The Beatles’ record once seemed unbeatable, and then Swift doubled it. But this unprecedented debut was planned weeks in advance. You may have heard that, this week, one artist—a notorious cat-lover with an increasingly foul mouth—has locked down the entire Top 10 on Billboard’s Hot 100. Before I dissect how this happened, gather ’round the [...] Read more

Sam Smith and Kim Petras both make history atop the Hot 100, but “Unholy” is not without precedent. From the summer of 1978 through the summer of 1979, singer-songwriter Sylvester James Jr., known by the mononym Sylvester, scored three consecutive Top 40 hits on Billboard’s Hot 100: “Dance (Disco Heat)” (No. 19), the hi-NRG landmark [...] Read more

Steve Lacy’s “Bad Habit” is a chart-topping hit that’s queer in every sense of the word. Consider, for a moment, the fate of Shuggie Otis, the shoulda-been music legend of the 1970s. The multiracial Los Angeles–based singer-songwriter and multi-instrumentalist was compared to the likes of Stevie Wonder and Marvin Gaye. Otis spent years working on [...] Read more

Beyoncé may run the world, but she hasn’t always ruled the charts. In November 2019, with a little over a month left to go before the start of the ’20s, I dropped an episode of my Hit Parade podcast commemorating the ’10s as the decade was passing into history. I walked through the acts, singles, [...] Read more

“About Damn Time” shows how the star creates coalitions of young and old fans to patiently work her songs up the charts. About damn time, indeed. For 10 of the last 15 weeks, boy bander–turned–pop hegemon Harry Styles has been commanding Billboard’s Hot 100 with his dreamy ditty “As It Was.” Styles would only step [...] Read more

The Netflix series gave “Running Up That Hill” the final push, but its unprecedented climb is 40 years in the making. In the seven years I’ve been a Rock and Roll Hall of Fame voter, Kate Bush has been nominated three times. I have stubbornly voted for the British art-pop legend each time, even as [...] Read more

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