More pop stars have an oddball, ultimately forgotten big single than you might think. Pop quiz: Name Maroon 5’s first No. 1 hit. Think back to the mid-aughts, when Adam Levine and his merry men were the hot new act on the charts. What song took them to the top of the Hot 100 for the first [...] Read more

It took more than a year for this TikTok hit to break into the mainstream. On a muggy late spring day in 2020, a perspiring British man drags himself down an empty street in East London. He is lugging what might as well be the weight of a pandemic-afflicted world—but, as it turns out, it’s [...] Read more

Its historic success is less about the song’s greatness than about how the chart works. In 2021, the Billboard Hot 100 was topped by an array of bespoke popular song forms: power-torch balladry (“Drivers License,” “All Too Well”), bubbly ’80s-style synthpop (“Save Your Tears,” “Stay”), Chicago drill–slash–New Orleans bounce (“Up”), flamenco-inflected hip-pop (“Montero”), classic pop-punk (“Good [...] Read more

Dua Lipa’s “Levitating” is Billboard’s top song of 2021, even though it never topped the Hot 100. Chart historians rank 1965 among pop’s greatest years. An amazing array of totemic songs topped Billboard’s Hot 100 that year. Five straight No. 1s by the Beatles—a sweep from “I Feel Fine” through “Yesterday”—and the first two by [...] Read more

She’s given The Beatles and Don McLean a 10-minute run for their money. “So, are you gonna be writing about Bob Dylan’s No. 1 song?” my rather giddy father asked me on the phone one day, a little over a year and a half ago. “Isn’t that what you write about?” I had to patiently [...] Read more

Another sulking ballad, another instant hit. But will it stick? A little less than a dozen years ago, in February 2010, Sade—the British group led by the striking Nigerian-born singer Sade Adu—debuted at No. 1 on the Billboard album chart with Soldier of Love. It was the group’s first album since their 2000 opus Lovers Rock, [...] Read more

With his latest Billboard Hot 100 record, he’s one step closer to being bigger than the biggest band of all time. Or is he? I know we have to break down the new No. 1 song in America, but first, I’d like to briefly address our new No. 4 song. It’s called “Champagne Poetry,” and it’s the [...] Read more

The K-pop group’s “Butter” is the Song of the Summer, so why doesn’t it feel like it? Tweet Share Comment A year ago around this time, in our family car, I was auditioning my annual summer playlist for my teenage stepkids. The two Zoomers are a useful focus group for this Gen Xer, who’s trying [...] Read more

Is anyone surprised that BTS’s newest English-language single became an instant hit? I don’t know who’s handling the Twitter feed for Queen these days, but they either don’t know pop history or have some seriously misplaced chutzpah. When “Butter,” the latest single from global pop dominators BTS, dropped in late May, someone at Queen HQ [...] Read more

The versatile Disney star might be the dying genre’s best hope. Tweet Share Comment Tweet Share Comment When Olivia Rodrigo made her much-anticipated appearance on Saturday Night Live two weekends ago, the focus was, overwhelmingly, on the first song she performed, “Drivers License.” Over the winter, that out-of-nowhere chart-topping debut had instantly made her a [...] Read more