For those of us who lived through and remember the 1980s, one small irony about Taylor Swift’s smash album 1989 is that it doesn’t actually sound much like 1989—a transitional pop year dominated by the sounds of New Jack Swing, hair metal, George Michael–style pop-soul, and second-wave Madonna. Swift’s fifth album is named after the [...] Read more

In the music industry today, there’s the 1 percent, and there’s everybody else. Why is this woman gloating? Taylor Swift is exulting because Billboard and Nielsen SoundScan finally made it official: Last week, defying early predictions, Swift’s fifth studio album, 1989, sold enough copies in the U.S. to go instantly platinum. In its first week [...] Read more

Halfway into October, I doubt I need to familiarize you with the No. 1 song in America, Meghan Trainor’s fauxminist booty anthem “All About That Bass.” After evicting Taylor Swift’s blockbuster hit “Shake It Off” from the penthouse of Billboard’s Hot 100 five weeks ago, this giant-killing song from a first-time artist hasn’t let go. [...] Read more

Before we talk about the shimmying pop tsunami that overtook Billboard’s Hot 100 pop chart this week—let’s call it Hurricane Taylor—it might help to ponder, briefly, another perky superstorm that first made landfall on the charts four decades ago. So here’s a quick quiz about a certain ’70s–’80s megastar: 1. What was Olivia Newton-John’s first [...] Read more

If you need evidence that America is having its ’90s-revival moment—right on the two-decades-later nostalgia schedule—look no further than “Rude” by Magic, the new No. 1 on Billboard’s Hot 100 pop chart. “Rude” is essentially an amalgam of two smash hits that rode the Top 10 together in the spring of 1993: the Spin Doctors’ [...] Read more

Last week, Vulture’s Amanda Dobbins wrote a piece bemoaning the “default Song of Summer” status achieved by “Fancy,” the Iggy Azalea hit featuring Charli XCX. Now in its seventh week at No. 1, “Fancy” has topped Billboard’s Hot 100 since the start of June, essentially the whole summer to date. Since the Song of the [...] Read more

The “Song of the Summer” is an old concept but a fairly new sport. Pop artists since the ’60s have on occasion tried to score a self-conscious summer smash—but the media only began studying the horserace a decade or two ago. We’re barely into June, and already several outlets have offered predictions for 2014. But [...] Read more

Three decades ago, in an interview with chart-trivia master Fred Bronson for his Billboard Book of Number 1 Hits, Blondie lead singer Debbie Harry said the following about 1981’s “Rapture”—the song with the rap about the man from Mars who’s eatin’ cars, and the first Hot 100 No. 1 song to feature rapping. “It took [...] Read more

John Legend’s “All of Me”—the new No. 1 song on Billboard’s authoritative, all-genre Hot 100 chart—is a paean to crazy love, a passion that’s can’t be deterred by “curves” or “edges” or “imperfections.” Its lyrics pull the clever (or crass) trick of expressing universal relationship bromides in seemingly specific language, rather like a horoscope. Legend’s [...] Read more

Mark it: 14 months, three weeks. That’s the longest period in Billboard Hot 100 history without a lead black artist at No. 1—including all of 2013, as I noted a while back here on Slate. Fortunately, that drought has come to an end, as “Happy,” Pharrell Williams’ exuberant, irrepressible pop song, ascends to the top [...] Read more