD.”

Instead of a “Long, Hot Summer,” San Francisco had a “Summer of Love,” and down the coast, L.A. produced seven of the top ten hits of the year.

#10 The Turtles – Happy Together

The first of which we’re gonna hear right now at #10. No ’60s flower power compilation would be complete without it, and it’s been on over 200 of ’em. AllMusic.com’s Denise Sullivan called it “a most sublime slice of Pop heaven [that’s] bounced through decades of AM-car-radio-play unharmed.” It’s The Turtles, “Happy Together.”

“Happy Together,” The Turtles, #1 for three weeks in March into April and the #10 song of 1967. None of The Turtles’ hits until “Eleanor” in late 1968 were written by members of the group. “Happy Together,” written by two guys from a no-hit New York Folk-Rock outfit called The Magicians, whose demo was a stripped-down affair with just guitar and hand-claps, rejected by a dozen artists before The Turtles’ brand new bass player Chip Douglas came up with that brilliant Flower Pop arrangement to help set the stage for the Summer of Love.

#9 The Young Rascals – Groovin’

At #9, the first of the three songs in our Chartcrush Top Ten Countdown Show for 1967 not from L.A. This group hailed from the New York area, and their first hits were frantic rockers. “Good Lovin’,” #1 in the Summer of 1966. But in ’67 they toned things down, first with mid-tempo Motown-y soul on “I’ve Been Lonely Too Long,” a top 20 hit in April; then with this mellow, sun-dappled stroll in the park, complete with singing birds and an arrangement featuring conga but no drums, and Caribbean rhythms.

At about the same time as Beatle George Harrison was discovering Indian music, Felix Cavaliere, was nurturing his fascination with Afro-Cuban sounds on what became The Young Rascals second #1 hit, for four weeks in May and June: “Groovin’.”

The Young Rascals, “Groovin,'” written, like all their hits after “Good Lovin’,” by bandmembers Felix Cavaliere and Eddie Brigati. Atlantic label boss Jerry Wexler wasn’t too keen on “Groovin'” at first, but DJ Murray the K intervened, and convinced him it’d be a hit.

In mid-May as it was peaking on the Hot100, “Groovin'” also crossed over to the R&B chart, eventually getting to #3, prompting a front-page piece in Billboard about Black radio stations playing more records by non-Black artists, and Pop Rock stations playing more R&B hits.

#8 Nancy & Frank Sinatra – Somethin’ Stupid

Our #8 hit is a crossover too, but to a different genre chart. Billboard had just three of those in the ’60s for each of the top radio formats: Country, R&B and, since ’61, Easy Listening, where it was #1 for nine straight weeks, topping the Hot100 for four.

It’s the only #1 father/daughter duet ever, and both father and daughter were red hot coming into ’67. Dad, a superstar since the early ’40s, had just scored his first #1 in over ten years at age 51 with “Strangers in the Night,” just a few months after his daughter became an international Swingin’ ’60s “it” girl in ’66 with a tough, platinum blonde image on her hit “These Boots Are Made for Walkin’,” and her starring role alongside Peter Fonda in Roger Corman’s outlaw biker flick The Wild Angels. Here are Nancy and Frank Sinatra straddling the generation gap: “Somethin’ Stupid.”

C. Carson Parks, older brother of songwriter/producer Van Dyke Parks, wrote “Somethin’ Stupid” and cut it earlier in ’67 with his wife Gaile Foote. It didn’t chart, but ‘Ol Blue Eyes Frank Sinatra got a hold of it and Nancy’s mentor-producer Lee Hazelwood persuaded him to record it with Nancy. Obviously not written with a father and daughter in mind, so DJs had lots of fun joking around about incest. But fans mostly saw it, as one commenter on an internet forum put it, as “the equivalent of a father and a daughter singing karaoke at a party.” Not creepy at all.

Detour: The Beatles – Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band

Now we’ll get to #7 in a minute, but first, a little detour.

For the first time in three years, The Beatles didn’t have any songs in the top ten on the year. They were busy inventing Album Rock!

In the Fall of 1967, Billboard’s music editor since the ’40s, Paul Ackerman, observed on page one that albums by “underground” acts were selling in the hundreds of thousands “without the impetus of a hit single:” albums with “unconventional” material, promoted in “scores of underground publications” and via “posters, buttons and certain radio stations which are hip to the idiom.”

And even big AM Top 40 stations were getting in on it, like New York’s WMCA, auditioning album cuts as if they were singles. This had a profound impact on the charts. While it’s always been true that people don’t usually buy singles of songs on albums they already have, even if they are out as singles, after ’67 with albums taking center stage, Billboard could no longer claim that the Hot100 was a definitive songs ranking.

Eventually they tweaked the rules to allow Album cuts on the Hot100, with Charts Director Geoff Mayfield explaining that “The goal is deceptively simple: to reveal the most popular songs in the United States. Period. End of sentence.” But that was at the end of 1998. From ’67 until then though, popular album cuts, even ones getting airplay and moving boatloads of LPs, were a total blind spot on the Hot100, which remained a singles-only chart.

And that’s why none of the songs on The Beatles’ Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band album charted on the Hot100, among other glaring omissions, especially at the peak of Album Rock in the ’70s: they weren’t out as singles (as with Sgt. Peppers), and/or most people were buying the album and had no use for the singles.

Now The Beatles did release some singles in ’67: “Penny Lane” backed with “Strawberry Fields Forever” in March and “All You Need Is Love” in the Summer did well, but not “well” by Beatles standards, and that was thanks to the massive backlash against John Lennon predicting the demise of Christianity and saying The Beatles were “more popular than Jesus” in the late Summer of ’66.

Practically overnight it became controversial to play Beatles records on Top 40 radio, and things got pretty tense on the road. So after wrapping up what turned out to be their final tour, they retreated to the studio, and ten months later, which is an eternity in Beatle time, they emerged with Sgt. Pepper’s, their all-in psychedelic, druggy rebuke to an increasingly hostile mainstream.

And right after it came out, Paul McCartney, who was actually the last of the four Beatles to try LSD, doubled down and became the first Pop star to admit it publicly. Lennon had been using LSD regularly for two years at that point!

#7 The Doors – Light My Fire

Back to our countdown, and #7: a new group plucked out of Hollywood’s thriving Sunset Strip club scene, and their debut album had been slowly scaling the Album chart all Spring. Just one problem: its biggest hit clocked in at over seven minutes! Well they weren’t The Beatles; they couldn’t just not release singles off their album, and Top 40 radio wasn’t playing seven-minute songs. So the label, Elektra, decided to edit out the song’s lengthy organ and guitar jam in the middle, and the result, just shy of three minutes, was the first “single edit” of an album cut on the Hot100. A song about fire, #1 for three weeks right in the middle of the “long, hot summer” of ’67, it’s The Doors, “Light My Fire.”

Another thing making headlines in the music trades in ’67: Texas radio mogul Gordon McLendon’s crusade against smutty and druggy lyrics. TV and radio, McLendon felt, was kids’ first contact with the adult world, and if that was making drugs and illicit sex attractive, “we’ve been just as guilty as those who do the pushing of drugs.” He even set up a panel of ex-prostitutes and junkies to help weed out suggestive records.

Well, a few weeks after “Light My Fire” hit #1, The Doors appeared on CBS’s Ed Sullivan Show, and a producer, who also happened to be Ed Sullivan’s son-in-law, asked them to change “girl, we couldn’t get much higher” in the song to “girl, there’s nothing I require,” and The Doors agreed to do that. The Rolling Stones had changed “Let’s Spend the Night Together” to “Let’s Spend Some Time Together” and aside from Mick Jagger flubbing one instance and rolling his eyes on another, that’d gone off without a hitch. But then, on live TV, Doors front man Jim Morrison went ahead and sang the original line, “girl, we couldn’t get much higher,” and The Doors, who’d been negotiating to do multiple episodes of Sullivan, were banned for life.

#6 The Box Tops – The Letter

At #6 is the debut single and biggest hit by a short-lived blue-eyed soul group from Memphis, Tennessee: another of the three records in our Chartcrush Top Ten Countdown for 1967 not out of California. The lead singer, just 16. In ’67 though, his gruff vocals really stood out, and helped propel the song to #1 for four weeks in the Fall. And speaking of song lengths, it was the last #1 hit shorter than two minutes. No editing needed on that one! It’s The Box Tops, lead singer Alex Chilton, “The Letter.”

Box Tops, “The Letter,” #6 on our Chartcrush Top Ten Countdown of 1967’s biggest hits, written by songwriter Wayne Carson, who wrote a couple more top 20s for them before they split in 1970, right around the same time Joe Cocker was scoring his first top ten hit, a slowed-down version of “The Letter.”

Box Tops singer Alex Chilton’s work in Big Star and beyond in the ’70s: a huge influence on ’80s Alternative groups like The Replacements, whose song entitled “Alex Chilton” is a highlight of their 1987 album, Pleased to Meet Me.

#5 The Monkees – Daydream Believer

So if anyone indirectly benefited from the backlash against John Lennon’s comments about Jesus and religion and The Beatles’ retreat to the studio and out of the public eye, it was our group at #5. The timing was perfect. Their first hit debuted in September ’66, right after The Fab Four played their last-ever U.S. gigs. And then, their weekly TV show premiered: a half hour goofball sitcom, Monday nights at 7:30 on NBC conceived as TV’s answer to The Beatles. How could it miss?

This song peaked in December ’67, well into season two of the show, so, one of their later hits, after they’d ruled the charts all year. It’s (who else?) The Monkees, “Daydream Believer.”

Mickey Dolenz, the singer on most of The Monkees’ biggest hits, but Davy Jones got the mic on “Daydream Believer,” The Monkees fifth top ten and third #1, all in less than a year and a half. And Monkeemania wasn’t just a U.S. phenomenon; in the U.K., The Beatles’ home turf, it was their sixth top ten! Over the summer, they’d drawn 10,000 to see their U.K. debut at Wembley’s Empire Pool in London, and according to Billboard, 90% of them were teenaged girls. By the end of ’67 The Monkees were bigger as a recording act than as TV stars, and Nesmith managed to wrest creative control of their music from the New York and Hollywood suits that had brought them together and made them stars.

“Daydream Believer,” the one song in our Chartcrush Top Ten Countdown for 1967 not in Billboard’s official published top ten for the year, because Billboard only counted chart action up to its December 16 issue. “Daydream” still had a week to go at #1, and six more in the top ten into 1968. At Chartcrush, not having to get an issue out before New Years, we get to factor every song’s full chart run for more accurate rankings.

#4 Bobbie Gentry – Ode to Billie Joe

At #4 is an unlikely hit by an until-then unknown singer based since her teens in, where else? L.A., but originally from Mississippi. And everyone who was around in ’67 seems to remember exactly where they were and how they felt when they first heard it. Janis Joplin felt nauseous. Right from the strummed intro, Otis Redding knew it was going to be “some kind of trouble.” And Bob Dylan called that same intro “primitive and searing.”

Capitol Records released it in July as a B-side on the singer’s first single with no fanfare, but it caught on and wound up displacing The Beatles’ “All You Need Is Love” at #1 at the end of August. Here’s Bobbie Gentry’s “Ode to Billie Joe.”

“Ode to Billie Joe,” #4 on our 1967 edition of the Chartcrush Top Ten Countdown Show: just Bobbie Gentry, a stunning raven-haired beauty from the Mississippi Delta where the story takes place, and her acoustic guitar, with those dramatic strings overdubbed.

Gentry, who wrote the song, was quoted saying it’s a study in unconscious cruelty for the way the news of Billie Joe’s suicide doesn’t rise above the mundane details of life. But it leaves key questions unanswered, like what were the narrator and Billie Joe throwing off the Tallahatchie Bridge? On that and other points, she let listeners draw their own conclusions.

It only got to #17 on the Country chart. Country radio, not playing many “primitive” and “searing” records in the late ’60s, and there was a cover version in a more polished-sounding “Countrypolitan” style by singer Margie Singleton, but enough Country fans bought Bobbie Gentry’s album to propel it #1 for three weeks on the Country Albums chart.

Get this: both song and album cracked the top ten on the R&B charts, even with a competing version by Instrumental Soul star, saxophonist King Curtis. As they say in the biz: an “all-market sweep.”

Gentry stayed in the music biz ’til the early ’80s, when she retired back to her native Mississippi, just a couple hours’ drive from the site of the Tallahatchie Bridge, which collapsed in 1972.

#3 The Association – Windy

So we’ve heard The Turtles, the Sinatras, Doors, Monkees, Bobbie Gentry so far. That’s five of the California-based acts in our 1967’s top ten. #3 is the sixth, all the way to the mellow side of the Folk-Rock spectrum: a Harmony Pop Vocal group that came out of The Troubadour, the West Hollywood Folk Club where Elton John put himself on the map a few years later.

They’d already scored a #1 hit with “Cherish.” That’s our #6 song of 1966. Here they are repeating in the top ten for ’67 with this breezy hit that was #1 for the whole violent, fiery month of July, dislodged from the top by “Light My Fire.” It’s The Association, “Windy.”

Now you’d think “Windy” would’ve been all over the Easy Listening charts in ’67, right? Nope. Not a chance with thinly-veiled drug references like “stormy eyes,” “tripping down the streets,” “flyin’ high above the clouds.” Nah ahh. They didn’t get to do it on Ed Sullivan either.

Adult America, still for the most part allergic to Hippie sounds and messaging. The Easy Listening chart in ’67 (precursor to Adult Contemporary) reads like a who’s who of pre-Elvis Crooners and Pop Singers: Sinatra, Como, Martino, Patti Page, Frankie Laine, Margaret Whiting, all in their 40s and 50s, while the counterculture was saying never to trust anyone over 30.

The Association established their Hippie credentials beyond doubt by leading off one of the defining events of the Summer of Love: the three-day Monterey Pop Festival in June. “Windy” was allowed there, and later in the festival, among many other iconic moments, Jimi Hendrix poured lighter fluid on his guitar and lit it on fire to top The Who’s guitar smashing antics.

On the planning committee for Monterrey, Brian Wilson, and his group The Beach Boys was slated to headline day two, their latest #1 single “Good Vibrations” having received a resounding thumbs up from the Hippie press. But they canceled last-minute, and according to writer Jesse Jarnow on the music site Pitchfork, “the ascendant underground effectively wrote The Beach Boys out of the ’60s Rock narrative that followed.”

Sgt. Pepper’s entered the album chart the same week as Monterrey, and The Beach Boys’ hotly-anticipated psychedelic studio masterpiece Smile was eventually shelved.

#2 Lulu – To Sir, with Love

And that gets us to #2 on our Chartcrush Top Ten Countdown for 1967. It’s the theme song of a British movie about a black Guianan immigrant played by Sidney Poitier who takes a teaching job in a school in London’s tough, working-class East End to make ends meet while he looks for a job as an engineer.

Unexpectedly, it became one of the biggest films of the year, and the song sung by a teen British singer-actress who was in the movie was #1 for five weeks in October and November. The singer-actress? Lulu. And the song’s title? Same as the movie: “To Sir, with Love.”

The “Sir” in “To Sir, with Love” is Sidney Poitier’s character in the movie: the teacher who insists on being addressed as “Sir” by his unruly students: part of teaching them respect and manners.

Poitier had previously played a student in Blackboard Jungle, the 1955 movie that launched “Rock Around the Clock” to the top of the charts. And then he became the first Black man to win Best Actor at the Oscars (for 1963’s Lilies of the Field) and was a such an icon in the Black community that Lulu’s “To Sir, with Love” was also a top ten hit on the R&B chart just because it was in a Sidney Poitier movie. That crossover success, definitely a bright spot in a year of racial strife.

Lulu, the singer-actress, remained a big star in her native U.K., but “To Sir, with Love” was her only big U.S. hit. And it was the #1 song on Billboard’s year-end Hot100.

#1 The Monkees – I’m a Believer

But again, here at Chartcrush, our rankings don’t just measure chart action in a defined “chart year;” we count every song’s full chart run in whichever calendar year it scored the most points, so songs don’t fall through the cracks like they so often have in the history of Billboard’s year-end rankings.

Our #1 song: well, it didn’t exactly fall through the cracks; it’s #5 on Billboard’s ranking. But seven weeks at #1 and 12 in the top ten, mid-December ’66 to March ’67 make it the strongest chart run of any 1967 hit.

Their very first hit, “Last Train to Clarksville,” was on its way to becoming the #7 song of 1966 even before their TV show premiered, but then their second was an even bigger hit. We heard “Daydream Believer” from late in the year at #5; here again, The Monkees, doing Neil Diamond’s “I’m a Believer.”

All across America, hundreds of teen combos formed in the wake of the British Invasion, practicing in garages, basements and warehouses, playing high school dances and “Battles of the Bands” sponsored by local radio stations, maybe even putting out a 45 on some indie or vanity label. A few of them even broke out nationally. Sam the Sham & The Pharaohs “Wooly Bully” and Question Mark & The Mysterians “96 Tears” were both among the top ten hits in ’65 and ’66, respectively. Tom Hanks’ 1996 movie That Thing You Do! chronicles the story arc of a fictional combo from playing a pizza parlor on Main Street in Erie, Pennsylvania to national one-hit wonderdom.

But right when this so-called Garage Rock movement was at its frenzied peak in late ’66, The Monkees captured all the lightning in a bottle and unleashed it on TV and the Pop charts to become, not one-hit wonders, but the top recording act of 1967. Which definitely validated the movement, but since they were a TV fabrication, also marginalized it against the backdrop of Sgt. Peppers, Monterrey Pop and Album Rock.

Underground cred, the new coin of the realm in music, as dispensed by guys like Jann Wenner, the founder of Rolling Stone, just one of the dozens of upstart underground ‘zines. Henceforth, by editorial decree, or so it seemed, The Monkees and any group like them: summarily dismissed as “Bubblegum.”

Bands scrambled to adapt, especially The Monkees. After NBC cancelled their TV show in ’68, they attempted to update The Beatles Help! for the acid generation, and the resulting movie, titled Head, was an epic fail, along with its soundtrack album, and The Monkees faded fast.

Jann Wenner didn’t have to do or say much to hasten that fall, but after a Monkees revival got them back on the charts in the mid-’80s and beyond, according to Monkee Peter Tork, Wenner spent the next 30-plus years making sure The Monkees never got anywhere near being inducted into his precious Rock & Roll Hall of Fame!

So there you have ’em: the top ten hits of 1967 according to our exclusive Chartcrush ranking, which (again) is derived from Billboard’s weekly Hot100 charts, but using a ranking formula that’s the same for all years and factors every song’s full chart run.

#13 Frankie Valli – Can’t Take My Eyes off You

Now there’s only one song from Billboard’s 1967 year-end top ten that’s not in ours. In ’67 they started tweaking their year-end rankings with bonus points for songs that made it to #1, which does produce more accurate rankings.

Our Chartcrush method though? Well it’s a little more generous with the bonus points than Billboard’s was in ’67, so their #10 song, which never got to #1, comes out #13 on our ranking: one of the earliest examples of an artist who’s still a member of a group, putting out a solo song and album. From that album entitled simply Solo, it’s Four Season Frankie Valli with a record that’s equal parts ’60s MOR Pop and Jet Age Lounge Crooner: “Can’t Take My Eyes off You.”

Frankie Valli, “Can’t Take My Eyes off You,” #10 on Billboard’s year-end chart and the first of two bonus cuts here on our 1967 edition of the Chartcrush Top Ten Countdown Show. The industry in ’67 was buzzing about fans preferring solo acts to groups, so Four Seasons mastermind Bob Crewe wanted to see if a Valli solo record could chart at the same time as a Four Seasons single. Yes, it could! The Four Seasons’ “C’mon Marianne” was in the top ten at the same time.

#15 Aretha Franklin – Respect

You may have noticed this hour that there were no songs by Black artists among the top ten hits of 1967. Very unusual: first year since 1957 for that. So we’re gonna close out this week’s show with the #1 song of the year from Billboard’s 1967 year-end R&B chart.

It did top the Hot100 for two weeks in June, but its shorter-than-average run of just 12 weeks on the chart only gets it to #15 on our ranking. It’s a cover of a song that written and first charted by Otis Redding in ’65, but this singer transformed it into one of the great feminist anthems of all-time. It’s Aretha Franklin’s “Respect.”

Aretha had been recording for Columbia Records since 1960, but it wasn’t until she moved over to Atlantic that she had her big chart breakthrough. R-E-S-P-E-C-T “Respect,” Aretha Franklin, closing out our action-packed 1967 edition of the Chartcrush Top Ten Countdown Show.

I’ve been your host, Christopher Verdesi. Hey, if you like what you heard, head on over to our website. It’s chartcrush.com, where you’ll find written transcripts and links to stream this and other Chartcrush shows on Spotify, plus chart run line graphs and other mondo extras. Every week, we count down a different year from the beginning of the charts in the ’40s all the way up to the present, so tune again, same station, same time, for another edition of Chartcrush.

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Welcome to the Chartcrush Top Ten Countdown Show, I’m your host, Christopher Verdesi. Every week on Chartcrush, we do a deep dive into a year in Pop music and count down the top ten songs according to our recap of the weekly Pop charts published at the time in the music industry’s top trade publication and chart authority, Billboard magazine. This week on Chartcrush, we’re setting our sights on 2019.

In 2019, Generation Z, Zoomers, born 1996 to 2011, were the same age as Millennials in 2003 and Gen-Xers in 1987: 7 to 23, the first generation to grow up with always-on Internet, plus smart phones and social media: true digital natives. Streaming was how they got their music, and it was the music industry’s salvation, the top revenue source since 2016 after over a decade of losses from illegal downloading.

But 2019 was the year streaming passed 50% of industry revenue. The biz hadn’t had such a dominant format since 2009, the last year CDs were over half of revenue. Spotify, Apple and Amazon: the biggest platforms for music streaming in ’19, but YouTube, bigger than any of those by number of song plays. In 2018, TikTok merged with lip-sync video sharing platform musica.ly, and was a hit right out of the gate: 25 million monthly U.S. users on its way to over 100 million, and fueling big breakthroughs on the charts. By the end of 2019, Billboard was having to define “meme culture” for its readers.

So Gen-Z sensibilities, streaming and TikTok, drivers of what Billboard trumpeted as a “massive comeback for Pop.” But as we’ll hear this hour, 2019’s Pop explosion: not quite as backward compatible with older generations of music fans as previous Pop surges. “The year’s biggest mainstream breakout artist,” Billboard noted in its year-in-review, “is all but unclassifiable,” attributing that to Gen-Z’s indifference to genres.

We’ll hear that artist in our countdown, but also a factor in all the newness and edginess on the charts (some would’ve said “weirdness”): America’s overwhelmingly leftist cultural institutions in Hollywood and New York and pockets in between, simply writing off the tastes and sensibilities of whole swaths of their audiences during the Donald Trump presidency. No, not many cultural gatekeepers anymore in the Trump years wringing their hands about whether a song, or artist, or TV show or movie, or message or cause was gonna “play in Peoria” (Peoria, Illinois: the archetypical down-the-middle Midwestern test market since Vaudeville days). “Peoria put Trump in the White House; to hell with Peoria!”

Rankling folks in flyover country: now something of a sport in pop culture circles, with mandatory participation: part of the broader #resistance to Trump’s “Make America Great Again” movement, whether in print, social media, movies, TV, or in award show acceptance speeches as host Ricky Gervais lampooned in his biting “don’t make a political speech, you know nothing about the real world” monologue at the Golden Globes.

For the record, Peoria actually went for Hillary Clinton in 2016, but Covington, Kentucky? Now that was Trump country, and that’s where a group of Teen Boys on a school trip to D.C. were from, waiting for their bus home in front of the Lincoln Memorial wearing red “Make America Great Again” hats and staring down a Native American man beating a ceremonial drum. A two-minute viral phone vid of that provoked an instantaneous hail of outrage and denunciation of the students in late January 2019, despite missing important context.

Days later the website Vox called the vid a “Rorschach test” that revealed people’s world views. If so, it revealed not just a bias, but open contempt for Trump and his voters across media, showbiz and blue-check Twitter.

Was that a sustainable business strategy? Time would tell, but it made for an interesting year on the charts as Rorschach test headlines kept poppin’:

Empire star Jussie Smollett’s MAGA hate crime hoax in Chicago just a week after the Covington kids video;

a trio of new Progressive, or radical, young Congresswomen, “The Squad” on the cover of Rolling Stone;

Trump-Russia Collusion sleuth Robert Mueller dropping his report clearing the President in March;

and then (speaking of awards ceremonies) an ultra-political American Music Awards featuring a newly “woke” Taylor Swift just as the new Democrat majority in the House was preparing the first of its two party-line impeachments of the President.

And over 7,700 tweets from Trump himself during the year.

What a whirlwind! And the ten songs we’re gonna hear in our Chartcrush 2019 countdown this hour were the soundtrack to all that.

#10 Jonas Brothers – Sucker

Kicking things off at #10, a Trio of Brothers whose reunion after six years as successful Solo Acts was one of the most anticipated entertainment events of the decade, and they did their best to stay out of politics. But remember, participation mandatory; no bleacher sitting! What, are they Republicans?!

The oldest Brother had been a contestant on Trump’s NBC reality competition Celebrity Apprentice in its 14th season right before the campaign, and one Writer went so far as to blame him for Trump’s presidency! The ratings for Celebrity Apprentice would’ve been better if he hadn’t been eliminated and Trump wouldn’t have run!

Well, I don’t know about that, but the Brothers’ reunion single did debut at #1. As it turned out, its only week on top, in mid-March, but it stayed in the top ten long enough to make it the #10 song of the year. It’s the Jonas Brothers, Nick, Joe and celebrity apprentice Kevin: “Sucker.”

Jonas Brothers, “Sucker,” #10 here on our Chartcrush Top Ten Countdown for 2019—also Billboard’s #10 song of the year.

Their album Happiness Begins followed in June along with their documentary Chasing Jonas and a world tour in August, but none of their subsequent singles were major hits. While “Sucker” was still in the top ten, gay YouTube comic Randy Rainbow added an “S” to the title for his parody version to lampoon Trump supporters as “Suckers”—plural.

#9 Ariana Grande – 7 Rings

According to Nielsen Music, which measures such things, Rap replaced Rock as the top music genre in 2017, and the subgenre that pushed it over the top in the streaming era was Trap.

After a decade of commercial Pop-adjacent Hip-Hop hits, and a Hip-Hop slump on the charts early in the ’10s, Trap, named for ghetto drug houses in Atlanta, was a return of edgy, menacing Hip-Hop: a cold, dark, bleakly reverberated ambience with ominous-sounding synthesizers and heavy sub-bass and layered 808 kick drums. Clipped, mumbled rapping, another feature that’s often mentioned, especially by detractors.

Enter a former Nickelodeon kids TV Star turned overachieving Pop Diva, winner of 12 Teen Choice awards, named by Billboard the top Female Artist debuting on the charts in the ’10s decade, with a four octave vocal range plus the whistle register. Now what use could an artist like that possibly have for a musical style that emerged from the sleaziest, druggiest nether-regions of the underworld?

Well Katy Perry had already plowed that field with her 2014 hit “Dark Horse” featuring Juicy J., but in the era of “Make America Great Again,” this White, mainstream Singer made her #resist statement by embracing it with both arms on her 2018 album, Sweetener, then, just six months later, doubling down on her 2019 set, Thank U, Next, whose first two singles debuted at #1. This was the second, #1 the week she became the first act since The Beatles in 1964 to have the top three hits on a weekly Hot100. At #9 on our countdown, Ariana Grande’s “7 Rings.”

Interpolating, to great ironic effect, Rodgers and Hammerstein’s “My Favorite Things” from The Sound of Music, “7 Rings,” the #9 song on our Chartcrush Top Ten countdown of the biggest hits of 2019, #7 on Billboard’s year-end ranking. The most successful single yet of Ariana Grande’s string of 12 top10s that started with her 2013 Duet “The Way” with Rapper Mac Miller, her boyfriend until just before his fatal OD in 2018.

Before “7 Rings” was released, her label cut a deal to split royalties. Rodgers and Hammerstein’s Publisher asked for 90%, and Grande’s team said “OK.” There wasn’t even a counter-offer. Ariana was just fine, though: the lead single and title track of Grande’s Thank U, Next album: also a #1 hit in late 2018.

#8 Lizzo – Truth Hurts

At #8, the first of several 2019 Chart Newcomers in our countdown. This song, though, originally released in 2017, and it took a viral TikTok meme to juice it onto the charts. The meme based on a line in the song about taking a DNA text and finding out you’re 100%— fill in the blank. And thousands of TikTok-ers put their phones in selfie mode, broke out the Q-Tips, swabbed their cheeks and announced their results to the world: 100% British, 100% ogre, 100% “that mom,” “dog,” “cat,” “the father,” you name it!

By the end of the year, she’d tied Iggy Azalea’s record for most weeks at #1 by a Female Rapper and was Hip-Hop’s new “it” girl heading into the 2020s, it’s Lizzo, “Truth Hurts.”

#8 on our Chartcrush Top Ten Countdown for 2019, Lizzo, “Truth Hurts.” It misses Billboard’s official year-end top ten at #13 because the tail end of its chart run was in Billboard’s 2020 chart year. They also have it as the #55 song of 2020. At Chartcrush we have the luxury of factoring every song’s full chart run in our rankings, so it makes our top ten.

Now, the line that launched “Truth Hurts” on TikTok about the DNA test: turns out Lizzo lifted that from a tweet she saw in 2017, by a Woman in the U.K., who’s since received a co-writing credit, and no doubt a nice big fat check!

If you’re listening on radio, you didn’t hear what Lizzo’s DNA test shows she’s 100% of because the line is censored in the radio edit, but I don’t want to leave you hanging here. She’s 100% that— b-word that rhymes with “witch.” Or “rich,” as Lizzo went with in her own version of that TikTok meme, in which she flashes a crisp new $100 bill.

#7 Travis Scott (featuring Drake) – SICKO MODE

At #7 we have a three-part Hip-Hop Suite. Yes, you heard that right! And it spent 32 weeks in the top ten, August ’18 to the end of March ’19. That was a new record for a Hip-Hop track, and most of those weeks came after the artist caught a ton of flak for accepting a gig that other big-name acts like Rihanna, Cardi B and P!nk had turned down: the Super Bowl 53 Halftime Show.

Why was everyone turning down the Super Bowl? Because ’18 into ’19 was peak hysteria over the controversial anthem-kneeling movement started by San Francisco 49ers Quarterback Colin Kaepernick in 2016 when he refused to stand for the “Star Spangled Banner” before games, saying he couldn’t be proud of a country that oppressed Black people. So instead when the anthem played he took a knee, which in football kills a play.

Well one Sunday in 2017 after President Trump personally weighed in and urged the NFL to sanction the Protesters, over 200 Players took a knee while others, including Patriots Superstar Tom Brady, locked arms and stood at attention with hands on heart.

Anyway, despite all the brouhaha, our Rapper at #7 played halftime at Super Bowl LIII and came out just fine. His autobiographical documentary, Look Mom I Can Fly, was one of the most-watched things on Netflix when it came out in August, and his next hit in the Fall, “Highest in the Room,” debuted at #1.

This song, though, his biggest hit: #5 on the charts the week he performed it—with Maroon 5’s Adam Levine on guitar—at halftime in February, and its our #7 song of the year: Travis Scott’s “SICKO MODE.”

Houston-born Rapper (and Kylie Jenner Boyfriend and Baby Daddy) Travis Scott, “SICKO MODE.” An uncredited Drake in the first part—uncredited because he didn’t turn in his verses for the song until 2AM the morning the album was released!

Colin Kaepernick’s anthem-kneeling movement sputtered in August as the 2019 football season was getting underway, when the NFL struck a big money deal with Billionaire Rapper Jay-Z to manage and produce future NFL events like the Halftime Show.

#6 Marshmello and Bastille – Happier

At #6 a British Indie Pop Band that had a quirky Alternative crossover hit, “Pompeii,” peak at #5 on the Hot100 in 2013, but failed to chart a follow-up and seemed destined for one-hit-wonder status, until this 2018 joint single with an American DJ and EDM Producer who got first billing on the track. It never got to #1, but it stayed in the top ten a good long time—from October ’18 all the way to April ’19—long enough to make it the #6 song of the year, both in Billboard and here on our 2019 edition of the Chartcrush Top Ten Countdown Show. It’s Marshmello and Bastille, “Happier.”

“Happier,” Marshmello and Bastille at #6. Bastille, again a British Group fronted by Dan Smith, whose birthday is July 14: Bastille Day, a major holiday in France commemorating the storming of a royal prison during the French Revolution.

Now this cat Marshmello they teamed up with was the top charting EDM (Electronic Dance Music) DJ-Producer of the late 2010s, which was past the commercial peak for EDM earlier in the decade, but he was the latest in a line of DJ-Producers—including Deadmau5 and Daft Punk—who cultivated what EDM Historian Michaelangelo Matos called in a 2016 Vice article, “a fetishized, radically anonymous image.” Which Marshmello achieved by wearing a bucket over his head: white like a marshmallow, with black x’s for eyes and a wide ironic smile.

In 2020, another Marshmello collab was a big hit, “Come & Go” from Gen-Z Emo Rapper Juice WRLD’s posthumous album after his fatal OD in December of ’19 shook the world. Juice WRLD charted 39 songs on the Hot100 and two others as a Featured Artist from his death to the Spring of 2022.

#5 Billie Eilish – bad guy

OK are you ready for this? Remember at the top of the show I quoted Billboard saying the year’s top New Artist was unclassifiable? Well her biggest hit of the year is at #5 on our 2019 Chartcrush Top Ten Countdown. She’s the first Artist born in the 21st century to hit #1, and her album When We All Fall Asleep, Where Do We Go?, was the #1 album of the year. Born in December 2001, it’s the 17-year-old homeschooled phenom from L.A., Billie Eilish, “bad guy.”

Billie Eilish, #5 on our 2019 edition of the Chartcrush Top Ten Countdown Show. Critic Simon Reynolds called “Bad Guy,” “a crawlspace of a track that feels like it’s made of the same whispery fabric as Eilish’s voice: clicks, whirrs, fingersnaps, and ear-tickling sounds that prompt ASMR tingles.”

ASMR, short for Autonomous Sensory Meridian Response: sound combinations that provoke involuntary physical reactions, like tingling in the spine or extremities, or across the scalp, also famously employed in 2019 in a Super Bowl ad for Michelob Ultra starring Zoe Kravitz that aired pre-“bad guy” when Eilish was still, as Billboard put it, a “hotly hyped Alt-Radio Weirdo.”

Now it’s one thing for a song like that to be an academic exercise or art-house curiosity—or for that matter a beer ad, but “bad guy” was the #5 Pop song of the year, and Eilish swept all four major awards at the Grammys: Record of the Year, Album of the Year, Song of the Year, and Best New Artist. On top of that, her brother Finneas O’Connell, who’s also her Co-Writer and Producer) took home the Grammy for Best Engineered Album for When We All Fall Asleep, Where Do We Go?

Eilish, just a year older than the Teen Swedish Climate Change Activist, Greta Thunberg, who was everywhere in 2019. And Billie claimed her #resistance participation trophy taking up Thunberg’s cause, wearing an oversized shirt with “No Music on a Dead Planet” in red jewels to that aforementioned ultra-political American Music Awards show in 2019: the slogan of the newly-founded Activist Group Music Declares Emergency. Who says all homeschooled kids turn out Republican?

#4 Lewis Capaldi – Someone You Loved

At #4 we have another “year-straddler,” like Lizzo’s “Truth Hurts,” which we heard at #8. Year-straddlers are songs whose chart runs go from one year into the next, so their true popularity isn’t reflected when you only count chart action within a defined “chart year,” like Billboard does. Again, being a retrospective ranking, we get to correct that record by counting every song’s full chart run toward whichever calendar year it earned the most points.

This song had the longest chart run of any 2019 hit, 54 weeks, May ’19 to May ’20, peaking at #1 in November, right at the cutoff for Billboard’s 2019 chart year, so they have it at #27 for 2019 and #10 for 2020. Applying our rules though, it’s a 2019 song and #4 on the year: Scottish Singer-Songwriter Lewis Capaldi’s breakout sleeper hit, “Someone You Loved.”

When he was 18, Lewis Capaldi sang a song into his iPhone and uploaded it to the audio sharing platform Soundcloud. Next thing he knows, a well-connected Talent Scout is on a plane from New York to watch him do an open mic night at his local pub in Scotland. Then, his first single in 2017 made him the fastest Unsigned Act up ’til then to get 25 million listens of a song on Spotify.

“Someone You Loved” first appeared on his second EP in 2018, and then was included on his debut full-length album in early 2019. It started out at #85 on the Hot100 in May and didn’t hit #1 until November: one of the longest climbs to #1 in Hot100 history. Two years to make the charts; six months to hit #1, and then another six months on the chart, most of that in the top ten: “Someone You Loved,” #4 as we count down the biggest hits of 2019 here on the Chartcrush Top Ten Countdown Show.

#3 Halsey – Without Me

At #3 is another song like “Someone You Love” that didn’t get big thanks to a TikTok meme, or hypnotizing listeners with ASMR tingles or tapping into the latest Hip-Hop trend—not that there’s anything wrong with any those things! Billboard‘s Jason Lipshutz wrote the week it hit #1 that with this song there’s no cheat code; “it’s just a really polished, successful Pop single.”

In 2016 she’d been the Featured Singer on what Billboard named its #4 song of the 2010s decade: “Closer” by the American EDM-Pop Duo Chainsmokers, but this was her first solo #1, for two nonconsecutive weeks in January, and in the top ten for 29 weeks. It’s Halsey, “Without Me.”

Halsey, one of the many flawed Female Pop Rebels who followed Indie sensation Lorde onto the charts after “Royals” shot to #1 for nine weeks in 2013, “Without Me,” the #3 song of 2019 as we continue our countdown of 2019’s biggest hits here on the Chartcrush Top Ten Countdown Show.

Halsey made the top ten again later in the year featuring on a song by Korean Boy Band BTS. And in 2020, her collab with the aforementioned Juice WRLD on “Life’s a Mess,” another of his posthumous hits. And then in ’22 her label, Capitol, didn’t think her latest song possessed sufficient “virality” for release, so they held it back and Halsey wasn’t happy.

As Pitchfork’s Cat Zhang put it at the time, all labels were talking about was “TikTok this and TikTok that, demanding ever-more lip-syncs, dances, and casual posts for an insatiable internet.” Halsey went public with her gripes with Capitol, the song failed to crack the top40, and Artist and Label went their separate ways the following year.

#2 Post Malone featuring Swae Lee – Sunflower

At #2 is another unclassifiable Artist. Some would say a shape-shifting Artist who picked the style to fit the song instead of trying to blend everything together: Hip-Hop, Pop-Rap, Pop, R&B, Trap, Rap Rock, Cloud Rap, even Country and Grunge: you name it, all in his toolbox.

He found himself in a little bit of hot water in 2017, right when Emo Rappers XXXTenacion and the aforementioned Juice WRLD were breaking out, when he questioned Hip-Hop’s emotional range. “If you’re looking for lyrics,” he said, “if you’re looking to cry, if you’re looking to think about life, don’t listen to Hip-Hop.” Ouch!

But the dust-up over that blew over and in 2018 he notched two songs in Billboard’s year-end top ten. And then he did it again in ’19: the only Artist ever to score two top10s two years in a row on Billboard’s year-end Hot100 charts. In our Chartcrush rankings he still has the two in ’18, but his second biggest hit of 2019 gets nudged to #11 by the addition of our two “year-straddlers” that weren’t in Billboard’s top ten: Lizzo’s “Truth Hurts” and Lewis Capaldi’s “Someone You Loved.”

Still an amazing run, though. “Rockstar” and “Psycho” were his two smashes in ’18, and then this, the #2 song of 2019. It’s White Rapper-Singer Post Malone, featuring Black Rapper-Singer Swae Lee from the Hip-Hop Duo Rae Sremmurd, whose cut “Black Beatles” was a #1 hit in 2017, from the blockbuster animated film Spider-Man, Into the Spider-Verse, and the first #1 hit in a few years from a soundtrack, “Sunflower.”

Post Malone with Swae Lee, “Sunflower,” the #2 song on our Chartcrush Top Ten Countdown: the top Artist of the year when you add up the points for all 16 of his songs that charted in 2019. Again, the only act ever with two Billboard year-end top tens two years in a row, but his second biggest hit of 2019, “Wow.,” just misses our Chartcrush top ten at #11.

In case you’re wondering, here at Chartcrush we’ve ranked every year all the way back to 1940 using the exact same formula, and by our reckoning, three Artists have scored two or more yearly top10s in consecutive years: The Beatles, ’64 and ’65, Elvis Presley in ’56 and ’57 and Glenn Miller in the Swing Era, ’41 and ’42.

#1 Lil Nas X featuring Billy Ray Cyrus – Old Town Road (remix)

OK, well we’re down to #1. As Rolling Stone put it in its “50 Best Songs of 2019” recap at the end of the year, “A Trap-Country song featuring a prominent Nine Inch Nails sample and a Rap verse from Billy Ray Cyrus probably wasn’t on your 2019 bingo card when the year started, but it’s hard to imagine what 2019 would’ve felt like without it.”

No song embodies the genre-bending—and genre-blending—spirit of Gen-Z and 2019 like the #1 song of the year. So much so that Billboard removed it from the Country chart after it had already reached the top 20 on that chart, explaining to CBS News that it “doesn’t embrace enough elements of today’s Country music to chart in its current version.” Well that’s pretty subjective! Shouldn’t Country Radio and Country Fans be the judge of what qualifies as Country music?

Well, in the midst of the uproar over that against the backdrop of racial and cultural politics in 2019, Billy Ray Cyrus swooped in to do a remix. Billy Ray, Singer of the Country smash “Achy Breaky Heart” way back in 1992, but well-known to Millennials as Miley Cyrus’s Dad, both in real life and on Miley’s hit Disney Channel Teen sitcom, Hannah Montana before she became a full-fledged Pop Star back in the ’00s.

Well, even the remix didn’t get Billboard to reinstate it on the Country chart, but it did spend the next 19 weeks at #1 on the Hot100, shattering the previous record of 16 weeks. Here’s Rapper-Singer Lil Nas X with Billy Ray Cyrus. The #1 song of 2019 (by a country mile): “Old Town Road.”

“Hat down, cross-town, livin’ like a Rockstar; spent a lot of money on my brand new guitar.” Those lines at the beginning of Lil Nas X’s “Old Town Road” sparked a viral dance craze on TikTok: a series of demonstrative hand gestures that anyone could do.

Lil Nas X was a 19-year old College Dropout when he walked into an Atlanta recording studio for their “$20 Tuesday” special and wedded the Nine Inch Nails beat he’d purchased online for 30 bucks to his hokey, cliché’d Loner Cowboy saga, and then memed the heck out of it on social media. Next came one of the most unlikely collaborations in Pop music history with Billy Ray Cyrus’s remix and a record-shattering 19 weeks at #1. “Old Town Road.”

Bonus

So there ya have ’em: our Chartcrush Top Ten for 2019, but as I mentioned, a couple songs that made Billboard’s year-end top ten got nudged out of ours by our two year-straddlers whose chart runs got split between 2019 and 2020. Let’s take a look at those.

#16 Khalid featuring Disclosure – Talk

First up, Billboard’s #8 song of 2019 peaked at #3 and was #16 on our Chartcrush ranking. It’s by a low-key R&B Singer who started putting his stuff on Soundcloud in 2016 just out of high school, and his song “Location” racked up millions of plays. He featured on Rapper Logic’s suicide-prevention hit, “1-800” in ’17, and in ’19 this lead single from his sophomore album was ridin’ high. It’s Khalid, “Talk.”

Billboard named Khalid its top R&B Artist of 2019 on the strength of that hit, “Talk,” and five other chart entries off his sophomore album Free Spirit, which was the #1 R&B album of the year despite mixed reviews from critics. After “Talk,” though, heading into the ’20s, his chart fortunes faded.

#11 Post Malone – Wow.

And finally, the song I mentioned when we heard Post Malone’s “Sunflower” at #2 that made him the first Artist in Hot100 history to land two hits in Billboard’s year-end top ten two years in a row. It was #5 on Billboard’s ranking, #11 on ours. Appropriately titled given his achievement, “Wow.”

Post Malone’s “Wow.” Louis Bell, Posty’s Producer on that and his song we heard at #2, “Sunflower,” plus Halsey’s “Without Me” and The Jonas Brothers’ “Sucker” (our #3 and #10 songs of the year, respectively): 2019’s standout Producer. Billboard called his impact “historic.”

Posty also scored two entries in the year-end top ten albums two years in a row: His debut Stoney and beerbongs & bentleys in 2018, and beerbongs & bentleys again in 2019 along with his third album, Hollywood’s Bleeding.

Well that’s all the time we have so that’s gonna have to be a wrap. I want to thank you for listening to our 2019 edition of the Chartcrush Top Ten Countdown Show. I’ve been your host, Christopher Verdesi. Check out our website, chartcrush.com, for a written transcript and link to stream this and other Chartcrush episodes on Spotify, plus chart run line graphs and other slay extras. Every week, we count down a different year from the beginning of Billboard’s charts in the ’40s all the way up to the present, so tune in again, same station, same time, for another edition of Chartcrush.

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Welcome! This is the Chartcrush Top Ten Countdown Show and I’m your host, Christopher Verdesi. Every week on Chartcrush, we take a look back at a year in music and culture and count down the top ten songs according to our recap of the weekly Pop charts published at the time in Billboard magazine. This week on Chartcrush we are setting our sights on 1996, a transitional year across American media including music as the digital revolution continued and the internet exploded. The number of websites grew ten-fold over 1995 as Netscape Navigator battled Microsoft’s Internet Explorer in the “browser wars.”

There were nearly twice as many people on the Internet in ’96 compared to ’95, but most, still on pre-Web so-called Direct Access platforms: CompuServe, Prodigy, and the one that took a clear lead in ’96, America Online. AOL increased from five to eight million subscribers, ’95 to ’96, each paying $2.95 an hour to swap ones and zeroes on dial-up modems, plus long-distance fees if you didn’t live in a city! Good luck getting anyone on the phone in those years, unless they’d added a second landline. A flurry of new area codes had to be created to meet that demand! Of course, this was all anyone was talking about on Wall Street: the dot.com boom.

The internet, of course, a key aspect of one of the overarching themes of American life in the ’90s: the fragmentation of media into ever-smaller niche audiences and interests, at the cost of the shared experiences that hold a diverse society together across ethnicities, genders, generations and interests. Cable TV, another aspect of that: viewership and ad revenues growing, so they could do more original programming and launch new special interest channels for food, golf, science fiction, Court TV, et cetera. MSNBC and FoxNews both launched in 1996, just in time for the Whitewater scandal: President Bill and First Lady Hillary Clinton’s failed Arkansas land deal.

And of course music was splintering into increasingly siloed genres and subgenres, and with it radio. Billboard had to launch all kinds of new genre charts to keep track of it all, armed since ’91 with super-accurate point-of-sale barcode scan and airplay data. But by ’96, labels had figured out how to “game” even that system to get their songs to debut high on the chart. In the last few months of ’95 there were three #1 debuts on the Hot100 thanks to these shenanigans.

But even worse for the Hot100’s integrity: increasingly, labels weren’t releasing singles at all, which meant they couldn’t chart on the Hot100 no matter how popular they were. That was Billboard’s rule until the end of 1998 when they finally changed it to allow album cuts. Don’t look for The Rembrandts’ massive 1995 hit, “I’ll Be There for You” (the theme of NBC’s hit show Friends) on the Hot100: no single release. But radio didn’t care! The song was #1 for eight weeks on the Airplay chart, and The Rembrandts’ album nearly cracked the top 20 on the album chart, proving that fans will buy a whole album for $17 just for one song they like.

So for a few years in the late ’90s until that rule change, Billboard’s Airplay chart, not the Hot100, became the go-to Pop chart. So that’s what you’re gonna hear this hour on our 1996 edition of the Chartcrush Top Ten Countdown Show: the top ten hits of the year derived, not from the Hot100 (which we normally use), but from Billboard’s weekly 50-position Radio Songs chart.

#10 Alanis Morissette – Ironic

And that works out well for our singer at #10 because even though her songs were out as singles and on the Hot100, practically everyone who bought her music in 1996 (and millions did) got her album, making it the #1 album of the year and making her Billboard’s top Pop Artist of the year despite none of her hits making the top ten on the year-end Hot100 chart. She absolutely killed it on the Airplay chart though. At #10, here is Alanis Morissette’s “Ironic.”

So there’s a scene in the 1994 Gen-X-defining movie Reality Bites where Winona Ryder is telling Ethan Hawke about how she botched an interview for a writing job because she couldn’t define the word “irony,” and Hawke glibly says “it’s when the actual meaning is the complete opposite of the literal meaning.”

Well the debate over what exactly is “irony” was still raging when Alanis Morrissette’s “Ironic” appeared two years later and sparked a hail of criticism. The situations in the song are unfortunate, yes, but are they ironic? U.K. Independent Arts Editor Thomas Sutcliffe said no, the song should’ve been titled “It’s a Total Bummer” or “Oh Hell, That’s All I Need Right Now.” And the Washington Post’s Richard Leiby lamented that, thanks to Alanis, “ironic” was now a mere synonym for “interesting” or “coincidental.” After months of this, a fan approached Alanis in a record store and pointed out that the situations not being ironic is what makes the song ironic. Aha!

#9 Mariah Carey – Always Be My Baby

At #9 we have another female, who churned out hit after hit starting in 1990, and by ’96 was America’s top chart Diva, big enough to assert creative control over her music and move in a more R&B and Hip-Hop-influenced direction collaborating with Rapper-Producer Jermaine Dupree and arranger-pianist Manuel Seal. And the resulting album Daydream was her biggest yet. It’s Mariah Carey’s third straight #1 off Daydream and 11th overall, tying Madonna and Whitney Houston, “Always Be My Baby.”

Mariah Carey, “Always Be My Baby,” #9 on our Chartcrush Top Ten Countdown for 1996, a laid-back feel compared to her past hits, with Hip-Hop 808-style drums courtesy of co-producer Jermaine Dupree. And she doubled down on her trademark multi-layered vocals.

#8 Eric Clapton – Change the World

At #8 we have the last British Rocker from the ’60s to score a top ten hit on the Hot100. Earlier in the year, none other than The Beatles had charted their first new song since 1970 with their work-up of John Lennon’s demo, “Free as a Bird.” That got to #6 in January. Then this song from the soundtrack of the fantasy drama Phenomenon starring John Travolta resonated after four years of standoffs and incidents between feds from the Clinton administration and militia groups: Ruby Ridge, Waco Branch Davidians, Oklahoma City bombing and in ’96 the Montana Freemen standoff.

The song was first recorded and simultaneously out on Country star Wynonna Judd’s album, but this version went to #1 on the Radio Songs chart and stayed on it all the way to May of 1997 , the longest run of any 1996 song, 47 weeks. It’s Eric Clapton’s “Change the World.”

“Change the World,” Best Record and Best Song winner at the Grammys and Eric Clapton’s final hit on the Hot100, produced by ’90s R&B mogul Kenneth “Babyface” Edmonds, #8 here on our Chartcrush Countdown of the top ten hits of 1996.

Since its chart run spanned ’96 into ’97, it was in both years’ Billboard year-end Hot100 rankings. numbers 19 and 67, respectively. But doing things the Chartcrush way and factoring its full chart run reveals it to have been a much bigger hit than either of those would indicate.

#7 Tony Rich Project – Nobody Knows

Speaking of Kenneth “Babyface” Edmonds, the label he co-founded with Antonio “L.A.” Reid, LaFace Records (a mashup of their two names): the biggest thing going in ’90s R&B, launching TLC, Toni Braxton, Outkast, P!nk, Usher, many other top acts.

Our artist at #7 got his big break in the early ’90s when LaFace hired him as a staff songwriter. When he eventually got the chance to do his own album, he crafted a sophisticated Soul sound that stood out against the slick, synthesized R&B that was the default on urban radio in the mid-’90s. Maybe too much since the song only got to #11 on the R&B chart. But it crossed over and was on the Hot100 for almost all of 1996. At #7, it’s the Tony Rich Project, “Nobody Knows.”

Tony Rich Project, “Nobody Knows,” #7 on our Chartcrush Top Ten Countdown of 1996’s top Pop hits, as ranked from Billboard’s weekly published Radio Songs charts. Tony Rich’s follow-ups to “Nobody Knows” failed to crack the top 40 and he joined the ranks of ’90s one-hit wonders, a long list!

#6 Alanis Morissette – You Learn

There are two acts with two songs in our countdown and we’ve already heard a song each from both. Just as “Ironic” began descending the charts in late Spring, our #6 song rose into the top ten and was #1 for five weeks in the Summer. Here again, Alanis Morissette. Listen for the title of her blockbuster album Jagged Little Pill in the lyrics: “You Learn.”

Alanis Morissette’s “You Learn,” #6 on our Chartcrush Top Ten Countdown for 1996: her biggest Airplay hit, paired on the single it was on with a live version of her breakthrough, the blistering Rocker “You Oughtta Know,” the studio version of which has Dave Navarro and Flea from L.A.’s Red Hot Chilli Peppers on guitar and bass, respectively and topped Billboard’s Modern Rock chart for five weeks in the Summer of 1995. L.A.’s influential Alternative station KROQ set things in motion.

Hard to believe, but Alanis started out doing Dance Pop earlier in the decade, cutting two albums that critics compared to Teen icons Debbie Gibson and Tiffany. But her earlier records only came out in her native Canada, so she was mostly unknown in the States , until Jagged Little Pill repackaged the aggressive feminist Grunge Rock-adjacent Riot Grrrl sound and attitude for mainstream listeners who’d probably never heard of Seattle trailblazers like Bikini Kill or Bratmobile or Hole.

Alanis took things in a more experimental, electronic (and it turned out less successful) direction on her follow-up album in ’98, but in 2019, the Alanis “jukebox musical” Jagged Little Pill on Broadway was an instant hit and the year’s most-nominated show at the Tonys: a testament to her widespread and enduring impact.

#5 Goo Goo Dolls – Name

Alanis, of course, wasn’t the only one distilling Grunge’s angsty poses for the Pop charts. As writer Sasha Geffen put it in a piece in Consequence of Sound in 2013, “Post-Grunge was a surge of vanilla Pop hits costumed in flannel and shaggy hair” that came in the wake of Nirvana’s fame as “major labels mass-produced an Alt-Rock that gestured toward Grunge.”

Hootie & The Blowfish, Gin Blossoms and Collective Soul all had songs among the top 20 Pop Airplay hits of 1995. And then in ’96 came the breakthrough for a Buffalo, New York Indie-Punk outfit who’d been at it since 1986, hitless for their first four albums. But then they married that Grunge aesthetic to melody and Emo first-person songwriting (a no-no for Grunge bands) and rode the Post-Grunge gravy train to Pop glory. The third single from their 1995 album A Boy Named Goo, propelled onto the charts by the same L.A. radio station that first put Alanis in heavy rotation (KROQ), it’s the Goo Goo Dolls at #5: “Name.”

“Name” was mostly about Goo Goo Dolls songwriter/front man John Rzeznik’s childhood, orphaned in his teens and raised by his older sisters. But song’s title and lyric “and I won’t tell no one your name” came out of his flirtation with MTV VJ (and future FoxBusiness anchor Kennedy), who didn’t want her real name out there (shhh! It’s “Lisa Montgomery). Goo Goo Dolls next hit, “Iris” in ’98, set a record for weeks at #1 on the Airplay chart (18) that stood until The Weeknd’s “Blinding Lights” in 2020.

#4 Everything but the Girl – Missing (Todd Terry remix)

At #4 is a politically-outspoken English singer, whose obscure 1982 album with an all-girl Post-Punk group, Marine Girls, was on late Nirvana frontman Kurt Cobain’s 50 favorite albums list, so she had the respect of the aforementioned Riot Grrrls. Over the next dozen years she cranked out a steady stream of Loungy-Jazzy singles and albums as a duo with her boyfriend, and they built quite a cult following.

But not much commercial success until 1995, when Chicago House DJ/producer Todd Terry did a chilled-out remix of a track from their mostly-acoustic album Amplified Heart and it began a protracted five-month ascent into the top ten. Its five weeks as the nation’s #1 Radio Song opened countless mainstream ears to other chilled-out “Trip-Hop” electronica: Massive Attack, Portishead, Sneaker Pimps and others. #4 on our Chartcrush Top Ten Countdown for 1996, it’s Everything But the Girl, Todd Terry’s remix of “Missing.”

Probably the only act ever who got their name from a furniture store slogan: a store where a man can get everything he needs for his home: everything, that is, but the girl. “Missing,” a top ten hit for the entire first half of 1996, but not in the top ten on Billboard’s year-end Hot100 because its long climb was in Billboard’s 1995 chart year, August to December. Everything but the Girl didn’t miss a beat: out later in ’96 with a whole album of all-in Trip-Hoppy electronica that included the #1 Dance hit, “Wrong.”

#3 Mariah Carey and Boyz II Men – One Sweet Day

We’re counting down 1996’s biggest hits this week on the Chartcrush Top Ten Countdown Show, and at #3, the song that shattered the record for weeks at #1 on the Hot100 with 16. It was two of the ’90s top chart acts teaming up on the same song. How could it miss?

Nevertheless, the label, Columbia, held off releasing the single for weeks until the song cracked the top five on the Airplay chart, then flooded stores with free singles that they could sell for 49 cents, which got the song to debut at #1. Remember those label shenanigans I mentioned at the top of the show to rig the Hot100? And they didn’t even need to! It was Mariah Carey and Boyz II Men, for heaven’s sake!

No way to rig the Airplay chart besides payola, which is illegal, so it merely tied the record for weeks at #1 there with 13, but that was enough to make it the #3 song on our 1996 Airplay-chart derived ranking. Here’s “One Sweet Day.”

Mariah and Boyz II Men had been independently working on songs about lost friends when they got together to collaborate, so they decided to merge them and “One Sweet Day” was the result: #3 on our Chartcrush Top Ten Countdown. ’96 was Mariah’s fourth year in a row with a song (or songs) in the top ten of Billboard’s year-end Hot100, and Boyz II Men’s third.

“One Sweet Day” scored a Record of the Year Grammy nomination and they opened the ’96 awards performing it together, but lost to Eric Clapton’s “Change the World,” and in fact, Mariah Carey didn’t take home any awards in ’96 despite six nominations, which was quite the scandal, and she didn’t perform again at the Grammys for the next ten years.

#2 Celine Dion – Because You Loved Me

If you’re thinking that was a sign that ’90s Pop Divadom was over though, think again! Our singer at #2 scored her biggest hit yet in ’96, and it too received a Grammy nomination for Best Record, the next year in ’97. It didn’t win either, but the album it was on won two. And the song broke the Airplay weeks-at-#1 record that Mariah and Boyz had just tied, with 14 weeks, April to July.

It’s a Gospel-inspired R&B ballad by Diane Warren and produced by power-ballad maestro David Foster: a soundtrack song, from the news media romance drama Up Close & Personal starring Robert Redford and Michelle Pfeiffer. The lead single from her Diamond-certified album Falling into You, her second #1 after “The Power of Love” in 1994, it’s Celine Dion, “Because You Loved Me.”

The song that made Celine Dion a superstar, “Because You Loved Me,” #2 on our Chartcrush Top Ten Countdown of 1996’s biggest hits, the song that dislodged “One Sweet Day” from its record-breaking 16 week run at #1 on the Hot100 and snagged the record for weeks at #1 on the Adult Contemporary chart, 19. It also notched the most weeks at #1 of any 1996 song on the Airplay chart, 14. Celine’s next #1, also a soundtrack hit: 1998’s “My Heart Will Go On” from Titanic.

#1 Donna Lewis – I Love You Always Forever

So beating Mariah, Boyz and Celine in 1996: quite a tall order, but one song did, and it came out of nowhere to become the first to hit 1,000,000 spins on radio since Broadcast Data Systems began its automated monitoring in 1991. “Radio stations play it and almost overnight it’s their most requested song,” a label exec told a newspaper in ’96.

It was the first single off the first album by a previously unknown 30-something Welsh Singer-Songwriter, and she never had another top 40 hit: a true one-hit wonder, and based on nothing but the sound of the record; no special marketing or gimmicks or anything. That’s the way it’s supposed to work, right? The #1 song of 1996, Donna Lewis’s “I Love You Always Forever.”

Donna Lewis’s self-penned debut single and only hit, “I Love You Always Forever,” the #1 song of 1996 according to our recap of the year’s weekly Radio Songs charts here on the Chartcrush Top Ten Countdown Show.

Bonus

#40 Los Del Rio – The Macarena (Bayside Boys Mix)

Maybe you were expecting to hear a different song at #1. I dunno, like maybe an epic leftfield Dance craze that swept the nation?

Well if we’d based our ranking on the Hot100, “The Macarena” would’ve been #1. By the way, Donna Lewis was at #2 on the Hot100 for nine of the 14 weeks “The Macarena” was #1, and #8 on Billboard’s official published year-end Hot100. But no fewer than 39 other songs beat “The Macarena” on our ranking from the weekly Airplay chart, a crazy gap that further highlights the Hot100’s dysfunction in the late ’90s, and why we choose Airplay for our rankings in those years.

Recall that Alanis Morrissette didn’t notch any of her hits in the ’96 year-end top ten on the Hot100 because so many people bought her album and didn’t need the singles. Well, with the hit Bayside Boys remix of Spanish duo Los del Rio’s “Macarena,” it’s the reverse: it was #1 because it was only out on a single.

But being named Billboard’s #1 song of the year only added to its fame, and the same goes for four other songs that were in Billboard’s year-end top ten for ’96, but not among the top ten Airplay hits, like Tracy Chapman’s “Give Me One Reason,” Billboard‘s #6 Hot100 song of the year.

#11 Tracy Chapman – Give Me One Reason

Former Harvard Square busker Tracy Chapman’s “Give Me One Reason” just misses the top ten on our Airplay ranking we counted down this hour at #11, but it was Billboard’s #6 Hot100 song of the year.

#41 Bone Thugs-n-Harmony – Tha Crossroads

Now, Hip-Hop on the radio, even in the late ’90s, was limited to just a handful of stations in big cities, regardless of how well a track was selling or performing on the Hot100: definitely a limitation of ranking songs by Airplay. Tupac Shakur was murdered in a drive-by shooting in September ’96 after his single “How Do U Want It” paired with “California Love,” had been #1 on the Hot100 for two weeks in July. That was #17 on Billboard’s year-end Hot100, but a track by another Hip-Hop act from L.A. was #7 on that ranking, Bone Thugs-n-Harmony’s “Tha Crossroads.”

Bone Thugs-n-Harmony’s “Tha Crossroads,” a tribute to the “Godfather of Gangsta Rap,” Eazy-E, who co-founded and led Straight Outta Compton O.G.’s N.W.A. and died suddenly of AIDS in ’95: #1 on the Hot100 for eight weeks, but just #41 on our Airplay-derived ranking.

#12 Toni Braxton – You’re Makin’ Me High

Billboard’s #9 Hot100 song of the year was the first #1 by yet another ’90s Diva, Toni Braxton: “You’re Makin’ Me High.”

Toni Braxton’s “You’re Makin’ Me High,” another song that just misses our Airplay-based ranking at #12 on the year.

#19 Keith Sweat – Twisted

And at #10 on the year-end Hot100, Billboard had a Slow Jam by the Artist-Producer who crafted New Jack Swing in the late ’80s and then upped the steaminess ante in R&B when he discovered and produced Silk and their 1993 smash “Freak Me,” Keith Sweat’s “Twisted.”

Billboard‘s #10 Hot100 song, Keith Sweat’s “Twisted,” notched in at #19 on our ranking of the year’s Airplay hits.

And that’s a wrap for our 1996 edition of the Chartcrush Top Ten Countdown Show. Just like the irony in Alanis Morissette’s “Ironic,” the defining feature of ’90s Pop is that there wasn’t a defining feature!

I’ve been your host, Christopher Verdesi. If you like what you heard this hour, you’re gonna want to check out our website, chartcrush.com, where you’ll find a written transcript and link to stream the podcast version of the show,  plus our full Top100 ’96 year-end Airplay chart, interactive line graph of the actual chart runs for our top ten songs, and other fly extras. We do that for every year we count down, from the beginning of the charts in the ’40s all the way up to the present, and it’s all on the website, again, chartcrush.com. Tune in again next week, same station and time, for another year and another edition of Chartcrush.

::end transcript::

::start transcript::

Welcome to the Chartcrush Top Ten Countdown Show, I’m your host, Christopher Verdesi. Every week on Chartcrush, we do a deep dive into a year in Pop music and count down the top ten songs according to our recap of the weekly Pop charts published at the time in the music industry’s top trade publication, Billboard magazine. This week on Chartcrush, we’re turning the clock back to 1972, by all appearances, the year the ’60s counterculture took over. Fashion, advertising: loud, aggressive modernism in everything from clothing to interior design, men with longish hair, sideburns, wide ties, striped pants and shirt collars out to here, women in crazy sunglasses and day-glo prints. Even the baseball cards in 1972 had a colorful, mod design. Glam, the headline-grabbing trend in music: T-Rex, Gary Glitter, Elton John and David Bowie as his alter-ego Ziggy Stardust with their outrageous costumes.

And ’72 was a banner year for the Feminist Movement. Title IX; Ms. Magazine; tennis star Billie Jean King; Norman Lear’s All in the Family spinoff Maude premiering on CBS; Loretta Lynn, Entertainer of the Year at the Country Music Awards (the first woman). And the Supreme Court was hearing the landmark Roe v. Wade abortion case in the Fall, right as Helen Reddy’s “I Am Woman, Hear me Roar” was all over radio.

According to Forbes, there were as many as three-thousand communes in America in the early ’70s: Hippies “going up the country,” starting their own communities. But radical self-discovery, not just for Hippies. Heinz Kohut’s groundbreaking revision of Freud, The Analysis of the Self, was on nightstands across the country, and for the spiritually-oriented, yoga, transcendental meditation, and the Jesus Movement. “My Sweet Lord,” George Harrison’s ode to Krishna: #1 for four weeks in 1971 and Jesus Christ Superstar, a #1 album and then a Tony-nominated hit on Broadway.

Drug use, of course, part of the self-discovery trend, tripling between ’69 and ’73. In 1966, Stewart Brand  had had an LSD vision of a photo of Earth from space sparking a mass Ecology Movement, and once those photos existed (culminating with Apollo 17’s “Blue Marble” photo taken in 1972), Brand used them on the cover of his Whole Earth Catalog, which won a National Book Award in ’72, and no commune was without a copy.

So with all that, there was every reason to believe in ’72 that a cultural revolution had taken place in America, but on Election Night, President Nixon, feared and loathed by the counterculture (to borrow gonzo Rolling Stone writer Hunter S. Thompson’s phrase) coasted to a 49-state landslide with 60% of the popular vote against the first candidate with the full-throated support of the counterculture, antiwar Democrat Senator George McGovern. And New Yorker film critic Pauline Kael famously wondered how?!, since there was only one Nixon voter in her entire social circle.

No one was talking blue states and red states yet in 1972 of course, but the tension and distance between a so-called “silent majority” of ordinary Americans who didn’t work at (or read) The New Yorker, and an urban, insular, self-styled countercultural vanguard who did defined American society and politics for decades. But the Hot100 is all about charting popularity across all demographics and styles, so it takes a consensus to propel a song into the top ten on the year, and that’s especially interesting in years when dramatic divisions were forming and playing out, like they were in 1972.

#10 America – Horse with No Name

Now with that, at #10 on our Chartcrush Top Ten Countdown for 1972 is a Folk-Rock trio’s first hit, which Hippies thought was by another Folk-Rock Singer-Songwriter whose record it replaced at #1. But most folks just liked it for its catchy, pleasant, peaceful vibe and escapist lyrics: same song, popular for different reasons, and escapism, a telltale symptom of tense, troubled times. What could be more escapist than wandering through the desert on “A Horse with No Name.” Here’s America.

So Canadian Singer-Songwriter Neil Young’s fourth solo album Harvest had just hit the album chart in March, and its lead single “Heart of Gold” topped the Hot100 the following week. And then the week after that, America’s “Horse with No Name” replaced “Heart of Gold” at #1 and kept it at #2 for all three of the weeks it was on top. But everyone thought on first listen that “Horse with No Name” was Neil Young, even Neil’s dad! Well, America, who were a trio of sons of Air Force guys stationed in England, never quite lived that down despite scoring many more top tens over the next decade.

“Horse with No Name,” #10 on our Chartcrush Top Ten Countdown for 1972, but only #26 on Billboard’s official published year-end Hot100, because someone forgot to add the 300 bonus points it should’ve gotten for its three weeks at #1—maybe a disgruntled Neil Young fan! Despite hitting #1 for a week, “Heart of Gold” misses our Chartcrush Top Ten we’re counting down this hour at #18, but Harvest was the #1 album of the year.

#9 Billy Paul – Me and Mrs. Jones

So Soul music was in the midst of a renaissance in 1972. There was Motown, of course, but for the seventh anniversary of the 1965 Watts riots in Los Angeles, rival Stax Records organized a one-day benefit called Wattstax that drew 100,000 to see Stax artists like Isaac Hays and The Staple Singers, both of whom had just scored #1 hits.

Stax seemed well-positioned for the ’70s, but a distribution deal with Columbia in ’72 was a disaster, and our #9 song was the first #1 for a different Columbia-backed Black label that got all the attention: Philadelphia International, who were just about to unleash Disco. Written by the label’s founders and producers Kenny Gamble and Leon Huff along with lyricist Cary Gilbert, it’s about an extramarital affair from the point of view of one of the participants, months before Marvin Gaye’s “Let’s Get It On” topped the charts and announced the Sexual Revolution. It’s Billy Paul’s “Me and Mrs. Jones.”

The average age of artists scoring #1 hits spiked from 26 to 31 in 1972, and Billy Paul had a lot to do with that. He’d been at it since his first singles for an indie R&B label in 1952, but our #7 song, “Me and Mrs. Jones” was his first entry on any Billboard chart. He was 38.

#8 Joe Tex – I Gotcha

Now timing, of course, is everything in Pop music, and in the months leading up to Wattstax, records by Black artists dominated with five or more of the top ten for 14 straight weeks, mid-April straight through to the end of July. The last time anything like that had happened was the Summer of 1961, for nine weeks. “Me and Mrs. Jones” hit in December, so, not a part of that mid-’72 surge, but our #8 song was, by the first Southern Soul singer to score a top ten hit, “Hold What You’ve Got,” January ’65, before Otis Redding, Percy Sledge, Wilson Pickett or James Brown. But this was his biggest smash, and it was originally a B-side. A station in Detroit started playing it and it broke nationally. #8 on our Chartcrush Top Ten Countdown for 1972, it’s Joe Tex, “I Gotcha.”

Joe Tex, “I Gotcha,” #8 in our Chartcrush Top Ten Countdown for 1972: quite a showcase for what critic Dave Marsh described as Tex’s “raspy-voiced, jackleg preacher style,” easy to confuse with James Brown. But Joe Tex and James Brown: bitter rivals since the mid-’50s. When Tex got divorced, Brown hooked up with his ex and they even did a mawkish duet record together to rub it in! Then, when that relationship soured, Brown wrote to Tex saying he could have her back, and Tex replied with a diss track called “You Keep Her.” But even that wasn’t the end of it. Tex got himself on the bill as an opening act at one of Brown’s homecoming concerts in Georgia, and used his set to mock Brown’s whole cape-wearing schtick and ego-fueled antics. Not amused, Brown showed up later at a club where Tex was and shot up the place with a shotgun, injuring seven (Tex not among them) before fleeing in his tour bus. To keep things quiet, Brown’s people handed out $100 bills to the injured, and Brown was never even questioned about it.

#7 Sammy Davis, Jr. – The Candy Man

Well after that I feel like I should be segueing to a song by a mid-’90s rapper. Our act at #7, though, best known for his work in Vegas, and it’s a song from a 1971 movie that was an instant classic when it hit theaters. But the version in the movie sung by the actor wasn’t deemed to be hit single material, so that opened the door for someone to ride the movie’s coattails onto the Pop charts. Enter “Mr. Entertainment,” Sammy Davis, Jr. doing the song from Willy Wonka & The Chocolate Factory: “The Candy Man.”

“The Candy Man,” Sammy Davis, Jr.’ s only career #1 (for three weeks in June) and the #7 song of the year here on our Chartcrush Top Ten Countdown Show for 1972. Now the guy who wrote the lyrics to that song (and the whole rest of the Willy Wonka movie soundtrack): British actor and Pop star Anthony Newley, who thought it could be a hit and begged producers to let him overdub his own vocal for the scene, but the version by actor Aubrey Woods as Bill the Candy Store Owner stayed. Newley did his own version anyway, but it was Sammy Davis, Jr. who scored the hit.

#6 Melanie – Brand New Key

Now earlier I mentioned escapism in Pop as a symptom of troubled times, and Willy Wonka certainly qualifies. But there was also a nostalgia boom underway in ’72. Grease debuted on Broadway. George Lucas’s pre-Star Wars ’50s pastiche American Graffiti was in production (it’s double LP oldies soundtrack went triple platinum). And the pilot of the hit sitcom Happy Days was an episode of ABC’s anthology series, Love, American Style. All that reflecting a widespread feeling in America that something had gone really wrong in the late ’60s, and wouldn’t it be nice to just hit the reset button?

Our singer at #6, not a throwback herself, but she described her song as “a kind of old ’30 tune.” She was a dreamy, introverted, aspiring-actress daughter of ethnic parents in New York who wandered into the wrong office looking for a stage audition. And the cigar-chomping label head inside signed her on the spot, which eventually led to an invitation to play Woodstock. Then the song she wrote about her performance at Woodstock was her first top ten in 1970, “Lay Down (Candles in the Rain).” But over the holidays ’71 into ’72 she scored her biggest hit. It’s Melanie, “Brand New Key.”

Melanie’s “Brand New Key,” #6 on our Chartcrush Top Ten Countdown for 1972. The song came to her after she broke a month-long water fast (that’s a very Hippie thing to do) with an epic McDonalds pigout (a very Middle America thing to do), that for some reason reminded her of her childhood and her dad teaching her to roller skate.

A “Brand New Key” was what you needed to tighten the over-the-shoe metal skates that kids had in those days, but the title was kind of buried in the lyrics, so people just called it “The Rollerskate Song.” Melanie Safka remained a critics’ darling, but she disappeared from the charts after 1974. Speaking of nostalgia, her last charting record? A cover of The Shirelles’ “Will You Love Me Tomorrow.”

#5 Johnny Nash – I Can See Clearly Now

And also speaking of nostalgia, lots of ’50s and early ’60s stars made chart comebacks in the early ’70s and our singer at #5 is technically one of them, having scored his first hits in the ’50s as a Johnny Mathis-style crooner. But when he re-emerged he wasn’t crooning anymore. After hanging out with Reggae legends Bob Marley and Peter Tosh in Jamaica in the mid-60s, his Rocksteady-influenced “Hold Me Tight” became the first proper Reggae hit on the Hot100 in 1968. And then this was #1 for all of November 1972: not an explicitly religious song, but resonated with the aforementioned Jesus movement, and spawned dozens of covers before becoming a window cleaner jingle in the ’80s. It’s Johnny Nash “I Can See Clearly Now.”

“I Can See Clearly Now,” #5 on our Chartcrush Top Ten Countdown for 1972, a Johnny Nash original. For his follow-up he released his cover of Bob Marley’s “Stir It Up,” which became the first hit version of a Bob Marley song outside of Jamaica.

#4 Nilsson – Without You

At #4, the first-ever power ballad on the charts, originally by the Welsh rock band Badfinger, who didn’t think it was anything special and never released it as a single. But American singer Harry Nilsson thought it was pretty special when he heard it at a party, and his version topped the Hot100 for four weeks, February into March: Nilsson’s first and only career #1 hit: “Without You.”

“Without You,” #4 as we count down the top ten hits of 1972 here on this week’s Chartcrush Top Ten Countdown Show. Before ’72, Harry Nilsson: best known for writing Three Dog Night’s 1969 hit, “One,” for his version of Fred Neil’s “Everybody’s Talkin'” from the 1969 movie Midnight Cowboy and for never ever ever performing live, which continued, at least for “Without You,” all the way ’til 1992: when his longtime buddy Ringo Starr was at Caesar’s Palace in Vegas with His All-Starr Band, and brought him out to sing it for the first time in front of an audience. Harry Nilsson died of a heart attack just a few months after that. Mariah Carey released her version of “Without You” in tribute, and that was a #3 hit for Mariah in 1994.

#3 Don McLean – American Pie

And speaking of Ringo Starr, in 1968, his band The Beatles—wise guys that they were—made their non-album single “Hey Jude” the maximum possible length that a song could be to fit on one side of a seven-inch vinyl single, which turned out to be seven minutes, 11 seconds. Well, clocking in at over eight and a half minutes, our song at #3 broke that record and remained the longest song to hit #1 in Hot100 history for 50 years, until Taylor Swift’s ten-plus minute version of her song “All Too Well” in 2021. But in the vinyl era, you had to split songs longer that 7:11 into two parts for single releases if you didn’t want to do a single edit. And there were lots of those in the early ’70s, including our song at #3, but listeners complained when Pop radio played just the A-side: Part One, so they played the whole thing and Billboard never specified “Part One” like it did for most songs released like that. So there it was: an eight-and-a-half minute #1 hit: #1 for four weeks, replacing Melanie’s “Brand New Key” in January, and our #3 song. It’s Don McLean’s, “American Pie.”

“American Pie,” the #3 song on our Chartcrush countdown of the top ten hits of 1972. “The day the music died,” of course: February 3, 1959: the plane crash in Iowa that killed rockers Buddy Holly, Richie Valens and J.P. “The Big Bopper” Richardson. Beyond that though, as the Washington Post’s Justin Moyer put it, the meaning of the song proved elusive even for a generation used to parsing inscrutable Bob Dylan and Beatles lyrics. And for 50 years, McLean swatted away questions about the song’s images and symbols with “It means I don’t ever have to work again.” Indeed! His manuscript and notes fetched $1.2 million at auction in 2015.

#2 Gilbert O’Sullivan – Alone Again (Naturally)

At #2, another artist new to the charts. An Irish singer-songwriter who changed his first name from Ray to Gilbert, but kept his last name to form a clever play on the famous operetta duo Gilbert & Sullivan. And he donned a pudding basin haircut, cloth cap and shorts inspired by 1920s Buster Keaton and Charlie Chaplin silent films and rode the early ’70s nostalgia bandwagon to chart glory. Here is Gilbert O’Sullivan: “Alone Again (Naturally).”

There is, of course, a long tradition of depressing tragedy songs in Pop, but at first listen, you’d never include 1972’s #2 song we just heard, Gilbert O’Sullivan’s, “Alone Again (Naturally),” on that list, because it sounds more like a shampoo jingle than the suicidal ruminations of a jilted groom. It resurfaced in 1991, sampled on an album cut by Rapper Biz Markie, and a landmark court judgement that year against Markie put an end to the “anything goes” era of Hip-Hop sampling.

#1 Roberta Flack – The First Time Ever I Saw Your Face

And we’re down to #1 in our Chartcrush Top Ten countdown for 1972, by a singer discovered in 1968 playing piano and singing in Mr. Henry’s, a pub-slash-restaurant on Capitol Hill in DC. Well, Atlantic Records stuck with her through four albums even though sales were tepid and there were no hit singles. And it paid off in 1971 when Clint Eastwood used a cut from her first album to score a love scene in his directorial debut, the psychological thriller Play Misty for Me. Atlantic put out a single edit and it shot to #1 for 6 weeks in April and May. It’s Roberta Flack’s big breakthrough: the #1 song of 1972, “The First Time Ever I Saw Your Face.”

Roberta Flack, 1972’s #1 song and Grammy winner for Record and Song of the Year, “The First Time Ever I Saw Your Face,” written by Scottish folkie Ewan MacColl in the ’50s for his lover and future wife Peggy Seeger (half-sister of Pete Seeger), when challenged to write a song that wasn’t about his communist politics. But Flack knew it from a version by the Black Gospel duo Joe & Eddie. She slowed it down, switched up the melody and phrasing a little and made it her own. In ’73, she returned to the top of the charts with “Killing Me Softly with His Song” and was a fixture on Pop and R&B radio all the way into the ’80s.

Bonus

And that’s our Chartcrush Top Ten countdown for 1972. Now over at Billboard, they do their year-end rankings based on a discrete chart year, and for ’72, that was December 4, 1971 to November 18, 1972. Chart activity outside that window? Ignored for their ’72 year-end rankings. Billy Paul’s “Me and Mrs. Jones” (which we heard at #9) was so late in ’72 that it got pushed into Billboard’s 1973 chart year (Billboard’s #15 year-end song of 1973); and our #5 song, Johnny Nash’s “I Can See Clearly Now” was #1 the week Billboard’s 1972 chart year ended, so with its chart run split between ’72 and ’73, it only placed #47 on Billboard’s 1972 year-end chart. America’s “Horse with No Name,” I mentioned when we heard it at #10: down at #26 on Billboard‘s year-end chart because they forgot to give it the 100 bonus ranking points it should’ve gotten for each of its three weeks at #1 in the Spring. So that’s three songs that made our Chartcrush Top Ten for 1972 that didn’t make Billboard’s. Which means that three songs made Billboard’s 1972 year-end ranking, but not ours. Well, let’s review.

#25 Wayne Newton – Daddy Don’t You Walk So Fast

At #10, Billboard had another star besides Sammy Davis Jr. whose name was gracing marquees in America’s oasis for the over-30 set in the early ’70s, Las Vegas.

That’s Wayne Newton with Billboard’s #10 hit of 1972, “Daddy Don’t You Walk So Fast.” It’s #25 on our Chartcrush ranking.

#12 Mac Davis – Baby Don’t Get Hooked on Me

At #8, Billboard had the guy who wrote Elvis Presley’s 1969 comeback hit “In the Ghetto,” trying his hand at being a Singer-Songwriter.

Mac Davis’s “Baby Don’t Get Hooked on Me” just misses our Chartcrush top ten for 1972 at #12.

#14 Bill Withers – Lean on Me

And finally, at #7 Billboard had the first and only career #1 by a Singer-Songwriter who won a Grammy for this song, but in 1987!

Bill Withers’ “Lean on Me” was #14 on our Chartcrush ranking for 1972; the second of his three top ten hits in his career. Club Nouveau, nominated for a Best R&B Performance Grammy for their drum machine and synth era update of “Lean on Me” in 1987, for which Bill Withers was also nominated as the songwriter, and won!

And that’s going to have to wrap things up for our 1972 edition of The Chartcrush Top Ten Countdown Show. I’ve been your host, Christopher Verdesi. Thanks for listening! If you like what you heard, check out our website, chartcrush.com, where you’ll find written transcripts links to stream all our Chartcrush countdown shows on Spotify, plus full top 100 charts, chart run line graphs and other funky extras. Every week, we count down a different year from the beginning ofthe charts in the 1940s all the way up to the present, so tune again, same station, same time, for another edition of Chartcrush.

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::start transcript::

Welcome to the Chartcrush Top Ten Countdown Show, I’m your host, Christopher Verdesi. Every week on Chartcrush, we do a deep dive into a year in Pop music and count down the top ten songs according to our recap of the weekly Pop charts published at the time in the music industry’s top trade publication, Billboard magazine. This week on Chartcrush, we’re turning the clock back to 1945, a year of celebration in America as World War 2 ended!

Germany surrendered on V-E Day, May 8, and Japan three months later on V-J Day, August 14. President Franklin Roosevelt didn’t live to see either of those days; he died in office on April 12 having just begun his fourth term as President.

But the tide turned after another letter-named day, D-Day, the Allied invasion of Nazi-occupied France on June 6, 1944, and towards the end of ’44 while Roosevelt was still alive, Americans were finally giving themselves permission to imagine a brighter Postwar world after years of nail-biting and sacrifice, scrap drives, wage and price controls, rationing of everything from coffee and sugar to gas and tires, and of course loved ones gone to war, and more than 400,000 of them never coming back.

The change on the Pop charts was striking. Defiant fight songs and lonely, yearning, anxious ballads yielded to brighter, dreamier, more upbeat and optimistic songs as the mood of the country changed.

Late ’44 also saw the end of the “Petrillo Ban,” a strike against record labels that barred players from making records for over two years right at the height of the Big Band era. James C. Petrillo, the head of the American Federation of Musicians Union. Gigs was how musicians got paid, and with a half a million nickel-a-play jukeboxes operating and three-quarters of all the disks made going in them, Petrillo thought records were making live entertainment obsolete. So the strike was to get Musicians a cut of record sales and airplay like Songwriters got, beyond the “one-and-done” fee they collected for the recording session.

There was nothing Petrillo and the AFM could do about urban blackout restrictions, players getting drafted, gas and tire rationing and other difficulties stemming from the war effort. And on top of all that, in the Spring of ’44 Congress slapped a 40% federal cabaret tax on the receipts of any establishment that permitted dancing, so “no dancing allowed” signs suddenly appeared in taverns, restaurants, hotels and even nonprofit teen clubs coast-to-coast. The tax was later reduced, but it wasn’t repealed until the mid-’60s!

All things considered, records, jukeboxes and performance royalties were really the least of working Musicians’ woes during the war. But “Diskers” (as Billboard affectionately called record labels) took the hit. And one by one they agreed to pay performance royalties, with the two holdouts, RCA and Columbia, the biggest, finally blinking in the Fall of ’44. That after over two years having to reissue old stuff or record their Stars a capella during the ban, which didn’t apply to Vocalists because they had a different union.

So the war was ending, four million GIs overseas were coming home, recording studios were humming and shellac 78s were tumbling from the presses again. And Americans were in the mood to celebrate.

#10 Carmen Cavallaro and His Orchestra – Chopin’s Polonaise

At #10 kicking off the countdown is America’s de facto victory theme, which peaked on the charts the week the B-29 bomber Enola Gay, named after the pilot’s mother, dropped atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki and Japan surrendered.

It’s a reinterpretation of a classical piece by a Polish Composer. Hitler’s invasion of Poland in 1939, of course, the event that triggered the war in Europe a little over two years before Pearl Harbor got the U.S. involved. And not only that, but it’s an example of a distinctly Polish form, the Polonaise, a walking dance that to this day opens everything from official state balls to senior proms in Poland.

From its first publication in 1843, people had been describing Frederic Chopin’s “Polonaise in A-flat major” as heroic, and a century later, this version had Americans humming it all year. Here’s “The Poet of the Piano,” Carmen Cavallaro and his band with “Chopin’s Polonaise.”

Classically-trained pianist Carmen Cavallaro with the #10 song on our Chartcrush Top Ten Countdown of 1945’s biggest hits. While Cavallaro toured Europe as a Teen Piano Prodigy in the early ’30s, back in the U.S., Eddy Duchin became the first successful Pianist-Bandleader, even though he had no formal training and was only at best an average player. Despite that, or more likely because of it, Cavallaro was inspired to switch to Pop, and after a few years as a featured Soloist he started his own Band, which was successful enough to land him a string of movie roles.

After “Polonaise” and the War, he rated double billing on records with star Crooners like Frank Sinatra and Bing Crosby, and in 1956 he was the ghost Pianist behind actor Tyrone Power in the 1956 biopic The Eddy Duchin Story.

#9 Johnny Mercer, Jo Stafford and The Pied Pipers – Candy

Next at #9 we have the first of two records in our 1945 top ten by an artist who was also a Label Executive, having just co-founded the first West-Coast record label, Capitol Records. He was also the A&R head and a massively successful Lyricist for stage, screen and the Pop charts; and then in ’45, he became one of Capitol’s most successful artists himself.

This was his second hit in the Spring after “Ac-Cent-Tchu-Ate the Positive” in late-Winter. It’s Johnny Mercer with Capitol’s house band led by Paul Weston along with Weston’s future wife Jo Stafford, who sings lead on one of the verses, and backing vocals by the Vocal Group Stafford had just left to go solo, The Pied Pipers. It’s “Candy.”

Johnny Mercer, Jo Stafford & The Pied Pipers, “Candy,” the #9 song of 1945 according to our exclusive Chartcrush ranking, and the first credit on a #1 hit for Jo Stafford, who went on to be one of the most successful Chart Acts of the Pop Singer era with “You Belong to Me” in 1952, then “Make Love to Me!” in ’54.

The Pied Pipers scored a #1 hit for Capitol in 1945 too, “Dream,” with June Hutton replacing Jo Stafford in the group. That was #14 on our Chartcrush ranking.

#8 Swing and Sway with Sammy Kaye (vocal, Nancy Norman and Billy Williams) – Chickery Chick

So at #10 we heard Carmen Cavallaro tackling one of the most difficult piano pieces, Chopin’s “Polonaise in A-flat major.” At #8, diminutive Singer Nancy Norman tackling what’s gotta be one of the most difficult-to-sing lyrics!

Norman was just 17, 4’11” and under 100 lbs. when Sammy Kaye’s band, Swing and Sway with Sammy Kaye, held a contest for Girl Singers in L.A. Guy Singers, getting drafted all over the place in 1942, the year after Pearl Harbor. Norman auditioned, won, and just like that, was the only Female Singer for the next four years in the most successful charting Band of the ’40s decade.

Now despite Kaye’s tag line, there wasn’t a whole lot of Swing going on in Swing and Sway with Sammy Kaye’s sound. They were a “Sweet Band” that played Pop, not Jazz. And this record, considered a Novelty even in 1945, was one of their biggest hits. Here’s “Chickery Chick.”

“Chickery Chick:” Swing and Sway with Sammy Kaye with Singers Nancy Norman and future Country Singer with the Pecos River Rogues, Billy Williams. That was the first version of “Chickery Chick” to chart, but three others followed including a Jazzier rendition by Drummer-Bandleader Gene Krupa featuring singer Anita O’Day, which is what you just heard if you’re listening on Spotify. The Sammy Kaye version with Nancy Norman, not available on the Spotify platform so we couldn’t include it in our podcast version of the show, but if you’re listening on the radio you got Sammy Kaye’s hit version.

Still another “Chickery Chick” that charted in ’45 was by Singer Evelyn Knight, and I mention that because she scored a #1 hit a few years later singing another avian song “A Little Bird Told Me.” Since the ’40s, you probably won’t be surprised to learn, “Chickery Chick” has become a Standard on Kids records, with versions by The Three Stooges, Tiny Tim and Joanie Bartels.

#7 Les Brown and His Orchestra (vocal, Doris Day) – My Dreams Are Getting Better All the Time

Well we’re counting down the biggest hits of 1945 here on this week’s edition of the Chartcrush Top Ten Countdown Show, and at #7 is the other Act besides Johnny Mercer with two hits in our top 10. Like Sammy Kaye with Nancy Norman, it’s a Band-featuring-Girl-Singer configuration. But whereas Nancy Norman left show biz soon after “Chickery Chick” hit aged 21 to settle down and raise a family, this Girl Singer became one of the biggest stars in America in the ’50s, ’60s and beyond, on records, on the big screen, on TV, you name it.

But few had heard of her, or the Band Leader for that matter, before this record debuted at #2 on the Best Sellers chart in March of ’45, and by the end of April, was #1 on all three of Billboard’s Pop charts: Bestsellers, DJ Airplay and Jukeboxes. The #1 song the week the Nazis surrendered, it’s Les Brown and His Band of Renown with career-making discovery Doris Day, “My Dreams Are Getting Better All the Time.”

Now if Billboard had had a Top New Artist award in 1945, it would’ve gone to Les Brown and His Band of Renown with Doris Day. That was their first #1 record, “My Dreams Are Getting Better All the Time” at #7. We’ll hear the other one later in our Chartcrush Top Ten Countdown for 1945.

Day first sang with the Les Brown band in 1940 when she was just 17, but left to marry and have a son. The marriage didn’t work out, though, and in 1943, Brown wanted her back so bad that he was willing to foot the bill for her Mom and baby boy to accompany her everywhere they needed to be.

#6 Johnny Mercer and The Pied Pipers – On the Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fe

Next up, the bigger of Johnny Mercer’s two hits as a recording artist in our 1945 countdown. I mentioned when we heard “Candy” at #9 that Mercer’s bread and butter was writing song lyrics for movies. That’s why he was based in Hollywood and started Capitol Records there.

By 1945, he already had nine Best Song Oscar nominations under his belt, on his way to 19 during his career, but his first win was our #6 song. And it was the first year the Academy had its new rule that reduced the number of officially nominated songs to typically five. Before that it could be any number. And he beat out names like Irving Berlin, Jack Brooks, Mack Gordon, Oscar Hammerstein II. That’s your entire Great American Songbook right there, pretty much!

Sung by Judy Garland in the movie it was in, The Harvey Girls, but the hit record was, of course, by Mercer himself, again with the Paul Weston Band and The Pied Pipers: “On the Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fe.”

The Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fe railroad operated from 1859 until it merged with the Burlington Northern in 1996. Johnny Mercer saw the name while sitting on a train and was struck by the rhythm of the words.

He notched several more hits through the rest of the ’40s as a Recording Act, including his mischievous “Personality,” #1 on both the Sales and Airplay charts in 1946. And in 1952 his adaptation of “The Glow Worm” got The Mills Brothers their final #1 hit.

For the rest of the ’50s he mostly stuck to his day job, lyrics for movie and show tunes, which got him back-to-back Best Original Song Oscars in ’61 and ’62 for “Moon River” from Breakfast at Tiffany’s, and the title song to Days of Wine and Roses, both co-written with Henry Mancini 15 years after his first win for the song we just heard at #6: “On the Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fe.”

#5 The Andrews Sisters – Rum and Coca-Cola

So maybe by now you’re noticing a theme: seven of the ten songs in our Chartcrush Top Ten countdown for 1945: either by or featuring Female Singers or singing Groups. And next up is another.

Caribbean music, of course, a wellspring of big U.S. Pop hits over the years. Well, it all started with this next tune at #5, which, in rather jarring fashion, opened up the Pop charts not just for Caribbean sounds, but for international songs in general.

As Radio Personality John Gilliland pointed out in his early ’70s radio show Pop Chronicles, for Servicemen returning from the War, “Kalamazoo was like dullsville after Paris or London or Trinidad. The paying customers weren’t calling for ‘Moonlight Cocktails’ much anymore” (“(I’ve Got a Gal in) Kalamazoo” and “Moonlight Cocktail,” both pre-War Glenn Miller hits). “The trend was toward the harder stuff.”

Indeed. And this song was the #5 song of the year despite being widely banned on radio. See if you can guess why. It’s the Andrews Sisters’ “Rum and Coca-Cola.”

Andrews Sisters, “Rum and Coca-Cola,” #5. Recorded in one take in the last ten minutes of a session without a written arrangement, and then banned by some radio stations, for the lyric “mother and daughter working for the Yankee dollar” of course, but by other stations for advertising a brand, “Coca-Cola,” and by still others for mentioning alcohol.

And then there was a lawsuit over authorship. Future Dick Van Dyke Show Actor Morey Amsterdam had heard the song while in Trinidad on a USO tour and published it under his own name, so after it was a hit, the real Author, Trinidadian Musician Lord Invader, sued and was awarded $150,000 in royalties—a tidy sum in 1940s Yankee dollars.

#4 Vaughn Monroe and His Orchestra (vocal, Vaughn Monroe) – There! I’ve Said It Again

You are listening to The Chartcrush Top Ten Countdown Show, and we’re counting down the top hits of 1945 this week. I’m your host, Christopher Verdesi. If you like what you’re hearing, visit our website, chartcrush.com, for a written transcript, plus our full 1945 Top 100 chart and other interactive extras and goodies, plus links to hear all our episodes on Spotify!

Now as I mentioned at the top of the show, RCA-Victor: one of the last labels to settle with Petrillo and the American Federation of Musicians at the end of 1944, allowing them to cut records again with Union Musicians. Well, just as you’d expect after a two-year ban, there was a frenzy of recording and releases by music’s biggest names, and for Victor, that was a who’s who of Big Bands.

America’s top Bandleader, Glenn Miller, was on Victor but had just disappeared over the English Channel on a flight to newly-liberated Paris at the end of ’44 after famously signing up at the peak of his fame in ’42 to lead the Army Air Forces Band. But Tommy Dorsey, Benny Goodman, Duke Ellington, Lionel Hampton, and Swing and Sway with Sammy Kaye who we just heard at #8: all still very much in the game, and all on Victor. And the new Band records did okay in ’45, but the biggest hits after the ban were by Solo Singers.

Now the guy with the #4 song of the year was on Victor and technically a Bandleader, but since he also sang on his records, and it was his deep baritone voice more than anything that made them hits, he was kind of a missing link between the Big Band and Pop Singer eras. And as such, he remained successful through the ’40s and into the ’50s. It’s Vaughn Monroe with “There! I’ve Said It Again.”

Vaughn Monroe’s first chart topper, “There! I’ve Said It Again,” #4 on our Chartcrush Top Ten Countdown for 1945. Brill Building Teen Idol Bobby Vinton took his remake of that song to #1 in early 1964: the last #1 before Beatlemania. But back in ’45, Monroe followed it up with a blockbuster holiday hit: a then-brand new song by ace Songwriters Sammy Cahn and Jule Steyn, “Let It Snow! Let It Snow! Let It Show!” Crooner Dean Martin’s version recorded in the ’60s, more familiar in the streaming era, but Monroe’s original hit version was #1 for multiple weeks.

He stayed hot with “I Wish I Didn’t Love You So” and “Ballerina” in ’47 and ’48, but in 1949, his finest moment: the game-changing #1 record that got the whole biz thinking Country-Western: “Ghost Riders in the Sky.”

#3 Perry Como – Till the End of Time

Now at #10, we heard Carmen Cavallaro’s Big Band Instrumental of “Chopin’s Polonaise,” which I highlighted as America’s de facto World War 2 victory theme. But what I didn’t mention, because I was saving it for our #3 song, is that Lyricist Buddy Kaye wrote words to it and published it as a Pop song. And three versions hit the charts simultaneously, as happened often in the ’40s, but one stood out and became the first of an amazing 14 #1 hits between 1945 and1958 for America’s all-time top charting Crooner, Perry Como. At #3, “Till the End of Time.”

Frank Sinatra, of course, the focus of the early ’40s Crooner craze often mentioned as a precursor to Elvis and Beatlemania in the ’50s and ’60s. Sinatra’s biggest hit in ’45, “Saturday Night (Is the Loneliest Night in the Week),” notches in at #34 on our ranking. But there was room for more than one Crooner, and Teen Bobbysoxers and their Swooner Clubs also swooned for Perry Como.

Besides being 1945’s third biggest hit, Como’s “Till the End of Time,” along with the instrumental “Chopin’s Polonaise” theme it’s based on, was used throughout the 1946 movie with the same title starring Dorothy McGuire, Guy Madison and Robert Mitchum, about War vets re-adjusting to civilian life.

With the Army alone discharging 1.2 million soldiers every month in late ’45, returning GIs were on everyone’s minds, and another movie out a few months later was an even bigger box office hit and went on to win nine Oscars including Best Picture, That was The Best Years of Our Lives with Myrna Loy and Frederic March.

#2 Les Brown and His Orchestra (vocal, Doris Day) – Sentimental Journey

But when it comes to GIs returning from World War 2, the song that stands above and beyond as their unofficial anthem and homecoming song is the #2 song in our Chartcrush Top Ten Countdown for 1945. Its run from March to September encompassed both V-E and V-J days, and the Band-Singer pairing had just debuted with their first big hit, our #7 song, “My Dreams Are Getting Better All the Time.” Here again: Les Brown and His Band of Renown with Doris Day: one for the ages, “Sentimental Journey.”

Les Brown and His Band of Renown with Doris Day, “Sentimental Journey.” Brown was a co-writer on the song and they’d been performing it for months, but couldn’t record it ’til their label, Columbia, settled with Petrillo and the musicians union in late 1944. And as Brown told it, “The timing was good because it looked like the War was won, and it just seemed to be a great homecoming song for all the troops.”

After ’45, Crooners and Pop Singers mostly replaced Bands at the top of the charts, but Doris Day continued as Brown’s featured Girl Singer for two more years, putting out records, touring extensively with her mother and young son in tow, and appearing on Bob Hope’s radio show.

In ’48, though, her first movie role fell into her lap, Romance on the High Seas. In the film she sang the song “It’s Magic,” which became her first solo hit, and from there she became one of the biggest stars of the ’50s repeating the formula with “Secret Love” from Calamity Jane in 1953, “Que Sera, Sera” from Hitchcock’s The Man Who Knew Too Much in 1956, and many others.

Les Brown stayed with Bob Hope for the next 50 years, and continued leading the Band of Renown doing upwards of 60 dates a year until his death in 2001. At which point his son, Les Brown, Jr. took over and kept it going as an attraction in Branson, Missouri until his death at 82 in 2023. Guinness has it as the longest-lasting musical organization in Pop history.

#1 Bing Crosby and The Andrews Sisters – Don’t Fence Me In

So the AFM Recording Ban wasn’t lifted for Columbia and RCA-Victor ’til the end of 1944, but other labels agreed to Petrillo’s demands earlier. Decca was first in September of ’43, and then Capitol a month later. Neither had deep back catalogs or a vault of unreleased stuff to keep them going through the strike, so they didn’t have much of a choice. Capitol had only just released its first record a month before the ban went into effect!

But with Columbia and Victor unable to record new material, settling early with the union gave labels like Decca and Capitol a clear shot at the charts, and the #1 song in our 1945 Chartcrush Top Ten Countdown is a collaboration between Decca’s two top Acts that came out just as Victor and Columbia were ramping back up again in late 1944. And it was #1 on at least one of Billboard’s Pop charts (Sales, Airplay and Jukeboxes) for a solid 13 weeks, mid-December ’44 to March ’45.

The pairing produced four chart hits for Decca in ’45, and separately they notched another 13, one of which we’ve already heard: The Andrews Sisters “Rum and Coca Cola” at #5. Here are Bing Crosby and The Andrews Sisters doing Cole Porter’s “Don’t Fence Me In.”

#1 on our Chartcrush Top Ten Countdown of 1945’s biggest hits, “Don’t Fence Me In,” supposedly recorded in a half hour, and neither Bing Crosby nor The Andrews Sisters had ever seen or heard the song before. How that happens, I don’t know, but if it’s true, the phrase “consummate professionals” comes to mind! Recall that The Andrews Sisters also recorded our #5 song “Rum and Coca Cola” in one take with 10 minutes of studio time. Pretty incredible!

Crosby first teamed up with the trio, Laverne, Maxine and Patty Andrews, in 1939 when they were newcomers, but by then he’d already been scoring hits for over a decade. Three of 1944’s top ten best-sellers were Bing Crosby records, and then in the mid-to-late-’40s, he was the #1 box office attraction for five straight years and still charting top10 hits.

As Johnny Mercer put it in an interview: “We were all born from Crosby. He was not only a Star as a Singer; he was a Star Leading Man, and nobody really beat him at it until our skinny friend” (referring to Frank Sinatra) “came along. And it took him a few years to do it.”

And there you have ’em: the top ten songs of 1945 according to our exclusive Chartcrush ranking. Now ranking the songs for years before Billboard debuted the Hot100 in 1958 is a bit tricky. As I’ve been saying throughout the show, there were three separate survey-based Pop charts before the Hot100: Best Sellers in Stores, Most Played by DJs, and Most Played on Jukeboxes. So what we do to rank the songs is first combine the data from all three, weighing each equally, into a single weekly chart. And then, we apply the same exact ranking mojo as for Hot100 years.

Honorable Mention: #12 Harry James & His Orchestra (vocal, Kitty Kallen) – It’s Been a Long, Long Time

Now there’s one Act who didn’t land a song in our top 10 for 1945, but had two near misses at numbers 12 and 13. We think that rates a special nod in our bonus segment in the time we have left. One of the songs was almost as iconic an end-of-War/soldiers-coming-home theme as “Sentimental Journey,” so between the two, we’re gonna go with that. It’s Trumpeter-Bandleader Harry James and Orchestra with his Girl Singer Kitty Kallen, “It’s Been a Long, Long Time.”

Trumpet playing Big Band leader Harry James’s final #1 hit, “It’s Been a Long, Long Time,” vocal by Kitty Kallen and that alto sax solo by Willie Smith, our #12 song and honorable mention here in our 1945 edition of the Chartcrush Top Ten Countdown Show.

Sammy Cahn and Jule Steyn wrote the song for lovers reuniting after the War, and two of the other charting versions by Bandleaders Charlie Spivak and Stan Kenton also featured Girl Singers: Irene Day and June Christy, respectively. But interestingly, Bing Crosby’s super-laid-back version with Les Paul on guitar interpreted the song from the Male returning Soldier’s point of view, and did almost as well as James and Kallen’s we just heard: #16 on our ranking.

James and Kallen’s other big hit in 1945: “I’m Beginning to See the Light.” That was #1 on the DJ chart for two weeks in April ’45 and #13 on our ranking.

Kitty Kallen struggled on the charts for years after 1945, but spectacularly re-emerged as the headliner on the #1 song of 1954, “Little Things Mean a Lot.”

And that’s gonna have to do it for our 1945 edition of the Chartcrush Top Ten Countdown Show. I’ve been your host, Christopher Verdesi, and I want to thank you for listening. Again, check out our website, chartcrush.com, for written transcripts and streaming links for this and other Chartcrush Countdowns, plus chart run line graphs and other dandy extras. We count down a different year every week on this show, from the dawn of the Billboard Pop charts in the early 1940s all the way up to the present, so tune in again next week, same station, same time, for another edition of Chartcrush.

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Welcome to the Chartcrush Top Ten Countdown Show. I’m your host, Christopher Verdesi. Each week on Chartcrush, we take a look back at a year in music and culture and count down the top ten songs according to our recap of the weekly Pop charts published at the time in the music industry’s top trade mag and chart authority, Billboard magazine.

This week on Chartcrush we are setting our sights on 2008, a year of change. And hope. “Hope and change” (airquotes). And “Yes We Can,” as Barack Obama, freshman Senator from Illinois, squared off against, first Hillary Clinton to become the first Black Presidential candidate to win a major party nomination and then against (airquotes) “maverick” Arizona senator John McCain and (airquotes) “Mama Grizzly” Alaska governor Sarah Palin, and won!

And pop culture, more specifically Hip-Hop culture, had had everything to do with that: why Obama was (airquotes) “the Hip-Hop President.” Hip-Hop had ruled the Pop charts for six years, so when Vibe (Hip-Hop’s top lifestyle mag) dubbed Obama “B-Rock” in a September ’07 cover story alongside the headline “It’s Obama Time,” that carried a lot of weight. Over half of Obama’s 65 million voters in ’08 were in Hip-Hop’s demographic: Black, Hispanic or under 30.

“Politics is downstream of culture,” conservative online news entrepreneur Andrew Brietbart had observed around the same time in a challenge to the Bush administration’s aloofness to culture and social issues. It was an edgy thing to say in Republican circles, but Democrats had been banking on it at least since “Rock the Vote” in ’92, the year Bill Clinton beat W’s dad playing his sax on Aresnio Hall’s late-night show and weaponizing Fleetwood Mac’s “Don’t Stop Thinking About Tomorrow” to rally Boomers.

And by 2004, Hip-Hop was fully mobilized. Rapper and Bad Boy Records mogul P. Diddy started up Citizen Change and enlisted Mary J. Blige, Mariah Carey, 50 Cent and others. “Vote or Die!,” the slogan on t-shirts and PSAs all over urban radio. MTV rolled out “Choose or Lose,” and Def Jam mogul Russell Simmons’s Hip-Hop Summit Action Network was up and running with civil rights leader Benjamin Chavis Muhammad. That’s a lot of pop culture muscle!

W. did get win his second term vs. stiff New Englander John Kerry, but only barely, and four million new youth voters turned out. So by ’08, with all that in place and now (unlike ’04), a young, stylish, culture-savvy community organizer candidate in Barack Obama, who identified as African-American and had legions of young “street team” volunteers knocking doors, “Netroots Nation,” and Hip-Hop icon Jay-Z (who’d just “put a ring on it” with “Single Lady” Beyonce) promoting Obama on tour and at campaign events proclaiming that “Black people are no longer left out of the American Dream,” youth turnout skyrocketed again in ’08: over 50% the only time in the ’00s decade.

Not surprisingly, ’08, yet another dominant year for Hip-Hop on the charts as we will hear. But first, kicking off the countdown, it was also a year of epic female chart chart debuts! We’re talking Adele, Lady Gaga, Taylor Swift, Miley Cyrus…

#10 Katy Perry – Hot n Cold

…and our singer at #10: a bridge between the Pop Rock sound Kelly Clarkson took 6X platinum with her 2004 album Breakaway, and the so-called “New Pop” that ruled for five years starting in ’09 as the Black-Eyed Peas, Lady Gaga and Electronic Dance Music (“EDM”) triumphed. This was the second single from her breakout album One of the Boys. It’s Katy Perry, “Hot n Cold.”

Katy Perry, “Hot n Cold,” #10 on our Chartcrush Top Ten Countdown for 2008. In ’04, Kelly Clarkson wouldn’t have dreamed of writing or singing an emasculating diss line like “you change your mind like a girl changes clothes,” but three years is an eternity, and mid-’00s reality TV (Real Housewives, The Simple Life, MTV’s The Hills) had fleshed out a whole new palette of scrappy, potty-mouthed, angsty poses for female Pop stars in the Emo ’00s.

P!nk gets the credit for diving in first (her ’06 set, I’m Not Dead), but more as an amused and annoyed observer on her hits “Who Knew” and “U + Ur Hand.” Katy Perry, on the other hand, struck and embodied the poses on the album that made her a star, ’08’s One of the Boys: a display of Pop shape-shifting not seen since peak-Madonna.

“Hot N Cold” was the second single, following up “I Kissed a Girl.” Both of those, co-written with ubiquitous Swedish writer/producer Max Martin (who’d engineered Britney Spears debut on “…Baby One More Time” ten years earlier). “I Kissed a Girl” was #1 for seven weeks and “Hot n Cold” only got to #3. But it stayed in the Top40 12 weeks longer, well into 2009, so it comes out the bigger hit on points when you factor its full chart run.

#9 Colbie Caillat – Bubbly

At #9 is another song that never topped the Hot100 but racked up enough chart action to make it into our top ten on the year just by sticking around as long as it did: 47 weeks, June ’07 to May ’08. Billboard has it as the #67 song of 2007 and the #21 song of 2008, but combining its full chart run like we do for every song at Chartcrush, it comes out #9!

The singer turned to MySpace after being rejected twice by American Idol, and even though she never made the top ten on the Hot100 again, her style and this song served as the template for Taylor Swift’s transition into Pop on her 2008 set Fearless. Here is Colbie Caillat’s “Bubbly.”

Colbie Caillat’s “Bubbly” at #9 as we count down the top ten hits of 2008 on this week’s edition of Chartcrush. “Bubbly” was a huge Adult Contemporary and Adult Top40 hit: #1 on both of those for most of late ’07 into ’08. And Caillat stayed in the top ten on those charts into the mid-’10s, even after her beachy California singer-songwriter vibe was swept away by the turn-of-the-decade’s EDM tsunami.

#8 Lil Wayne featuring Static Major – Lollipop

At #8 is the first #1 hit by a Rapper who first appeared in the late-’90s as a pre-teen doing hardcore Southern Hip-Hop. Can’t not pay attention to that, right? But he kept it going through Hip-Hop’s early ’00s “Bling Era” cranking out album after album and turning in guest Rap verses on literally dozens of hits by everyone from Fat Joe to Destiny’s Child: so many features in ’07 that GQ named him “Workaholic of the Year.” And he would’ve had a new album out in ’07 too, except that his songs kept leaking on the internet, which delayed things ’til mid-’08.

The singer who gets the feature credit on our #8 hit, Static Major, also co-wrote the song. He was best-known for writing most of R&B singer Aaliyah’s big hits before her untimely death in a plane crash in ’01. And then his life unexpectedly ended after a hospital procedure. The song, one of his last vocals, was rushed out as an advance single, and shot into the top ten in just its second week, becoming rapper Lil Wayne’s first and only career #1 hit, on top for five weeks in May and June: “Lollipop.”

“Lollipop,” Lil Wayne featuring recently-deceased Singer-Songwriter Static Major: Grammy winner for Best Rap Song and #8 as we count down the biggest hits of 2008 here on this week’s edition of The Chartcrush Top Ten Countdown Show.

Wayne’s glitchy Raps on “Lollipop,” courtesy of Auto-Tune, studio software that, when used as intended, subtly corrects off-pitch notes so you don’t even know it’s there. But starting with T-Pain mid-decade, a parade of Rappers in the late ’00s were turning the controls all the way to 10 to get that weird, unnatural stepped pitch effect, to the point where it was showing up on TV in Wendy’s fast-food commercials and going viral in hilarious “Auto-Tune the News” YouTube vids “remixing” speeches and newscasts as songs.

In ’09, Rapper Jay-Z for one had had enough. His song “D.O.A. (Death of AutoTune),” was nominated for Best Hip-Hop Video at the ’09 MTV Video Music Awards, and Alt-Rock band Death Cab for Cutie showed up at the Grammys wearing baby blue lapel ribbons to raise awareness about Auto-Tune abuse.

#7 Rihanna – Disturbia

Next at #7, a singer who made her debut a few years before in ’05 after being plucked out of her native Barbados at just 16 and signed to a six album deal with Def Jam. And she already had four top tens to her name when she scored her first #1 hit in ’07. That song, “Umbrella” won Best Video at the VMAs and nominations for Song and Record of the Year at the Grammys. And then in ’08, with this song she tied Beyonce for most #1s by a female act in the ’00s up until then at four, all in just two years.

From a special “reloaded” version of her third album Good Girl Gone Bad, the second #1 from that album after the downtempo “Take a Bow,” it’s Rihanna with “Disturbia.”

Rihanna, “Disturbia,” 2008’s #7 song according to our Chartcrush Top Ten Countdown Show ranking, which, again, factors every song’s full chart run. Since “Disturbia’s” chart run went from July ’08 to March ’09, it’s split on Billboard‘s year-end rankings: #16 for ’08 and #77 for ’09.

The main songwriter on “Disturbia:” Chris Brown, Rihanna’s then-boyfriend, who was also hot on the charts in ’08. But in ’09 he pled guilty to assaulting Rihanna in the most high-profile domestic violence case of the era, and got five years probation.

#6 Leona Lewis – Bleeding Love

So 2008 was the fourth year in a row that TV talent shows were behind one or more of the year’s top ten hits. In ’08, though, it was season three of the U.K. talent show The X-Factor that supplied the hit. American Idol judge Simon Cowell, also an X-Factor judge, mentored our singer at #6 through her victory and beyond. The lead cut off her first album was the world’s best-selling single of 2008. At #6, it’s Leona Lewis, “Bleeding Love.”

Leona Lewis’s “Bleeding Love,” #6 as we count down the top ten hits of 2008 here on this week’s edition of The Chartcrush Top Ten Countdown Show. Lewis continued scoring top ten hits in her native U.K. for another five years, but despite continuing to work with a who’s who of ’00s Pop talent, her fortunes on the U.S. charts quickly waned. By her own admission, she was pretty headstrong and impatient about her musical direction, and not a wide margin for error with all the female Pop talent coming on the field into the 2010s.

#5 Coldplay – Viva la Vida

At #5 it’s another British act: a Rock band! In comparison to earlier eras, the ’00s were lean years for Brits on the Hot100. Between The Spice Girls’ “Wannabe” in 1997 and James Blunt’s “You’re Beautiful” in ’06, nine years, no British acts topped the Hot100, and none since Blunt, so two almost back-to-back in ’08, Leona Lewis in May and these guys in June: not quite a British Invasion, but it was a story.

With 51 weeks, May ’08 to May ’09, it was the longest chart run of any song in 2008, and 46 of those weeks were in the top 40, and the album it was on, their first in three years, debuted at #1. The title song from that album and the Song of the Year at the Grammy’s, it’s Coldplay’s “Viva la Vida.”

Coldplay’s very first career #1 hit, “Viva la Vida,” eight years after ABC, the TV network, picked up their debut U.S. single “Yellow” to promote their 2000 Fall lineup. ABC built their whole brand around the color yellow at the turn of the millennium. Then it was another four years ’til their first top ten hit, “Speed of Sound,” and another four again ’til “Viva la Vida,” their first #1: #5 on our Chartcrush Top Ten Countdown of 2008’s biggest hits.

Rock guitar virtuoso Joe Satriani sued Coldplay for copying his 2004 instrumental “If I Could Fly.” The case settled out of court.

#4 T.I. – Whatever You Like

But speaking of legal problems, as I mentioned when we heard Lil Wayne’s “Lollipop” at #8, three of the songs in our ’08 countdown are Hip-Hop cuts, and two of the three Rappers in our countdown were facing serious drug and weapons charges after 2007 arrests while their songs were topping the charts in ’08. Lil Wayne, arrested in New York City, eventually did eight months in Riker’s Island and later published his prison diary as Gone ‘Til November: A Journal of Rikers Island. And our Rapper at #4, nabbed in his native Atlanta just hours before the ’07 BET Hip-Hop Awards where he was a multiple nominee slated to perform.

Lil Wayne had just happened to be near a handgun in a bag on his tour bus when he was busted by the NYPD; this guy, already a convicted felon, got nabbed by feds buying machine guns with silencers from an informant! And wound up serving six months in federal prison, and then another ten months after violating his parole.

These were big, widely-reported stories at the time. We’re talkin’ Katie Couric, Brian Williams and Charles Gibson, FoxNews, CNN, BBC. But in a medium built on glorifying violence and criminality (Hip-Hop), outlaw street cred was currency, and the arrests and coverage certified both Rappers’ status as legit OGs with the public: “OG,” Hip-Hop slang for “original gangsta.”

Lil Wayne’s “Lollipop” was #8; at #4, out of Atlanta, it’s T.I.: his first #1 after charting a dozen songs since 2003, written and recorded while he awaited trial, and it shot from #71 to #1 in a single week: the biggest one-week jump in Hot100 history up to then: “Whatever You Like.”

T.I., one of the Atlanta-based Rappers, along with Gucci Mane and Young Jeezy, credited with pioneering Trap, the dark, sparse style that fueled Hip-Hop’s comeback on the Pop charts in the mid ’10s. “Whatever You Like” was #1 or 2 for all of September, October and November: the whole ’08 election season in which Obama won the Presidency, and it’s the #4 song in our Chartcrush Top Ten Countdown for 2008. Billboard had it at #15 on the year since the final 16 weeks of its run were after Billboard’s November 29 “chart year” cut-off for 2008.

Song parodist “Weird Al” Yankovic was out immediately with a parody version, in which Al woos his woman with his Costco card, fast-food dinners and coupon-clipping dates as the subprime mortgage crisis blew up, the stock market crashed, and the Great Recession got real for 2.6 million newly unemployed Americans: the most jobs lost in one year since 1945 when World War 2 ended and the economy had to transition back from war production.

#3 Timbaland featuring OneRepublic – Apologize

“Whatever You Like” hit late in the year at the peak of those woes; at #3, a song that debuted all the way back in April ’07 when the storm clouds were just gathering. It entered at #97, rising to 92 the following week, but then disappearing for two months. But then it re-entered in September, rose into the top 5, and stayed there for 19 weeks to the end of February ’08.

The group had recorded their debut album all the way back in 2005, but the label dropped them before the album came out, so same as Colbie Caillat did with “Bubbly” over a year later, they self-released on their MySpace page. And the song was such a hit on MySpace that Hip-Hop and R&B producer Timbaland (fresh from producing two of ’06’s biggest hits, Justin Timberlake’s “SexyBack” and Nelly Furtado’s “Promiscuous”) did a remix and gave the group their breakthrough hit. But it’s credited to Timbaland featuring the group, OneRepublic. At #3, “Apologize.”

OneRepublic’s “Apologize,” the Timbaland remix: #3 on our Chartcrush Top Ten Countdown Show for 2008. Songwriter/front man Ryan Tedder had a big year in ’08, and not just because of OneRepublic and “Apologize.” He also co-wrote and produced the song we heard at #6, Leona Lewis’s “Bleeding Love,” and then did the same on Beyonce’s “Halo.” With a string of epic behind-the-scenes assists like that by 2014, Billboard named Tedder “The Undercover King of Pop,” but OneRepublic kept racking up chart hits too; that same year (2014) their song “Counting Stars” spent an amazing 68 weeks on the Hot100 and was the #4 song of the year.

#2 Alicia Keys – No One

Next up at #2 is the #1 most listened-to song on America’s radio airwaves in 2008 with over 3 billion listens according to Nielsen Broadcast Data Systems, by an R&B singer and classically-trained pianist who Billboard named the R&B/Hip-Hop Artist of the ’00s decade: quite a distinction considering all the competition!

Her debut single “Fallin'” had been a #1 hit in 2001 (our #3 song of ’01). Then she scored four more top tens ’02 to ’04 and lit up the big screen opposite Ben Affleck and Andy García in Smokin’ Aces, and alongside Scarlett Johansson and Chris Evans in The Nanny Diaries. When she returned to music, the lead single from her first studio album in four years, As I Am, was #1 for five weeks and #2 for another six, December ’07 to February ’08, and is our #2 song of 2008. Oh, and As I Am? That was Billboard’s #1 album of 2008. Here’s Alicia Keys’s “No One.”

#1 on the Hot100 for five weeks starting December ’07, Alicia Keys’s “No One.” That was the original version, but a remix by New York producer/DJ and Keys’s future hubby Swizz Beatz featuring Rapper Cassidy was preferred on rhythmic radio. At the Grammys big 50th anniversary show in ’08, Keys won Best Female R&B Vocal Performance and Best R&B Song for “No One,” and also famously performed a live duet with a video of Frank Sinatra. She was back at the top of the charts in ’09 into 2010 with possibly her best-known song, especially in New York: her duet with Jay-Z, “Empire State of Mind.”

#1 Flo Rida featuring T-Pain – Low

And that brings us to the #1 song in our 2008 edition of the Chartcrush Top Ten Countdown Show, the debut single off the debut album by a Rapper who burst onto the scene as a throwback to ’90s Hip-Hop party music, a missing link of sorts between Hip-Hop’s “Bling Era” and the electronic dance music-styled party sounds that defined the New Pop at the turn of the decade.

It was the most-downloaded song of ’08 and topped Billboard’s Hot Digital Tracks chart for 13 weeks, and the Hot100 for ten straight weeks, January to March. From Miami it’s the one Rapper in our top 10 who wasn’t in trouble with the law: Flo Rida featuring T-Pain, and the song describes a dancefloor move. Don’t try it at home though unless you have really strong knees! “Low.”

“Apple Bottom jeans, boots with the fur,” an earworm and meme launched by Flo Rida and T-Pain’s brand-laced track “Low,” the #1 song of 2008 here on the Chartcrush Top Ten Countdown Show. Apple Bottoms, a denim brand launched by Rapper Nelly in ’03. It was also Billboard’s #1 song of the year. T-Pain featured on the track, also from Florida, just coming off his #1 hit in ’07, “Buy U a Drank (Shawty Snappin’).” Flo Rida scored his next #1 just months later in early ’09. “Right Round” introduced the singer who became the poster girl for the New Pop when her song “Tik Tok” was #1 for nine weeks in 2010, Ke$ha.

Bonus

And there you have ’em, the top ten songs of 2008 according to our exclusive Chartcrush ranking, which is based on Billboard’s weekly Hot100 charts, but, again, unlike Billboard, we factor every song’s full chart run, not just the weeks within a discrete “chart year,” so some of the songs Billboard had in its top ten for 2008 are absent from our countdown. Let’s shout ’em out, shall we?

#13 Chris Brown – Forever

R&B singer Chris Brown was red hot in ’08 coming off a string four top tens starting in ’05. I mentioned earlier that he wrote our #7 song, “Disturbia,” and gave it to his then-girlfriend Rihanna, but none of his own hits made our top ten. Over on Billboard though, there are three Chris Brown hits in the year-end top ten, including numbers 10 and 9 back-to-back. At #10 was “Forever.”

Now time was that Pop acts mingling with brands was all but verboten. In the ’80 The Rolling Stones caught all kinds of shade for their multimillion dollar tour sponsorship deals, and as early as 1954, radio stations were banning records that were also ad jingles. But Chris Brown wrote “Forever” for Wrigley’s Doublemint gum and is in the commercial. “Double your pleasure, double your fun.” Between that and Flo Rida’s wonton brand-slinging in “Low,” by 2008, attitudes had clearly changed. Brown also made bank from NBC when “Forever” was famously spoofed in the Jim and Pam wedding episode of The Office.

#16 Chris Brown – With You

But “Forever” wasn’t Chris Brown’s first hit of 2008.

“With You” was in the top ten January into May, the #9 song of 2008 on Billboard’s ranking. “Forever” and “With You,” numbers 13 and 16, respectively, on our Chartcrush 2008 ranking.

#17 Usher featuring Young Jeezy – Love in This Club

Now again, T.I.’s “Whatever You Like” was split between Billboard’s ’07 and ’09 “chart years,” so it didn’t make the top ten either year, but another Hip-Hop cut that was #17 on our ranking did.

Rapper Young Jeezy featuring on Usher’s “Love in This Club,” Billboard’s #8 song of the year and, again, #17 on our Chartcrush ranking. Usher’s seventh #1 hit, but his first since 2004. I mentioned Young Jeezy earlier as one of the acknowledged pioneers of Atlanta’s “Trap” Hip-Hop sound, along with T.I.

#12 Sara Bareilles – Love Song

At #7, Billboard had a song by a newcomer that broke through on the charts thanks to Apple featuring it as an iTunes free download. And then (speaking of ad jingles), rival internet music platform Rhapsody used it in a commercial.

Sara Bareilles’s “Love Song” just misses our Chartcrush ranking at #12.

#15 Jordin Sparks Duet with Chris Brown – No Air

And finally, Billboard’s #6 song of 2008 (#15 on our ranking): Chris Brown, duetting with an American Idol winner that’s not Kelly Clarkson or Carrie Underwood.

Season six Idol winner Jordin Sparks, teaming with Chris Brown on “No Air,” the third Chris Brown song in Billboard’s year-end top ten bumped out of our Chartcrush countdown. Serves him right for how he treated our girl Rihanna! But as a consolation, on Billboard, his debut “Run It!,” got lost in the shuffle between ’05 and ’06 so it isn’t intheir top ten for either year. “Run It!” is our Chartcrush #1 song of 2006.

Well, thanks for listening to our 2008 edition of the Chartcrush Top Ten Countdown Show. I’ve been your host, Christopher Verdesi. Check out our website, chartcrush.com, for written transcripts and streaming links for this and other Chartcrush countdown shows, plus chart run line graphs and other “fire” extras. Every week we count down a different year on this show, from the dawn of Billboard’s charts in the 1940s all the way up to the present, so tune in again next week, same station, same time, for another edition of Chartcrush.

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::start transcript::

Welcome to the Chartcrush Top Ten Countdown Show. I’m your host, Christopher Verdesi. Every week on Chartcrush, we do a deep dive into a year in pop music and count down the top ten songs according to our recap of the weekly pop charts published at the time in the music industry’s leading trade publication, Billboard magazine. This week, we’re counting down the top ten hits of 1993, the year when the two big defining features of pop in the ’90s came into focus: brokenness and dysfunction!

“Not that there’s anything wrong with that,” to borrow a catchphrase from the decade’s hottest TV sitcom, Seinfeld. Actually, for most fans in the early ’90s, brokenness felt like a good thing: an exciting thing! Artists in every genre were casting off mainstream formulas and pushing outside the box. As a fan, whether you were into Hip-Hop, R&B, Rock, Country, Dance or even New Age, it felt like Springtime after a long Winter, or like after the collapse of an empire, when all the provinces break away and become a patchwork of tribes doing their own thing.

Really, things were only “broken” from the point-of-view of the former overlords, the Baby Boom generation. And wouldn’t you know it: on the timeline, ’93 was the year the generation that came after the Baby Boom, Generation-X, born 1965 to ’80, hit its cultural peak: the five years before the youngest members of any generation turn 18.

It hadn’t been easy dislodging the Boomers. In fact, with music it might never have happened without a dramatic change that Billboard made to how it compiled its charts in 1991, switching to real point of sale and airplay data collected by Soundscan and Broadcast Data Systems, and scrapping its system of weekly retail and radio surveys. Slate writer and Gen-X chart geek Chris Molanphy has called the start of the “Soundscan Era” “the B.C./A.D. moment” of Pop charts, when the illusion of a Pop “mainstream” was shown to be a fiction, and the overdue flowering of Gen-X’s disparate left-field musical tastes could begin.

Of course, the downside: compared to other eras, there was no longer a common Pop music language: an idiom or set of songs that everyone knew. As New York Times writer Eric Weisbard put it in his 2000 article “Pop in the 90’s: Everything for Everyone,” “The music world pays a price for diversity. Our new heroes are often only heroes to a few.” The Top 40 still existed, but no one wanted to hear all of it, and no broadcaster, not even MTV, was playing all of it.

So Pop was broken and fractured: the first defining feature of ’90s music. The other? Dysfunction. And there I’m referring to Billboard‘s Hot100 chart. The Hot100 was conceived in the late ’50s as a definitive weekly ranking of the most popular records in the land. Scrapping the survey system improved accuracy, but at the same time, the music format that’d been the pillar of the Hot100 for decades was going extinct: the vinyl 45rpm single.

Billboard reasoned that cassette and CD singles were just replacing 45s, but it never worked out that way. CD singles were great for genres that released multiple versions of songs, like Hip-Hop, Dance and R&B: actually a huge improvement over vinyl 12-inch singles. Artists could now put out CD “maxi-singles” with four, five, even six different remix versions of the same song, and those were hot items. But in genres that typically only released one version of a song like Rock and Country, fans had little use for tapes or CDs with just a couple of tracks on them.

So with Billboard still insisting that songs be in U.S. stores as singles to chart, the Hot100 quickly skewed toward genres where maxi-singles were selling, and it took a series of massive radio hits not charting at all for Billboard to finally drop the rule and make the Hot100 a songs chart. That didn’t happen until the 1999 chart year. But in ’93, all this talk of chart dysfunction was still just that, talk, and nine of Billboard‘s top ten Hot100 songs of the year were also hits on the R&B charts.

#10 Meat Loaf – I’d Do Anything for Love (But I Won’t Do That)

On our Chartcrush ranking though, it’s eight out of ten, and the first of the two non-R&B songs is at #10: the triumphal return to the U.S. charts after over 12 years by an Act whose offbeat Rock opera in 1977 had bubbled up out of nowhere at the height of Disco to become one of the bestselling albums ever.

Health and legal problems through the ’80s prevented him from following it up, but in ’93 he mended fences with his original collaborator, songwriter Jim Steinman, and did a sequel. Bat out of Hell 2 didn’t do quite as well as the original, but its lead single was his biggest-ever hit. At #10 it’s Meat Loaf’s “I’d Do Anything for Love (But I Won’t Do That).”

What wouldn’t you do for love? Hmm. A worthwhile question that millions pondered while Meat Loaf’s “I’d Do Anything for Love (But I Won’t Do That)” rode the charts in late ’93 into ’94. Something sexual? Something criminal? Some extraordinary sacrifice?

There doesn’t seem to be an answer in the lyrics, but in a 1998 episode of VH1 Story Tellers, Meat Loaf wheeled out a chalkboard with the lyrics and, using a pointer, tried explain that “that” in the song refers to all the things people do that screw up relationships: cheat, lie, “stop dreaming of you every night of my life,” etc. But that’s an answer to a different question, isn’t it? What won’t you do when you’re in love? As for the question posed in the title: what won’t we do for love, the head-scratching continues.

#9 SWV – Weak

R&B girl groups, never bigger than in 1993, with R&B trio En Vogue following Latin Freestyle trios Expose and Sweet Sensation onto the Pop charts in 1990, joined by TLC in ’92. At #9, another trio that joined the fray in ’93 and were the #2 overall singles artist of the year, with three top tens during the year. Their breakthrough was a #6 hit in February, “I’m So into You,” but in the Summer, this one got all the way to #1. From New York, it’s Coko, Taj and LeeLee: Sisters with Voices, abbreviated SWV: “Weak.”

SWV’s, “Weak,” #9 on our Chartcrush Top Ten Countdown for 1993. Later in the year, the trio hit big again, peaking at #2 on the Hot100 and #1 on the R&B chart for a straight seven weeks, with a remix of their debut single, “Right Here:” a mashup with a sample of Michael Jackson’s 1982 song “Human Nature.” SWV stayed hot for another five years, splitting up in 1998 over creative and interpersonal differences, and “Weak” was their only #1 hit.

#8 Shai – If I Ever Fall in Love

From Girl R&B groups to Boy R&B groups: Boyz II Men had already been charting massive vocal harmony hits for nearly two years by ’93, but R&B fans couldn’t get enough. So when our act at #8 first came on the radio with their silky a capella smoothness, it was love at first hear. They scored three top tens, all in ’93, which made them the year’s #3 overall Hot100 singles artist, but the first was their biggest. Formed by four seniors at Washington, D.C.’s Howard University as a side hustle and catapulted to instant stardom, it’s Shai, “If I Ever Fall in Love.”

Shai, “If I Ever Fall in Love,” our #8 song here on the Chartcrush Top Ten Countdown Show for 1993. S-h-a-i, according to a 1993 article in the Hartford Courant newspaper, a Swahili word for “personification of destiny,” but if you look it up on Google Translate, it means “tea.” Hot or iced, not specified.

What we just heard is an edit of the album version that’s also in the video, with backing track by group leader and co-producer Carl “Groove” Martin. Some stations, though, played an a capella version. It never got to #1, but it nearly broke the record for weeks at #2: eight weeks in the runner-up spot behind the song that did break the record for weeks at #1. You bet we’ll be hearing that one later.

#7 Silk – Freak Me

So, in 1991 after Boyz II Men first hit, Brooklyn, New York’s Uptown Records tasked an intern, future Hip-Hop mogul Sean “P. Diddy” Combs, with molding another male R&B vocal group into a “bad boy” version of Boyz II Men. Motown’s Boyz sang about romance and love; Uptown’s bad boy Slow-Jammers Jodeci would sing about seduction and sex, and present as edgy, dangerous Hip-Hop characters wearing Timberland boots and baseball caps.

Well it worked! Jodeci’s “Come and Talk to Me” was the #1 R&B song of 1992. But New Jack Swing impresario Keith Sweat thought he could go even further, and it was quite a scandal when the male R&B quintet he’d just plucked out of Atlanta topped not only the R&B charts, but the Hot100 for two weeks in May with as debauched and explicit a record as had ever been a hit on the Pop charts. It’s our song at #7: Silk’s “Freak Me.”

Silk, “Freak Me,” #1 for eight weeks on the R&B chart; two on the Hot100, our #7 song of 1993 here on the Chartcrush Top Ten Countdown Show. Keith Sweat, co-producing and even co-writing the songs on Silk’s double platinum 1992 debut, Lose Control. The hits dwindled by 1999, but Silk continued putting out albums and singles with the same lineup into the 2010s.

#6 Snow featuring MC Shan – Informer

So if a White guy in Miami named Robert Matthew Van Winkle can score a #1 hit in the early ’90s as rapper Vanilla Ice, can a White guy from Toronto, Canada named Darrin Kenneth O’Brien top the charts with a Jamaican Dancehall Reggae number? Sure, why not? And Mr. O’Brien isn’t the only White Reggae artist in our countdown. He came by his love of Reggae honestly though; Toronto’s Jamaican population exploded in the ’70s and ’80s and is the metro’s largest ethnic minority. At #6, it’s Snow, featuring Queens, New York rapper MC Shan, who also produced: “Informer.”

“Informer” not only topped the Hot100 for seven weeks in March and April, but also the Rap Songs and Dance Singles charts. Snow proved to be a one-hit wonder despite continuing to release music steadily into the ’00s and ’10s, but in 2019, Puerto Rican Reggaeton and Dancehall star Daddy Yankee featured him on his “Informer” influenced single “Con Calma,” which made it to #22.

#5 Janet – That’s the Way Love Goes

Well as you’re hearing, lots of new voices on the R&B landscape in 1993. Lots of new voices in every genre in the early ’90s. But at #5 is an established star whose album released in 1993 was her first in four years, and it debuted at #1 on the album chart when it dropped in May. At the same time its lead single rocketed to #1 on the Hot100 its third week and stayed on top for eight weeks. It’s Janet Jackson’s “That’s the Way Love Goes.”

Right after “That’s the Way Love Goes” was a hit, Janet Jackson made her feature film debut opposite rapper Tupac Shakur in John Singleton’s drama Poetic Justice, which helped update her image. Rolling Stone heralded her 1993 album, titled with just her first name and a period, as a cultural moment in which she announced her sexual maturity, after taking charge of her life on her album Control in ’86, then commanding a dancing army to fight society’s ills on Rhythm Nation in ’89.

With the ’90s diva era already in full swing and Mariah, Celine and Whitney scoring hits, a handful of critics called out Janet Jackson for subpar vocals. “Looks good, sounds bad,” a Boston Globe headline said. But it didn’t matter much. “That’s the Way Love Goes,” the first of six top ten singles from the album. and the #5 song in our Chartcrush Top Ten Countdown of the biggest hits of 1993.

#4 UB40 – (I Can’t Help) Falling in Love with You

At #4, the other White Reggae act I mentioned. They’re a U.K. group that started out in the late ’70s, but only got noticed Stateside after their album of Reggae covers hit in ’83. “Red Red Wine,” a #1 hit from that after it was reissued in 1989. Then in ’93 their second #1, a cover of a 1962 hit by Elvis Presley that got a big big boost from being on the soundtrack of the Sharon Stone erotic thriller Sliver, it’s UB40’s version of, “(I Can’t Help) Falling in Love with You.”

#4, UB40, “(I Can’t Help) Falling in Love with You,” which a writer at AllMusic.com pinpoints as completing UB40’s transition from a Reggae band to an Adult Contemporary band that plays Reggae-Pop. It also paved the way for 1994’s big overnight success story, the Swedish Reggae-Pop outfit Ace of Base.

#3 Mariah Carey – Dreamlover

Well we’re getting down to the small numbers here on our Chartcrush Top Ten Countdown for 1993. At #3, the lead single from the third album in as many years by not only the top Diva of the ’90s, but the top Hot100 act, period. She had at least one yearly top ten hit in six out of the decade’s ten years, and ’93 marks the first of four consecutive years, ’93 to ’96. ’92, one of the years she missed because of the mixed reaction to the Gospel and ’60s Soul influence on her sophomore album Emotions. So she returned to Pop and scored her seventh #1. Here’s Mariah Carey’s “Dreamlover.”

Mariah Carey’s, “Dreamlover,” the lead single from her album Music Box, #1 for eight straight weeks in September and October and the #3 song of 1993 here on our Chartcrush Top Ten Countdown. Mariah returning to Pop on that song, this time with a bit of a Hip-Hop feel absent from her earlier hits, thanks to producer Dave “Jam” Hall, who was fresh from producing Mary J. Blige’s debut, What’s the 411, in ’92.

#2 Tag Team – Whoomp! (There It Is)

1993 was a big year for Hip-Hop, especially the West Coast and Death Row Records, with Dr. Dre, who’d just split from gangsta group N.W.A., planting the G-Funk flag on the charts with the year’s #6 album, The Chronic. Before the year was out, Dre’s protégé Snoop Dogg, featured on The Chronic‘s biggest hits, dropped his debut album on Death Row.

Dre and Snoop’s “Nothin’ but a G Thang” just misses our countdown at #11, leaving our song at #2 the lone Hip-Hop cut in our 1993 Chartcrush Top Ten Countdown. And they’re a one hit wonder out of Atlanta! A mainstay at sporting events for decades, not to mention aerobics classes, frat parties and Spring Break beer halls, it’s Miami Bass duo Tag Team, “Whoomp! (There It Is).”

Tag Team, “Whoomp! (There It Is),” the #2 song on our 1993 edition of the Chartcrush Top Ten Countdown Show. It never got to #1, peaking at #2 for seven weeks in August and September. But it stayed on the Hot100 for 45 weeks, until April of ’94: the longest chart run of any song in 1993.

At the same time, a similar song, “Whoot,” (with a “t”) “There It Is” by a Miami bunch called 95 South made it to #11. But it was a total coincidence! Both had lifted the phrase from strip club vernacular, and, fun fact, on July 26, both appeared on Arsenio Hall’s syndicated late night talk show in a charity battle of the bands fundraiser for Midwest flood victims.

#1 Whitney Houston – I Will Always Love You

Now leading off his Year-in-Charts article for 1993 in the December 25 issue, Billboard‘s new “Chart Beat” columnist Fred Bronson observed that “the race for the #1 single of 1993 was over when the year began.” When the first Hot100 chart of calendar ’93 appeared, the song had already been #1 for five weeks, and it stayed there for another nine. 14 weeks total, a new record.

So who scored this amazing chart coup? Well, her career wasn’t exactly on the skids, but since blowing everyone away with her vocals on her amazing string of 1980s Dance and Pop crossover hits and starting the whole Diva thing, she turned to R&B on her third album in 1990, and by ’92 there was serious competition in the Pop Diva space. Mariah Carey, cranking out albums and chart-topping singles like it was going out of style, Celine Dion ramping up, and newcomer Toni Braxton debuting on the Boomerang soundtrack.

But in the Fall of ’92, ads for the new Kevin Costner movie started showing up on TV. Not only did the Singer co-star in the film (her acting debut), but she had six new songs on the soundtrack, and the impossible-to-ignore climactic key change moment in one of them was the centerpiece of the ads. Well the single was #1 even before the movie hit theaters, and by Christmas, Whitney Houston was again the undisputed queen of diva-dom. The #1 song of 1993 by a mile, from The Bodyguard soundtrack, “I Will Always Love You.”

From 1993’s #1 album, The Bodyguard soundtrack, Whitney Houston, “I Will Always Love You,” the #1 song of 1993: a cover of a song Country Diva Dolly Parton wrote in 1973 when she split from her business partner and mentor Porter Wagoner to start her solo career.

It’d been a #1 hit on the Country charts twice, first in 1974 and then again in 1982 when Dolly re-did it for a movie she co-starred in with Burt Reynolds: The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas. But then Whitney Houston’s version in ’92 and ’93 made it one of the biggest hits in Hot100 history. Not surprisingly, Whitney was the top singles artist of the year with four chart hits including three top tens, all from The Bodyguard.

Bonus

So there you have them, the top ten songs of 1993 according to our Chartcrush ranking. Now of the songs we heard in our countdown this hour, only one was absent from Billboard‘s official published year-end top ten for 1993. At Chartcrush, we count every song’s full chart run in whatever year it scored the most points, so Meat Loaf’s “I’d Do Anything for Love,” which straddled ’93 and ’94, comes out the #10 song of 1993 on our ranking. At Billboard, though, they have to split a chart run like that and factor it into both years, so it’s buried in the mid-30s on both their ’93 and ’94 year-end rankings.

#13 Wreckx-n-Effect – Rump Shaker

Now the song from Billboard‘s 1993 year-end top ten that Meat Loaf displaced? Their #9 song: another memorable Hip-Hop vocal hook supplied by New Jack Swing Producer Teddy Riley, whose brother was in the group, Wreckx-n-Effect.

#13 on our Chartcrush ranking for 1993, Wreckx-n-Effect’s “Rump Shaker.” Teddy Riley’s Rap verse written by a 20-year-old Pharrell Williams, one of his earliest credits.

And that’s gonna do it, for our 1993 edition of the Chartcrush Top Ten Countdown Show. I’ve been your host, Christopher Verdesi. On our website, chartcrush.com, you can get a written transcript and a link to stream this and other Chartcrush countdown shows on Spotify, plus chart run line graphs and other fresh extras. Every week, we count down a different year from the beginning of the charts in the ’40s all the way up to the present, so tune again, same station, same time, for another edition of Chartcrush.

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