Did the boy band adapt for America, or did they make America adapt for them? On a business trip through Japan in 1962, the president of Britain’s Pye Records heard an enchanting pop song by the young Japanese singer Kyu Sakamoto and brought a copy of the 45 back with him to the U.K. He [...] Read more

The video is a smash, but it’s the song that put it on top. This month marks the centennial of vaudeville performer Mamie Smith’s “Crazy Blues,” a watershed for both blues recordings and Black women’s cultural expression. Smith’s August 1920 recording, lamenting a love gone wrong, eventually sold about 2 million copies and, over the next [...] Read more

Like any boy band alumnus, he first had to overcome radio’s bias against teen heartthrobs. Late summer is a great time for sleeper hits: songs that have been hanging around the charts for months and finally hit their stride. Four years ago, in August 2016, Sia’s “Cheap Thrills” reached No. 1 after knocking around the [...] Read more

With Folklore, she figured out the streaming era—and she didn’t even have to turn herself into a rapper. Maybe it’s appropriate that, in the dead of August in a year when we mostly can’t leave the house, our No. 1 song has the counterintuitive title “Cardigan.” But then, Taylor Swift has long been the music [...] Read more

Seven songs—six in a row—have spent only a week at No. 1. Which will prove the soundtrack for this turbulent season? Summer, hard as it may be to believe, has not been canceled. But nothing about the summer of 2020 in America feels—can feel, should feel—normal. Our country is currently navigating contradictory compulsions to both [...] Read more

  America’s new No. 1 song took over social media just as we began social distancing. Chic’s legendary dance hit “Good Times” topped the Billboard Hot 100 in 1979—the final year of disco’s peak, and also the peak of the oil crisis and record U.S. inflation. In interviews over the years, Chic co-founder Nile Rodgers [...] Read more

How TikTok—and a squeaky noise—made Roddy Ricch’s “The Box” the biggest song in America. Back in January 2006, the Billboard Hot 100 was overtaken for one week by a quirky rap track by a group that would never have a major hit again. “Laffy Taffy” was the handiwork of a troupe calling themselves D4L, an [...] Read more

For her wish to come true, it took changes in technology and chart rules. Jimmy Fallon didn’t hurt, either. At a time of year that brings us oft-told holiday fables and yarns about Christmas miracles, the moral of this story is simple: When it comes to the Billboard charts, never, ever count out Mariah Carey. [...] Read more

On “Heartless,” the singer keeps on recycling the same old tricks, and America still can’t get enough. For years—really, decades—AC/DC bandleader Angus Young has been finding creative ways to restate the maxim “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it” in interviews. The guitarist can often come off as self-satisfied about his Rock Hall–inducted band’s endurance. [...] Read more

On his latest No. 1, the singer shows why he might just be our era’s most defining star. With less than a month to go in the 2010s, the decade that has utterly confounded our understanding of what genre even means in popular music, perhaps it’s appropriate that genre-obliterator Post Malone has the top song [...] Read more