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Welcome to the Chartcrush Top Ten Countdown Show, I’m your host, Christopher Verdesi. Each week on Chartcrush we dive deep into a different year in Pop music and pop culture history, and count down the top ten songs according to our recap of the weekly charts published in the music industry’s leading trade publication and chart authority, Billboard magazine.

This week we’re counting down 1988, Reagan’s last year, when Pop’s glossy ’80s makeover hit terminal velocity. Mall couture on full display—acid-wash denim, neon, spandex, shoulder pads. Big hair for women; Jheri-curls, high-top fades and mullets for men. Glam Metal Bands pounding arenas, veteran Boomers showing off their synth chops on million-selling albums.

MTV, still the oracle of cool, but just below the surface, the ground was shifting and whole new sensibilities were germinating as the generation that’d been driving and dominating pop culture since Ed Sullivan was aging out. No Baby Boomer in ’88 under 24, and Gen X, born ’65 to ’80—stirring, but still underground. What even was pop culture without Boomers?

Well the rough outlines were starting to resolve. In Rock, of course, the late ’80s were peak Glam Metal—Bon Jovi, Def Leppard, Poison. But left of the dial, college radio was seeding the future—Alternative Rock for the first-wave X-ers now in their late teens and early 20s. Once all the quirky Early ’80s New Wave Acts went mainstream—or tried to—college radio was where you had to go for stuff like The Replacements, Sonic Youth, Smiths and Pixies.

’87—the first year the entire 19-to-22 “college” demo was Gen X, and, no coincidence, ’87, also the year that U2 and R.E.M. became the first Alternative Acts to score top tens on the Hot100, so finally in September of ’88, Billboard launched its Modern Rock chart.

And in Hop-Hop: crossover top tens by Run DMC with Aerosmith and the Beastie Boys late ’86 and ’87, and eight other Rap songs charted on the Hot100 in ’87 with virtually no radio support beyond Rap stations in the biggest markets—KDAY in L.A., WBLS in New York. But once Hip-Hop did get a national showcase with Yo! MTV Raps in ’88, 15 Rap hits peaked on the Hot100—Fat Boys, LL Cool J, DJ Jazzy Jeff & The Fresh Prince, and Female newcomers Salt-n-Pepa and J.J. Fad.

At year’s end, Public Enemy’s It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back won Album of the Year in the Village Voice‘s influential Pazz & Jop critics’ poll, and in ’89, Rap got its first weekly chart in Billboard.

Cassettes were how most Americans were buying their tunes in ’88—over half of music biz revenue from ’84 to ’89, and ’88 was the peak, with 450 million sold. And CDs outsold vinyl for the first time in ’88. But no one was sitting out music’s portability revolution—Walkman on your hip; cassette deck in the car, boombox if you wanted everyone to hear! 400 million blank Maxell, TDK and Memorex C-60 or C-90 cassettes sold as home taping culture thrived, foreshadowing the filesharing debacle that gutted the music biz in the ’00.

So ’88—both the zenith of ’80s flash and spectacle and the rumblings of Gen-X battering the ramparts, even as the year’s biggest hits were still within the Boomer-dominated mainstream.

#10 George Harrison – Got My Mind Set on You

Like our #10 song as we kick off the countdown. What could possibly be more within that Boomer comfort zone than a former Beatle? But like an exclamation point on our generational change theme, it was the last #1 by a Beatle. At #10, one of the most surprising comebacks in Pop history, it’s George Harrison’s “Got My Mind Set on You.”

George Harrison’s “Got My Mind Set on You,” #1 for one week in January and #10 on our Chartcrush countdown of 1988’s biggest hits—the last Beatles solo record to get to—not just #1, but the top 20! In the ’90s it took all three to score a hit—Paul, George and Ringo reuniting in the studio in ’95 with John Lennon’s cassette demos recorded in the ’70s and with Jeff Lynne’s help, forging new Beatles singles “Free as a Bird” and “Real Love.”

“Got My Mind Set on You” was a cover of an obscure R&B record George had bought while visiting his sister in America in 1963 just months before the Fab Four arrived in New York and Beatlemania erupted—the lead single off his first album in five years, Cloud Nine. After his ’82 album Gone Troppo bricked, he’d shifted to car racing and producing movies, but in ’87 he caught the music bug again and teamed up with Beatles superfan Jeff Lynne—whose distinctive ELO sheen is all over Cloud Nine, not to mention those aforementioned ’90s Beatles reunion hits.

And they weren’t done. While Cloud Nine was still on the charts, Harrison and Lynne were back in the studio, this time with Bob Dylan, Roy Orbison and Tom Petty as The Traveling Wilburys whose album dropped in the Fall, and went triple-platinum.

#9 Guns ‘n Roses – Sweet Child o’ Mine

So Glam Metal or “Hair Metal,” again, at full roar after Bon Jovi’s Slippery When Wet logged 38 weeks in the album chart’s top five, followed by five more Metal acts. Bon Jovi’s “Livin’ on a Prayer” and Whitesnake’s “Here I Go Again” both hit #1 in ’87, and two of the seven hits off Def Leppard’s Hysteria actually charted higher on the Hot100 than on Billboard‘s Rock chart.

But by ’88 Rock fans were craving something grittier—more street than salon. Enter our #9 Act, whose debut Appetite for Destruction spawned three top tens, the first topping the Hot100 for two weeks in September. Billboard‘s #1 New Artist of 1988, it’s Guns n’ Roses, “Sweet Child o’ Mine.”

Guns n’ Roses, “Sweet Child o’ Mine” from their 1987 album Appetite for Destruction—the bestselling debut album ever: 30 million sold, 18 million in the U.S. Raw Punk edge colliding with Hollywood sleaze and igniting Rock’s zeitgeist like a cigarette butt flicked into hairspray factory.

“Sweet Child o’ Mine,” an outlier—Axl Rose’s tender ode to girlfriend Erin Everly, daughter of Don Everly of the Everly Brothers. Two more top tens followed—”Welcome to the Jungle” and “Paradise City“—and suddenly Bon Jovi sounded too slick and Def Leppard, too Pop. Glam had peaked. Metal’s next big wave? Thrash, already pushing at the ramparts in ’88, but still underground ’til Metallica’s Black Album in ’91, the same year Nirvana crashed in with Grunge.

#8 Tiffany – Could’ve Been

But before Metal’s next chapter could roar in, America’s malls had other plans, and at #8 on our 1988 edition of the Chartcrush Top Ten Countdown Show, the second #1 in just three months by a brand-new Teen Idol, just 15 when she cut her first album. And when the label started having second thoughts about releasing it, her Producer-Manager sent her out on a nationwide tour of, yes, shopping malls. And it worked—spectacularly. At #8 it’s Tiffany with “Could’ve Been.”

Tiffany, “Could’ve Been,” a #1 on both Pop and Adult Contemporary in ’88. Not bad for a Singer who’d just broken through covering ’60s Bubblegum hits in food courts. But the song was written by a Boomer, Singer-Songwriter Lois Blaisch, and Tiffany’s version we just heard at #8 has the same backing track as Blaisch’s 1983 demo.

Could she have prolonged her hot streak leaning in to AC perhaps? Doubtful. Her next Ballad single “All This Time” barely grazed the AC top ten, and with Mariah Carey and Celine Dion right around the corner, things were about to get very crowded in that lane. But ditto Teen Pop: rival Debbie Gibson not just Singing but writing her own hits, and Paula Abdul, Martika, Kylie Minogue and Tiff’s own opening act, New Kids on the Block queued up for ’89.

Add in a messy emancipation battle with her parents, and Tiffany’s run was over by mid-’89, though she never stopped recording and resurfacing on nostalgia tours, reality shows, B-movies—even an “all grown up” Playboy spread in 2002.

#7 Rick Astley – Never Gonna Give You Up

Which raised a lot of eyebrows for sure, but nothing compared to how our song and Singer at #7 resurfaced later in the ’00s as the internet hit warp speed—and he didn’t even have to lift a finger! Details on that straight ahead, but first the song: a British Singer-Songwriter whose deep, soulful voice was something fresh in late ’80s Dance Pop and Adult Contemporary. Four top tens from ’87 to ’89 and the biggest was the first: #1 for two weeks in March. At #7 as we count down the top ten hits of 1988 here on this week’s Chartcrush, it’s Rick Astley’s “Never Gonna Give You Up.”

Rick Astley’s “Never Gonna Give You Up” at #7, Billboard‘s top-selling 12-inch single of ’88, and Astley named the #1 Dance Club Play Artist of the Year—but so frozen in its 1988 moment that beyond class reunions, retro nights and “worst of” lists—like VH1’s “Most Awesomely Bad” in 2004 and then a gag in an episode of It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia—there wasn’t much reason to revisit it.

Until Rickrolling. Click a link in a webpage or email, hit “next slide” in a PowerPoint—boom! Instead of what you expected, it’s Rick Astley in a trench coat in the “Never Gonna Give You Up” video. Gotcha! You’ve been Rickrolled. Church of Scientology links, a favorite target—Astley loved that.

And the capper? November ’08 when online pranksters stuffed MTV Europe’s “Best Act Ever” ballot box with millions of votes for Astley—and he won, but he skipped the ceremony, leaving Katy Perry and Perez Hilton to present the award without him!

#6 Bobby Brown – My Prerogative

Well we’re counting down the top ten hits of 1988 here on this week’s edition of the Chartcrush Top Ten Countdown Show, and up next at #6 we have the first of three songs in our countdown that Billboard had in their 1989 year-end Hot100, not ’88.

Their rule in the late ’80s—and bear with me here: if a song is still climbing at the end of their chart year—usually around Thanksgiving—its full chart run counted in the following year’s tally. But if it had peaked and was heading down, its run so far counted in the current year, plus Billboard‘s estimate of its remaining chart life. The goal: to keep year-end charts from short-changing big hits whose runs straddled two calendar years.

Now here at Chartcrush with the luxury of hindsight and not having to make a press deadline, we get to factor every song’s actual full chart run, and go by calendar years, not arbitrary date-shifted “chart years,” and songs gets ranked in whichever calendar year they racked up the most points. So this next one at #6—it hadn’t cracked the top ten by the end of Billboard‘s 1988 chart year, December 3, but it did the very next week, and by a slim margin, it earned more points in calendar ’88 than ’89, so that’s where we’ve got it—at #6 for 1988. Again, the first of three like that in our ’88 top ten.

It’s from the “bad boy” of ’80s R&B Boy Band New Edition, breaking out solo with a defiant statement of independence that helped launch Producer Teddy Riley’s hot new R&B/Hip-Hop hybrid New Jack Swing. Billboard‘s #2 song of 1989, our #6 for ’88, it’s Bobby Brown’s “My Prerogative.”

Bobby Brown, “My Prerogative,” #6 as we count down the top ten hits of 1988 on this week’s Chartcrush Top Ten Countdown Show. Brown’s old Group New Edition had written the Boy Band playbook in the ’80s, but with his album Don’t Be Cruel, at 18, Bobby was the first New Edition alum to make the leap from Teen Idol to adult Pop Star—as it turned out, the first of many.

Of the album’s five top tens, “My Prerogative” was his manifesto—a swaggering kiss-off to anyone questioning his choices. And those choices kept him in the headlines for years—stormy marriage to Whitney Houston in ’92, drug arrests, rehab stints, and finally in 2005, Being Bobby Brown, the Bravo! reality show that turned their chaos into must-see TV.

#5 George Michael – One More Try

And speaking of Artists breaking out of their Teen Idol image, next up, the Singer from the mid-’80s British Pop Duo Wham! who scored our #1 song of 1987 with the title track off his debut solo album, Faith. “Father Figure” was the second #1 off that album in March of ’88, and then this Soulful Ballad at #5 in our countdown—the third: #1 for three weeks, May into June.

And the week it dropped out of the top spot on the Hot100, it topped the R&B chart, which was a huge deal for a British Singer-Songwriter obsessed with American Soul. Not only did he write all the songs on Faith; he also produced and played all the instruments! At #5 it’s George Michael’s biggest hit of ’88, “One More Try.”

Nearly six minutes, George Michael’s “One More Try” at #5 in our Chartcrush Top Ten Countdown for 1988. He refused to do a single edit, but radio still played it.

Now looking back it seems obvious that George Michael’s songs were about relationships with other men, even though he didn’t actually come out as Gay until his arrest in ’98 for “lewd acts” in a public bathroom in L.A. But in the era of “don’t ask, don’t tell,” even flamboyant Acts like The Village People, Boy George or Frankie Goes to Hollywood—not to mention David Bowie and Elton John—were mostly read as parody, fashion gimmicks, tongue-in-cheek fun, not identity. And George Michael used that wide berth as a lyrical canvas, writing love songs that spoke his truth long before he could say it out loud.

#4 INXS – Need You Tonight

Now as I mentioned at the top of the show, by ’88, that New Wave spark of MTV’s early days—those quirky, Punk-adjacent sounds from ’81 to ’84: all but gone. Some Acts fizzled; others chased glossy Pop and lost their edge. But a handful kept their cool and transitioned to Alt Rock and Billboard‘s Modern Rock chart launched in ’88. Among them these guys—eight top tens on that new chart between ’88 and ’93.

This one was a hit early in ’88 before the chart existed, but it kicked off a run of six consecutive top tens on the Hot100 through ’91. U2 may’ve been the biggest New Wave survivors in the late ’80s, but right behind them, Billboard’s #1 Pop Singles Artist of 1988. At #4 it’s Australia’s INXS with “Need You Tonight.”

“Need You Tonight,” the lead single off INXS’s quadruple-platinum album Kick, #1 for a week at the end of January. Then came the top tens “Devil Inside,” “New Sensation” and “Never Tear Us Apart,” and suddenly they were everywhere. In the Fall they owned the MTV Video Music awards—Rolling Stone calling their performance “the sexiest five minutes on MTV,” while Critics compared Frontman Michael Hutchence to Mick Jagger and Jim Morrison, and music mags put him—solo—on their covers.

That momentum carried deep into the ’90s until Hutchence’s suicide in ’97 stopped them cold. Seven years later, they tried to reboot on the CBS reality show Rock Star: INXS, even scored a modest hit with “Pretty Vegas” with the winner J.D. Fortune singing, but by then, the Pop landscape they’d ruled in ’88 had vanished—and along with it (at least on the charts), the stylish, reckless, swaggering type of Rock star that Hutchence embodied.

#3 Chicago – Look Away

Okay, down to the top three, and back-to-back at numbers 3 and 2, the other two songs in our Chartcrush Top Ten for 1988 in that dense cluster of big hits at the end of the year, that when Billboard unveiled its 1989 year-end Hot100, everyone went “wait, weren’t those on the radio last year!” “My Prerogative” we heard back at #6 was Billboard‘s #2 song of 1989—but this next one was #1. And its two weeks at #1? December of ’88!

Cue collective head shaking and facepalms, and after the uproar, Billboard scrapped its “count the full chart run” method it’d used since ’86 and went back to splitting points between chart years for year-straddling hits for its year-end charts.

So what’s the song that caused all the fuss? Well, here it is, #3 on our 1988 ranking: a Chicago Power Ballad sung not by Peter Cetera, who’d gone on to solo glory, but by Bill Champlin. It’s Diane Warren’s second #1 as a Songwriter after Starship’s “Nothing’s Gonna Stop Us Now” in ’87, “Look Away.”

“My Prerogative” and New Jack Swing—still fresh at the end of ’89 even though the song was an ’88 holdover. But after a year of Paula Abdul and Milli Vanilli in ’89, a Chicago Power Ballad at #1 for the year wasn’t on anyone’s bingo card, so fans and critics alike bristled.

Still, an impressive feat to jettison Peter Cetera and score a #1 hit, and that’s what Chicago did in ’88 with “Look Away.” Cetera scored hits too, of course: “Glory of Love” from Karate Kid Part 2, #1 in 1986, and his duet with Amy Grant, “The Next Time I Fall,” also topped the chart.

#2 Poison – Every Rose Has Its Thorn

Up next at #2, the second in our twofer of late-in-the-year smashes that Billboard ranked in its 1989 year-end Hot100 but by our math here on the Chartcrush Top Ten Countdown Show, scored more points in calendar 1988. It didn’t sound as dated as “Look Away” when it turned up on that ’89 year-end list because, like “My Prerogative,” it was something new: a makeup-caked Hair Metal Band known for punky bangers like their 1987 debut “Talk Dirty to Me,” suddenly out with a stripped down acoustic Message Song. Their first and only #1, three weeks spanning December into January ’89, Poison’s “Every Rose Has Its Thorn.”

“Every Rose Has Its Thorn,” Poison. #2 on our countdown of the top ten hits of 1988 here on The Chartcrush Top Ten Countdown Show. The Acoustic Power Ballad wasn’t new, of course. KISS, Night Ranger, Warrant, White Lion, they’d all gone there, but Poison’s pivot landed like a midlife reckoning: Glam Metal after a decade of wild debauchery, hairspray and pyrotechnics. Within a year MTV launched Unplugged, and even KISS was baring its soul on a stool.

Poison tried it again on their next album in 1990 and got to #4 with “Something to Believe In,” and Extreme stripped things down even further on their #1 in ’91, “More Than Words,” but then the ground shifted with Grunge and Thrash and that was pretty much it for Glam Metal in the top ten.

#1 Steve Winwood – Roll with It

Up next, our #1 song of ’88, and its June to October chart run also landed it in Billboard‘s year-end top ten for ’88—but at #10. Why #10? Well we can’t say for sure since Billboard was factoring unpublished data in its algorithm behind the scenes in the last few years before ditching their 40-year-old survey system and going to actual sales and airplay tallies from Soundscan and Broadcast Data Systems for the 1992 chart year. That underlying data—not public either.

But at Chartcrush we stick to a consistent formula for ranking all years that’s based solely on Billboard‘s published weekly charts—and surprise! Their #10 comes out #1! It’s close—only a few points separated our top three—but four weeks at #1, the most of any ’88 hit, puts it over the top, just barely.

It’s a veteran English Rocker since the ’60s—Spencer Davis Group, Blind Faith, Traffic—now Nashville-based with his American second wife—and the late ’80s were his chart zenith. At #1, it’s Steve Winwood’s second career chart topper after “Higher Love” in ’86, “Roll with It.”

Steve Winwood’s “Roll with It”—our #1 song of 1988—was also the final #1 of Casey Kasem’s original run hosting American Top 40, his syndicated radio countdown since 1970. That’s a tidy punctuation on our generational change theme here on our 1988 edition of Chartcrush. It also topped the Adult Contemporary and Mainstream Rock charts, and was Winwood’s first R&B chart entry since The Spencer Davis Group’s “I’m a Man” in 1967. Oh, and it won him the Grammy for Best Male Pop Vocal Performance.

His Michelob Beer Commercial song “Don’t You Know What the Night Can Do?” also cracked the top ten later in ’88, but from there the hits tapered off, although his 2008 album Nine Lives featuring an Eric Clapton collab debuted at #12—the highest of his career.

Bonus

So that’s our Chartcrush Top Ten, but with all this calendar-year shuffling I’ve been calling out, no surprise that Billboard‘s year-end list doesn’t line up exactly. First, the big one I haven’t mentioned yet: Billboard‘s #1 song of ’88, George Michael’s “Faith.” That, plus their #6 and #7—Whitney Houston’s “So Emotional” and Belinda Carlisle’s “Heaven Is a Place on Earth“—were all late ’87 hits that shift into our ’87 ranking when you go strictly by calendar years.

Then, coming in from Billboard‘s 1989 year-end top ten: Chicago’s “Look Away,” Bobby Brown’s “My Prerogative,” and Poison’s “Every Rose Has Its Thorn.” Those were Billboard‘s top three songs of 1989—but really, they’re ’88 hits.

So, three shuffling out to ’87, three coming in from ’89—well you’d think that evens things out, right? Not quite. There’s still one song from Billboard‘s 1988 year-end top ten that got nudged out of ours just from the way we crunch the numbers.

#21 Breathe – Hands to Heaven

It was their #9 song that racked up 29 weeks on the chart—just one shy of Taylor Dayne’s 30 with “I’ll Always Love You:” the British Sophisti-Pop Group Breathe with “Hands to Heaven.”

Breathe’s “Hands to Heaven” never hit #1 and only had six weeks in the top ten—most of our 1988 Chartcrush hits had seven or eight—yet Billboard ranked it #9 on the year. We’ve got it at #21. Again, Billboard‘s ’88 rankings factored undisclosed data; ours are based purely on weekly chart action.

The one song we heard in our countdown that wasn’t in any Billboard year-end top ten: George Michael’s “One More Try.” They had that one at #11 for ’88.

#22 Anita Baker – Giving You the Best That I Got

And finally in our ’88 edition of Chartcrush, two more songs from Billboard‘s 1989 year-end top ten that were really 1988 hits—five in all, if you’re keeping count. No wonder Billboard went back to splitting chart runs!

At #10 for ’89, the track Chicago Bulls legend Michael Jordan blasted in the locker room before games. Not exactly “Eye of the Tiger“—more smooth, romantic, Jazzy. The sound of late-’80s Adult Contemporary: Quiet Storm. Anita Baker, “Giving You the Best That I Got.”

Anita Baker’s “Giving You the Best That I Got”—peaked at #3 in that jam-packed hit cluster in late ’88. Billboard‘s #10 hit of 1989; on our Chartcrush ’88 ranking, it’s #22.

#15 Will to Power – Baby, I Love Your Way/Freebird Medley

And Billboard‘s #9 song of ’89—also an ’88 hit, but not big enough to crack our Chartcrush Top Ten. On our ’88 ranking it notches in at #15. It’s a medley of two songs that are unrelated except that they’re both Rock cuts from the ’70. Miami DJ-Producer Bob Rosenberg heard one on the radio and it made him think of the other. And under label pressure to make an album, the “Baby I Love Your Way/Freebird Medley” was born. It’s Will to Power.

Will to Power’s “Free Baby Medley,” fusing parts of two mid-’70s Rock classics into a conversation between Lovers—Singer Suzi Carr singing Peter Frampton’s “Baby, I Love Your Way” about missing your partner, and Producer/Mastermind Bob Rosenberg singing Lynyrd Skynyrd’s “Free Bird” about not wanting to be tied down—and it somehow connected and was Billboard‘s #9 hit of 1989; #15 on our Chartcrush ranking for 1988, the calendar year it saw most of its chart action.

And with that, we’re gonna have to wrap up our action-packed 1988 edition of the Chartcrush Top Ten Countdown Show, but hey, if you like what you heard and want more, head on over to our website, chartcrush.com for a written transcript of the show and a link to stream the expanded podcast edition, plus dope extras like our full top 100 chart and interactive line graph of the actual chart runs of the top ten songs. We do all that for every year we count down, from the 1940s to now, and it’s all on that website, again, chartcrush.com.

I’ve been your host, Christopher Verdesi. Thanks for listening, and tune in again next week for another year, and another edition of Chartcrush.

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Welcome to the Chartcrush Top Ten Countdown Show, I’m your host, Christopher Verdesi. Every week we do a deep dive into a year in Pop music and culture and count down the top ten hits according to our exclusive recap of the weekly charts published at the time in Billboard magazine, the music industry’s go-to chart authority. This week on Chartcrush, we’re counting down 2006, the year the last remnants of Pop’s Album Era born in the late ’60s withered away.

Yeah, you could still buy a CD, but CD sales were in freefall, down nearly 40% since 1999 as the illegal filesharing apocalypse continued to gut the music biz. Stores? Vanishing too. FYE, the last mall chain standing, snapping up the corpses of Wherehouse, Sam Goody, Strawberries, Coconuts and others. For music discovery, radio and cable TV still ruled—for the moment—but YouTube and MySpace were coming on strong.

And when you did hear something you liked, odds are you weren’t buying the album; you were downloading just that track, and probably for free on a legally dubious peer-to-peer network like LimeWire or BearShare—although you could spare yourself that hassle and pay 99 cents for a legal, guaranteed glitchless mp3 of your new jam on iTunes. But still, just that à la carte track. Either way, the Album Era was toast.

Artists, though? They weathered it just fine. With CDs collapsing, ticket prices soared, and surprise! So did attendance—up 14%. And grosses? Up a whopping 35%. No wonder Billboard‘s Year in Music issue for ’06 led with tours, not songs or albums. And the biggest winners: Legacy Acts like Madonna, Rolling Stones, Barbra Streisand, U2: Acts with mile-long catalogs and legions of fans to pack stadiums. Concerts weren’t promoting the product anymore; they were the product.

Which was no help to labels, of course, but Ringtones were! In ’06, labels raked in $1.2 billion from Americans downloading 15- to 30-second clips to their Motorola, Nokia, Samsung, or LG flip phones. When the phone rang, you knew who it was from the Ringtone. They’d been around for a few years, and polyphonic MIDI tones even got their own Billboard chart in ’04, but ’06 was the year of the “MasterTone:” actual song clips, finally possible thanks to better phone memory and networks. And fans were happy to shell out up to five times more than iTunes was charging for the full song.

Labels had competition, though. In ’04, startup Jamster unleashed its animated Crazy Frog to sell a ringtone of a guy imitating a motorcycle, and within a year Crazy Frog’s cover of the Beverly Hills Cop theme “Axel F” was #1 for four weeks in the U.K. In the States it only hit #50, but by ’06 you couldn’t turn on a TV without being assaulted by ads with cartoon critters hawking ringtones—Sweetie the Chick, Crazy Cow, Mad Moley the Gopher.

Ringtone companies preferred their own clips, of course—no pesky royalties—but once the latest chart hits were available, cartoon mascots faded fast. And once Artists and Producers started crafting hits for the Ringtone market, the Pop formula shifted: bumper-sticker slogans, and hooks and choruses EQ’d to make tinny Motorola Razr speakers crackle.

Pop learned to write little catchy jingles—for itself! And the obsession with brevity, impact and immediacy didn’t stop with ringtones. It’s the same DNA that would soon drive the EDM-Pop explosion in the early ’10s.

#10 Justin Timberlake featuring T.I. – My Love

Which you can already hear the first rumblings of in our #10 song, by the only Artist that had not one but two songs among Neilsen RingScan’s top ten MasterTones of ’06, and both are in our countdown. The minute people heard Producer Timbaland’s futuristic sounding beat with its trancey strobing synth, they knew: club culture was about to conquer the mainstream—again!

The track first leaked as a lo-fi unmastered mp3 on LimeWire, with a robotic watermark interrupting: “Atlantic Records for T.I. clearance.” Well DJs spun it anyway, the tag became a meme, and someone even made a t-shirt of it! T.I., the Featured Rapper on the song. #10 as we kick off our Chartcrush Countdown of 2006’s top ten hits, Justin Timberlake’s “My Love.”

“My Love,” the second hit off Justin Timberlake’s second solo album FutureSex/LoveSounds. The first and biggest, still to come on our 2006 edition of the Chartcrush Top Ten Countdown Show. T.I. with the Rap verse—his first #1 as well, after two top tens under his own name since debuting in ’04 with his verse on Destiny’s Child’s “Soldier.”

Now don’t look for “My Love” anywhere near the top ten in Billboard‘s year-end Hot100 ranking. It’s third week at #1 was the chart year cutoff, November 25 so most of its run landed in Billboard‘s 2007 chart year and they’ve got it at #61 for 2006 and #26 for ’07. But counting the song’s full chart run as we do for every song in our Chartcrush ranking, it’s the #10 song of 2006.

Hipster music site Pitchfork gave it even more love—#1 on their staff-compiled top 100 songs ranking for ’06, and they declared JT “the new King of Pop,” which raised some eyebrows!

#9 Natasha Bedingfield – Unwritten

So, fun fact: between the Spice Girls and Elton John’s Princess Di tribute in 1997 and early 2006, British Acts went nearly a decade without a U.S. #1, and only a few cracked the top ten—notably Dido with “Thankyou” and Coldplay with “Speed of Sound.” But in February ’06 there were two songs by British Acts in the top ten simultaneously for the first time in nearly five years. Both stayed in the top ten for 11 weeks, and both are in our countdown.

At #9, the one that didn’t get to #1—it peaked at #5—by a Singer whose older brother Daniel had joined that exclusive British early ’00s top tens club in ’02 with his bedroom-produced U.K. Garage hit “Gotta Get Thru This,” and whose younger brother Josh had just turned 14, so the song was his birthday present. At #9 it’s Natasha Bedingfield’s “Unwritten.”

After ’06, Brits made a comeback on the U.S. charts—Snow Patrol, Amy Winehouse, Leona Lewis, Coldplay, and another top ten by Natasha Bedingfield, “Pocketful of Sunshine.” “Unwritten” we just heard at #9—one of the first cracks in the dam, along with the song that was the first #1 by a Brit since ’97, still to come on this week’s edition of the Chartcrush Countdown Show.

Again, “Unwritten” only peaked at #5 on the Hot100, but it got to #1 on the club charts thanks to remixes and was the #2 Airplay hit and the #5 Adult Contemporary hit of the year, also boosted by being the theme song of MTV’s wildly popular The Hills—the docu-soap about 20-something gals figuring out the whole adulting thing in L.A.

#8 Beyoncé featuring Slim Thug – Check on It

At #8, the Female Singer, who, like Justin Timberlake, had been in a massively successful Group at the turn of the millennium, went solo and scored hits—bigger hits than Justin in ’02 and ’03, in fact. But a top-heavy and self-important pop culture establishment that couldn’t agree on much of anything wasn’t quite ready to crown either of them era-defining Superstars—until 2006.

Both their sophomore albums dropped that Fall, but while Justin’s advance singles lit up the charts, this Singer’s first two off her B’Day album stalled, so the coronation had to wait until “Irreplaceable,” ten weeks at #1 into ’07. Her biggest hit of 2006? Not from B’Day at all, but from the end credits of Steve Martin’s Pink Panther reboot, where she co-starred as Pop Diva murder suspect Xania. Left off the soundtrack CD for some reason, it landed on Destiny’s Child’s #1’s compilation. Still a solo track though, featuring Houston Rapper Slim Thug. At #8, Beyoncé’s “Check on It.”

“Check on It,” Beyoncé with Slim Thug, #8 on our 2006 Chartcrush Top Ten Countdown. Bey’s first collab with Producer Swizz Beatz—Ruff Ryders Beatmaker, Label Boss, future Alicia Keys husband. He’d go on to helm three tracks on her B’Day album, including “Ring the Alarm,” which hit #11. But “Irreplaceable” was waiting in the wings—the single that, as one Hip-Hop editor put it, elevated Beyoncé “from princess-in-waiting to a full-fledged queen.”

#7 Sean Paul – Temperature

At #7, the second solo #1 after guesting on Beyoncé’s “Baby Boy” in ’03 by the Kingston DJ who brought Jamaican Dancehall into the American mainstream in ’03 with his breakout hit “Get Busy.” Since then, Daddy Yankee’s “Gasolina” and Shakira’s “La Tortura” had launched Reggaeton into the top 40, so Caribbean club sounds were everywhere in the mid-’00s.

But no one rode the wave higher than our Jamaican Dancehall star, back on top in ’06 laying his rapid-fire patois over Rohan “Snowcone” Fuller’s sleek electronic riddim. A riddim in Dancehall? It’s kind of a public domain backing track or beat for DJs to toast—or rap—over. At #7 it’s Sean Paul’s “Temperature.”

Sean Paul, “Temperature,” the #7 song of 2006. Like “Get Busy” on Lenky’s “Diwali” riddim, Paul turned a hot Jamaican street track into a global smash—his star power translating the culture to U.S. Pop radio. And he wasn’t done: three more top tens in the year after “Temperature”—his own “Give It Up to Me,” plus features with Lil Jon and a young Rihanna in early ’07, just before “Umbrella” made her a superstar.

Then, just when EDM-Pop seemed to have left him behind, he was back with the Tropical House wave in 2016: a U.K. top ten with an up-and-coming Dua Lipa, #1 worldwide with Sia’s “Cheap Thrills,” and another top ten in 2017 on Clean Bandit’s “Rockabye.”

#6 James Blunt – You’re Beautiful

Now earlier I mentioned the ten-year drought of British Acts at #1 on the Hot100. Natasha Bedingfield’s “Unwritten” stalled at #5 but this next song which in the top ten at the same time, climbed slowly for four months until it hit #1 in March—the first U.S. chart-topper by a Brit since Elton John’s “Candle in the Wind 1997.”

And even if you’re of the mind—as we are at Chartcrush—that the Airplay chart better reflects songs’ true popularity in the late ’90s because the Hot100 was excluding songs not out as physical singles in those years, you still have to go back to late ’97—to Chumbawamba’s “Tubthumping“—to find the last U.S. #1 by a Brit.

It was the lead U.S. single from the Singer’s debut album—#1 in the U.K. in the summer of ’05—and Adult Contemporary radio got it scaling up the charts in the U.S. At #6, James Blunt’s “You’re Beautiful.”

“It’s always been portrayed as romantic, but it’s actually a bit creepy,” James Blunt told the U.K. Guardian in 2020 about his biggest hit. He continued to chart in the U.K. ’til 2019 and his next two albums did alright, but after “You’re Beautiful” he never cracked the top 10 again on any Billboard songs chart.

Fun fact, though: before music, Blunt was a Captain in the British Army leading a peacekeeping platoon in Kosovo. When NATO commander Wesley Clark ordered his unit to block Russian forces at the airport serving Kosovo’s capital, Pristina, Britain’s General Mike Jackson famously refused: “I’m not going to start World War Three for you.” So the standoff ended without a shot, and Blunt went on to a very different kind of battlefield: the Pop charts.

#5 The Fray – How to Save a Life

At #5, 2006’s biggest Rock Band on the Hot100, formed at a Christian school in Colorado and boosted early on by Denver’s alternative free weekly Westworld. Local free weeklies, a crucial but often overlooked music-discovery pipeline of the ’80s to ’00s. Their debut single “Over My Head (Cable Car)” broke at Alternative radio in the Fall of ’05 and crossed over to the Hot100, dipping in and out of the top ten through the Spring and Summer.

But then, ABC featured their follow-up on Grey’s Anatomy and used the song for its Season 3 promos in late Summer for the show, and that sync propelled it to #3. Like most Rock crossovers in the ’00s, it makes the top ten on the year on staying power, racking up those ranking points week after week for 58 weeks—19 in the top ten. At #5 it’s The Fray with “How to Save a Life.”

“How to Save a Life,” The Fray at #5 on our Chartcrush Countdown of 2006’s top ten hits. Like Justin Timberlake’s “My Love” we heard at #10, its long chart run split between adjacent Billboard chart years, so they only factored its 31-week ascent up the Hot100, but not the 27 weeks it remained on the chart into their ’07 chart year. Again, at Chartcrush, we factor every song’s full chart run so it’s #5 on our Chartcrush ’06 Countdown instead of a middling #27 where Billboard has it.

“You Found Me,” the lead single off their next album in ’09 spent 39 weeks on the chart and peaked at #7, but the Hot100 was not kind to Rock Bands in the ’10s, and TV syncs, top ten albums and even collabs with Timbaland and Ryan Tedder couldn’t get The Fray back into the top 40. In 2019 they announced a hiatus and Frontman Isaac Slade opened a record shop on an island in Puget Sound.

#4 Daniel Powter – Bad Day

Well, we’ve made it all the way to #4 without mentioning American Idol even once! Hard to believe, because Season Five in 2006 was peak Idol—biggest ratings yet after Season One winner Kelly Clarkson scored three of 2005’s biggest hits off her album Breakaway and proved that the show could mint actual Pop stars. And Season Four winner Carrie Underwood about to be crowned Billboard‘s Top Country Artist of ’06 with the year’s #1 album, Some Hearts.

Season Five’s finalists Chris Daughtry, Taylor Hicks, Katharine McPhee and Kellie Pickler all went on to successful careers, but the only Idol-related single to crack our top ten for ’06 wasn’t sung on the show. It was the song that soundtracked the goodbye montage for every episode’s eliminated contestant. At #4 it’s Daniel Powter’s “Bad Day.”

Now, Billboard has “Bad Day” as 2006’s #1 song, but only because the chart runs of our top two were split across years. Counting them in full—and our #3 hit edging it out in points—Daniel Powter’s opus lands at #4 in our Chartcrush ranking for ’06 we’re counting down this hour.

He recorded it all the way back in 2002, and it hit in the U.K. and Europe in ’05 after it was in a Coke ad, but once contestants started getting voted off American Idol Season Five, it rocketed to #1 in just seven weeks.

Ironically, as a 35-year-old Canadian, Powter wasn’t eligible to compete on Idol and told VH1 that he couldn’t even watch the show: “too sensitive; it’d break my heart,” he said.

Two follow-up singles barely scraped the Adult Pop and AC charts later in ’06, and that was it. Billboard later crowned “Bad Day” the decade’s top one-hit-wonder.

#3 Nelly Furtado featuring Timbaland – Promiscuous

Well we’re down to the top three here on our 2006 Chartcrush Top Ten Countdown, leading off with a pair of hits at numbers 3 and 2 from the year’s MVP Producer, Timbaland, who we already heard one from back at #10, Justin Timberlake’s “My Love.” On these two, though, he’s not just behind the glass; he’s on the mic. Pop Matters‘ Quentin B. Huff dubbed these two songs “fraternal twins.”

Prince and Janet Jackson’s “Nasty” loom large as influences on the one at #3, but the real surprise was the Artist: a Canadian Singer-Songwriter who’d first broken through in the waning days of the Lilith Fair boom in the ’90s with airy, coffeehouse confessionals. Her sultry-but-sweet “I’m like a Bird” was her first hit in 2001, and also her last, until this, which is a hard pivot to slinky, clubby call-and-response. At #3, the lead single off Nelly Furtado’s third album Loose: “Promiscuous.”

The working title for “Promiscuous” was “The BlackBerry Song,” like back-and-forth flirty texts. How 2006 is that? Gwen Stefani had shown in ’05 how an Alt-Girl could crash the Pop mainstream with “Hollaback Girl,” and Nelly Furtado followed suit on Loose, but with Timbaland’s techno sheen and sly chemistry, she carved out her own lane. And then Britney Spears amped up the formula in ’07 on Blackout, the album that foreshadowed Gaga and the EDM-Pop wave.

Loose yielded two more big hits in ’06—”Maneater” and “Say It Right“—and then along with Justin Timberlake she added a verse to Timbaland’s three-way diss track “Give It to Me,” #1 in the Spring of ’07. But after that? Just guest spots, a Spanish-language detour in ’09, and eventually in 2013, a Pop comeback that really didn’t have much of a chance in a landscape crowded with newly minted Female Superstars like Katy Perry, Rihanna, Nicki Minaj, Taylor Swift and Miley Cyrus.

#2 Justin Timberlake – SexyBack

But speaking of Justin Timberlake—by the mid-2000s he was everywhere. Embracing R&B on his solo debut Justified… envelope-pushing comedy sketches on SNL—a certain very un-family-friendly holiday gift sketch which was the most-viewed clip in YouTube’s short life up to that point… Guest spots with Hip-Hop heavyweights… cameos on MTV’s hidden-camera practical joke show Punk’d… the ubiquitous McDonald’s “I’m Lovin’ It” jingle; and of course, he was the guy onstage with Janet Jackson during the infamous Super Bowl wardrobe malfunction in ’04. All of which helped him shed his squeaky-clean *NSYNC image and become Pop culture’s “it” guy.

But the clincher was his ’06 Timbaland-produced album FutureSex/LoveSounds. Its lead single, his biggest hit of 2006, #1 for seven weeks in September and October, a must-have ringtone, and the second half of our Timbaland twofer at numbers 2 and 3 here on the Chartcrush Top Ten Countdown Show. At #2: “SexyBack.”

Well after three and a half years of Hip-Hop and R&B dominance, April 22, 2006 marked the first week since the Fall of ’02 that a majority of the songs in the top ten were by White Artists—the norm for decades until 1991 when Billboard started ranking songs on real sales and airplay data, but a rarity post-SoundScan.

Justin Timberlake found a lane, though—embracing Black music like few Artists since the ’60s—then in ’06 and ’07 as Hip-Hop transitioned between its Bling and Blog Eras, a big factor in that sudden comeback of White Acts in the top ten with his FutureSex/LoveSounds album and its Timbaland-produced top tens “SexyBack” and “My Love”—plus “What Goes Around…Comes Around” and “Summer Love” in ’07.

Rihanna, Kanye West, T-Pain. Flo Rida—and the Teen Singer/Dancer R&B Hearthrob at #1 in our ’06 Chartcrush Countdown—restored that lopsided post-SoundScan racial status quo after mid-’07. But for about a year, JT—along with Nelly Furtado, the Fray, Fergie, and Idol breakouts Carrie Underwood and Daughtry— led a rare pause in an era when Black Artists all but owned the top ten.

#1 Chris Brown – Run It!

And speaking of that Teen Singer/Dancer R&B Hearthrob, our #1 song was the debut single off his debut album. And with four top tens, he was Billboard‘s Top Artist of ’06. Well, duh! But here’s a twist: none of those hits are in their year-end top ten, let alone #1. Explanation for that straight ahead, but first, the song: Producer Scott Storch’s de facto update of Usher’s club anthem “Yeah!,” our #1 song of ’04. And like, “Yeah!,” there’s even an exclamation point in the title! It’s the 17-year-old Michael Jackson heir apparent from Tappahannock, Virginia, Chris Brown: “Run It!”

“Run It!,” #1 on our Chartcrush Countdown of the biggest hits of 2006—Chris Brown. 38 weeks on the Hot100, late August ’05 to mid-May ’06, with 17 in the top ten and five at #1. But that run? Split between Billboard chart years like Justin Timberlake’s “My Love” and The Fray’s “How to Save a Life,” the other two songs we heard this hour that didn’t make Billboard‘s top ten. They’ve got “Run It!” at #16 for ’06 and #42 for ’05. But again, factoring songs’ full chart runs puts Billboard‘s Top Artist of ’06 also at the top of the yearly Hot100 ranking. That’s right where he belongs.

In 2008 it was the opposite. Brown had two songs in Billboard‘s year-end top ten—”With You” and his Wrigley’s Doublemint Gum jingle “Forever,” plus his duet with Jordin Sparks “No Air,” speaking of American Idol breakouts—Sparks was the winner of Idol Season Six in ’07. But all three of those hits, nudged out of our Chartcrush Top Ten for ’08 by that year’s year-straddlers, one of which was our #7 song of ’08, Rihanna’s “Disturbia,” which Chris Brown wrote!

A year after that, of course, Brown brutally assaulted then-girlfriend Rihanna and was sentenced to five years’ probation in the era’s top domestic violence case. But he still managed to chart 36 hits in the 2010’s, 78 if you count his features—including six top tens. No other Male Solo Act who debuted before 2006 had more chart mojo in the ’10s than Chris Brown.

Bonus

Allright, so there ya have ’em: our Chartcrush Top Ten songs of 2006, but we’re not quite done yet because the three year-straddling hits coming in to our top ten (including “Run It!” at #1), displaces three from the top ten on Billboard‘s year-end Hot100 ranking, so in deference to Billboard‘s enormous reach as America’s go-to source for charts, let’s have a look at those.

#16 Chamillionaire featuring Krayzie Bone – Ridin’

At #8, Billboard had the year’s top ringtone hit according to not only that Neilsen Ringscan ranking I mentioned at the top of the show, but the Rapper also got a gold cell phone trophy when the RIAA made it its first-ever multi-plantinum certified Mastertone for its sales of 3.2 million ringtones, and folks started talking about “blingtones.”

Houston, Texas, looming large on Hip-Hop’s heat map in ’06. Slim Thug we heard back at #8 featured on Beyonce’s “Check on It” was from Houston. So was Chamillionaire, and here he is featuring Bone Thugs-n-Harmony’s Krayzie Bone on “Ridin'”

Chamillionaire’s “Ridin’ Dirty” is #16 on our Chartcrush ranking for 2006 but Billboard had it at #8 on the year. But either way, the biggest Rap song of ’06 on the Pop charts, and Weird Al Yankovic’s send-up even cracked the top ten—”White & Nerdy.”

Billboard‘s year-end Hot Rap Songs chart went a different way: Yung Joc’s “It’s Goin’ Down” was #1 on that chart for the year.

#18 Gnarls Barkley – Crazy

Next in our Chartcrush Top Ten Countdown Show bonus segment of songs from Billboard‘s year-end top ten nudged out of ours, it’s Billboard‘s #7 song of ’06, but in ’09, Rolling Stone named it the #1 song of the decade. That’s a subjective ranking, but the song spanned radio formats at a time when Pop had fragmented into dozens of “squabbling niches” and “the idea of a universal pop hit…seemed like a sweet old-fashioned notion,” as Rolling Stone‘s Writer put it. Beloved by everyone “from your mom to your ex-girlfriend’s art professor,” it’s Danger Mouse and CeeLo Green as the short-lived Duo Gnarls Barkley, “Crazy.”

Gnarls Barkley, Producer Danger Mouse who helmed Cartoon Act The Gorillaz’s second album in ’05 and the top 20 hit “Feel Good, Inc.” and Singer CeeLo Green of Atlanta’s Goodie Mob with “Crazy.” #7 on Billboard‘s year-end chart, it notches in at #18 on our Chartcrush ranking we counted down the top ten from earlier in the show—stuck at #2 for seven weeks in late Summer behind Nelly Furtado’s “Promiscuous” and Black Eyed Pea Fergie’s first solo hit “London Bridge.”

#19 Shakira featuring Wyclef Jean – Hips Don’t Lie

And finally, we’ve got another real strong contender for Song of Summer: a Colombian Singer teaming up with a 37-year-old Haitian Rapper and scoring what Neilsen Broadcast Data Systems called the most-played hit in a single week in the history of American radio. It also had the year’s biggest opening-week digital sales, and since those two metrics—airplay and paid downloads—basically defined the Hot100 in 2006, it was Billboard‘s #5 song of the year. Shakira featuring Fugees alum Wyclef Jean, “Hips Don’t Lie.”

Original title, “Dance like This,” written by Wyclef Jean as a Fugees song, but Lauryn Hill didn’t like it, so after Shakira’s people approached him about a collab, it evolved into “Hips Don’t Lie.” At Chartcrush we’ve got it at #19 for 2006 but Billboard‘s got it at #5, probably because of those outsized airplay and download stats I mentioned.

Instead of recapping the weekly charts, in ’92, Billboard started going back to its underlying Nielsen-reported—and highly confidential—sales and airplay data to recap the year, which usually doesn’t create huge discrepancies like that, but looks like it did for Shakira’s “Hips Don’t Lie.”

And with that, we’re gonna have to wrap up our 2006 edition of the Chartcrush Top Ten Countdown Show, but if you like what you heard and want more, head on over to our website, chartcrush.com for a written transcript of the show and link to stream the expanded podcast edition, plus crunk extras like our full top 100 chart and interactive line graph of the actual chart runs of the top ten songs.

’06 not your thing? No problem!—we do all that for every year we count down, from the ’40s to now, all on that website, again, chartcrush.com. I’ve been your host, Christopher Verdesi. Thanks for listening, and tune in again next week for another year, and 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 we dive deep into a year in Pop music and culture and count down the top ten from our exclusive re-ranking of the weekly charts published at the time in Billboard, the music industry’s top trade mag. This week on Chartcrush it’s 1977, a year of deep divides—between genres and generations, fantasy and reality, idealism and cynicism, past and future—nowhere more vivid than on the Pop charts.

’77, of course, the year of Star Wars and Disco—kinetic, escapist fantasies for Americans running low on optimism and neck-deep in what President Jimmy Carter would soon dub a “malaise.”

But alongside the lightsabers and mirror balls, top 40 radio and the charts? Awash in slow, tender Ballads full of heartbreak, innocence, longing. Not just escapist, but retreatist! And there was plenty to retreat from. The economy? Stagnant. Inflation? Rampant. Politics and government? Deeply suspect post-Watergate. Crime? Rising. Cities? Burning and crumbling. Energy costs? Through the roof. The speed limit on highways, capped at 55 since ’74 to save gas, and wouldn’t go back up until the mid ’90s. Carter in his first Oval Office address called the energy crisis “the moral equivalent of war,” then turned down the thermostat to 65, donned a cardigan and put solar panels on the White House.

But for a couple days in July of ’77 in New York, it really did feel like a war when the lights went out in a massive blackout. Fires, mayhem, and looting—especially pro audio shops. And the next week, according to Hip-Hop Pioneer MC Debbie D and many others, “Everybody was a DJ. Everybody.” ’77, also the Summer of the Son of Sam murder spree, turning the Big Apple into a noir nightmare.

And elsewhere? Cleveland, on the verge of default. Detroit, choking on smoke and decline, earning its rep for Devil’s Night fires. Crips and Bloods, ramping up in L.A., where the smog was thicker than the plot of an ABC Movie of the Week.

Elvis Presley died in August—young! Just 42. Boomers mostly shrugged, but for older fans, the unprecedented media spectacle transformed Elvis into a tragic symbol of a vanishing American dream, his death a sobering postscript to early Rock ‘n Roll rebellion.

And in that wake, Nostalgia shows Happy Days and Laverne & Shirley surged in the TV ratings. And also on the tube, new hits like the sex farce Three’s Company, plus The Love Boat and, speaking of fantasy, a show that had it right in the title, Fantasy Island. All those on ABC—redefining itself in the late ’70s as the antidote to CBS’s earlier lineup of Norman Lear social-commentary sitcoms All in the Family, Maude and The Jeffersons. That approach to comedy, seeming a little too heavy by ’77.

And of course, the cresting Disco wave—less a revolt than an alternate universe that went mainstream, with enough DJs spinning records to spawn a whole new format—the 12-inch single: longer, louder mixes tailored for club play. Music for bodies in motion: sweat, sex, glamour, and abandon—the sexual revolution hitting the dancefloor in heels, polyester, Sassoon jeans and Fabergé Brut. Half our ’77 countdown, Disco or Disco-adjacent hits, and Saturday Night Fever didn’t even hit theaters ’til late November.

But as I said at the top, even with Disco booming, many of 1977’s top hits were soft—sentimental, acoustic, Country-inflected: a quieter echo of that same revolution—with emotional openness, romantic ambiguity, confessing anxieties and insecurities in whispers, not shouts.

Overall the Pop charts in ’77 were a soundtrack for emotional limbo—fraying nerves and fading dreams—the future more a question mark than a promise. While the Sex Pistols snarled “No Future” in the U.K., America rode out malaise on rich Corinthian leather seats in softly-lit faux wood-grain appointed sedans, humming along with latest escapist hit Ballad on the radio, while heading out to the disco.

#10 Mary MacGregor – Torn Between Two Lovers

But at least it was an earnest escape: one that clings to love—even the messy kind—as the last refuge of meaning. Which helps explain how an intimate Ballad about a woman caught between two men got all the way to #1 in February. The Singer’s first (and only) hit, co-written and co-produced by Folkie Peter Yarrow—he was the Peter in Peter, Paul and Mary, who mentored her. Kicking off our Chartcrush Countdown of 1977’s top ten hits, at #10, Mary MacGregor’s “Torn Between Two Lovers.”

https://open.spotify.com/track/4qegwB7zI3FAianHx6jHZv

So, she’s telling her husband she’s cheating—but hoping he’ll be cool with it. Pretty brazen—and even the Singer Mary MacGregor found it cringey, blaming the song for her eventual divorce. But surprisingly, “Torn Between Two Lovers” also topped the conservative Easy Listening chart (soon to be rebranded Adult Contemporary), and was top ten Country for five weeks.

Unclear from the lyrics how things work out for her, and no one ever did a sequel or answer song (why on Earth not?!). But in ’79, CBS did borrow the song and title for a TV movie starring Lee Remick and George Peppard, and spoiler alert—in that, she winds up back with hubby.

Mary MacGregor: the first of five Female Solo Acts in our 1977 Chartcrush Countdown. The only other year with that many up to then? 1952. And it wouldn’t happen again ’til 1989. Female Solo Acts in the ’75 and ’76 top tens? Zero. The only women were in Duets or Groups—so, quite the comeback for the ladies in ’77.

#9 Kenny Nolan – I Like Dreamin’

Another theme among ’77’s top hits: fantasy lovers. Two major hits in the year, both by White Guys from L.A. who’d just notched their first #1s as Songwriters in ’75, now stepping into the spotlight as Singer-Songwriters—at the peak of the Singer-Songwriter era.

Alan O’Day’s “Undercover Angel” made it to #1 in July and both records got seven weeks in the top ten, but this one was first, in March, and despite only getting to #3, it logged three more weeks in the top 40, so it comes out ahead on chart points. At #9, Kenny Nolan’s “I Like Dreamin’.”

Kenny Nolan, co-writer with Four Season Bob Crewe, of two back-to-back #1s in 1975: Frankie Valli’s “My Eyes Adored You” and Labelle’s “Lady Marmalade.” Alan O’Day’s first big score before “Undercover Angel” was Helen Reddy’s surreal “Angie Baby,” also in ’75. So two red hot Songwriters going solo and scoring with songs about imaginary lovers, in a year when sex and relationship norms were in flux. The Atlanta Rhythm Section for one was paying attention—their hit titled “Imaginary Lover” put the exclamation point on the trend in early ’78.

Interestingly, 1959, also a banner year for songs about fantasy lovers: Frankie Avalon’s “Venus” and Bobby Darin’s “Dream Lover,” both aimed squarely at inexperienced Teens. And in between, Roy Orbison’s “In Dreams” in ’63 and The Temptations’ “Just My Imagination (Running Away with Me)” in ’71, which the Rolling Stones were busy covering for their 1978 album Some Girls.

#8 Thelma Houston – Don’t Leave Me This Way

Now if you’ve been listening to our Chartcrush 1977 Countdown wondering when the Disco kicks in, it’s time to break out the mirror ball, folks, because we’ve got three in a row, starting with a Motown Singer whose career up to that point had been a string of near-misses.

Set to star in a Dinah Washington biopic inspired by Diana Ross’ Oscar-nominated turn as Billie Holiday in Lady Sings the Blues, but the project got iced when Washington’s family wouldn’t sign off. Then she was first to record the Michael Masser/Gerry Goffin song “Do You Know Where You’re Going To?” But Motown shelved it and Diana Ross scored the hit in ’76 as the Theme of her movie Mahogany.

Finally in ’77, though, the dice rolled her way when Ross passed on this song as the follow-up to her smash “Love Hangover,” and it landed in her lap. #1 for a week at the end of April, at #8 it’s Thelma Houston’s “Don’t Leave Me This Way.”

#8, Thelma Houston, “Don’t Leave Me This Way.” Written by Philly Soul legends Kenny Gamble and Leon Huff and first done by Harold Melvin & The Blue Notes in ’75 with Teddy Pendergrass singing lead, but never released as a single—leaving it for Motown and, after Diana Ross passed, Thelma Houston (no relation to Whitney, by the way).

She never cracked the top 20 again after being catapulted to Disco royalty, but then again, neither did Diana Ross during peak-Disco—no #1’s after “Love Hangover” until “Upside Down” in 1980. Both Singers, though, scored multiple top tens on the Dance charts in the early ’80s after leaving Motown for RCA.

#7 Heatwave – Boogie Nights

Next up in our three-pack of Disco hits here on our 1977 edition of the Chartcrush Top Ten Countdown Show, a record that was in the top ten October and November, five those ten weeks after Billboard‘s October 29 cut-off for its 1977 “chart year” and not counted, so on their official year-end Hot100, it’s only #93—one of dozens of smashes over the years that’ve fallen through the cracks, only because of when on the calendar they were hits.

Now, at Chartcrush, we don’t do “chart years.” Instead, we factor every song’s full run on the weekly charts into whichever year it got the most ranking points, so we’ve got this one at #7 for ’77, not #93!

It’s a group formed in Germany, fronted by U.S. Serviceman Johnnie Wilder, built around the songs and keyboards of an unknown Brit named Rod Temperton—who in just three years would be working with Quincy Jones and writing “Rock with You,” “Off the Wall,” and “Thriller” for Michael Jackson. Rounding out the lineup, Wilder’s brother Keith from Dayton, Ohio, plus another Brit, a Czechoslovakian, a Jamaican and a Bass Player from Switzerland.

They made their debut album in ’76 after moving to London, and our #7 song hit in the U.K. in January ’77—but took nearly a full year to catch on in the States. And no thanks to Discos—at least not the elite ones Billboard was surveying for its National Disco Action chart at the time. It barely cracked that chart at #36. But it was a huge Pop hit, #2 for two weeks in November while the unstoppable juggernaut we’ll be hearing later at #1 was racking up its record-breaking ten weeks at the top of the Hot100. At #7, it’s Heatwave’s “Boogie Nights.”

Heatwave, “Boogie Nights” at #7 on our Chartcrush Countdown of 1977’s top ten hits—again, not a song you were likely to hear in an upscale disco in ’77—DJ’s preferring sleek, orchestrated, rhythmically consistent tracks for seamless mixing and a continuous, hypnotic 4/4 pulse. Even Kool & The Gang, edged out of Discos for the same reason, until “Ladies Night” in late ’79.

Heatwave scored two more big hits in ’78, the Slow Jam wedding perennial “Always and Forever” and another funky Banger, “The Groove Line.” But once Rod Temperton got snapped up by Quincy Jones to write for Michael Jackson and became one of the most in-demand R&B songwriters, Heatwave—unlike Kool & The Gang—couldn’t keep the momentum going into the ’80s.

And hey, if you’ve ever wondered why “Boogie Nights” isn’t in the 1997 movie of the same name starring Mark Wahlberg about the rise of the Porn industry in the ’70s? Well, Frontman Johnnie Wilder became a born-again Christian after a car crash in 1979 left him paralyzed—and he vetoed it.

#6 Leo Sayer – You Make Me Feel like Dancing

Next at #6, another Brit whose first U.K. hit took a few months to catch on in the States back in ’74 and ’75: the quirky “Long Tall Glasses.” But by late ’76, he was well-known enough that this one charted on both sides of the Atlantic more or less simultaneously.

He’s the other Male Singer who rode his falsetto to Pop glory in the late ’70s—Barry Gibb, of course, the one you think of, and the Bee Gees did blaze that trail with “You Should Be Dancing,” their first of their many hits with a falsetto lead. That peaked in September of ’76. But on the eve of Saturday Night Fever and “Stayin’ Alive,” this guy pretty much had the falsetto lane all to himself with back-to-back #1’s in early ’77. At #6, the first of them. It’s Leo Sayer with “You Make Me Feel like Dancing.”

Leo Sayer here on our 1977 edition of Chartcrush—another year-straddler, its first two weeks in Billboard‘s 1976 chart year, not ’77, and in Billboard‘s year-end ranking, that made the difference. It missed the top ten at #13. But factoring its full run with our Chartcrush ranking method, it’s #6.

Ray Parker, Jr., reportedly the actual writer of “You Make Me Feel like Dancing.” He said he gave it to a label exec, and when the record came out, his name was nowhere to be found. And it went on to win Best R&B Song at the Grammys! Parker landed on his feet, though—two top tens in ’78 and ’79 with his Group Raydio, two more solo in ’81 and ’82, and then “Ghostbusters” in ’84, which got him sued for ripping off Huey Lewis’ “I Want a New Drug.”

Leo Sayer followed up in ’77 with the Ballad “When I Need You“—his second back-to-back #1 in May—and then after a three-and-a-half year top 20 drought, he ditched the falsetto and donned a New Wave-y pink jacket for one last top ten, “More Than I Can Say,” in 1980.

#5 Crystal Gayle – Don’t It Make My Brown Eyes Blue

OK, so that wraps our three-pack of Disco hits, but next up at #5, our third year-straddler in a row that you won’t find in the top ten on any Billboard year-end Hot100, again, because their chart runs got split between Billboard‘s “chart year” ranking periods. “Boogie Nights” and “You Make Me Feel Like Dancing,” split between the 1976 and ’77 chart years; this next one—plus one more still to come in the countdown—’77 into ’78.

To this day, Billboard caps its chart year early to give themselves time to get the rankings out by New Years, but at Chartcrush, without a publishing deadline we get to factor songs’ full chart runs—even if they end the following Spring—and correct the record.

And in this case give proper due to a Singer who scored her first hit on the Country chart in 1970, “I’ve Cried (The Blue Right Out of My Eyes),” written for her by her older Sister, none other than Country Legend Loretta Lynn. Her first Pop crossover was her first Country #1 in ’76, “I’ll Get Over You,” but in ’77, she put the blue right back in her eyes when she scored the biggest Pop hit by an already-established Country Singer since Glen Campbell’s “Rhinestone Cowboy” in ’75. At #5, it’s Crystal Gayle with “Don’t It Make My Brown Eyes Blue.”

’77, a big year for Country crossovers. Crystal Gayle’s “Don’t It Make My Brown Eyes Blue,” the biggest at #5 in our Chartcrush Top Ten Countdown. Glen Campbell’s “Southern Nights” and Kenny Rogers’ “Lucille” were earlier in the year, and just as “Brown Eyes” slipped out of the top ten, Dolly Parton made her move with “Here You Come Again,” on her way to #3 for two weeks in early ’78.

Crystal Gayle never scored another Pop hit quite that big, but she did crack the top 20 a couple more times before the end of the decade. And for the record, her eyes are blue, but it was her floor-length hair that really had people talking in ’77 and beyond.

#4 Barbra Streisand – Love Theme from A Star Is Born (Evergreen)

At #4, the second #1 hit by a Superstar who was already the first woman to complete the EGOT grand slam—E-G-O-T: Emmy, Grammy, Oscar and Tony awards. She won the Best Actress Oscar in ’69 for Funny Girl, and an honorary Star of the Decade Tony the next year, after racking up Emmys and Grammys aplenty in the ’60s.

But this next song—co-written with lyricist Paul Williams—made her the only Artist ever to win Academy Awards both for Acting and Songwriting when it took Best Song at the ’77 Oscars. She also starred in the movie it was from, A Star Is Born, opposite Kris Kristofferson—her second time taking a Movie Ballad to #1. The first? “The Way We Were” in ’74.

This one ended a three-year top 40 dry spell for her and kicked off a run on the charts that kept her in the spotlight through the Disco era and into the early ’80s. At #4, it’s Barbra Streisand’s “Love Theme from A Star Is Born (Evergreen).”

The 2018 remake of A Star Is Born also yielded a #1 hit and Best Song Oscar—”Shallow,” sung by co-stars Lady Gaga and Bradley Cooper. Gaga as Lead Songwriter got the Oscar and was one of the nominees for Best Actress. Had she won, she would’ve matched Barbra’s historic feat, but Olivia Colman got the nod for The Favourite, so Streisand remains the only Artist ever to win for both Acting and Songwriting.

#3 Emotions – Best of My Love

Now Earth, Wind and Fire didn’t crack the top ten again after their #1 breakthrough in ’75, “Shining Star” and their #5 “Sing a Song” in ’76 until their late-’70s run starting in ’78. But our next song at #3 is an EWF record in all but name—they wrote it, produced it, and most of them played on it.

The voices, though, belonged to a Chicago Sister Act—Wanda, Sheila and Pamela Hutchinson. Performing since 1958, recording since ’62, and from ’69 to ’75, on Volt Records—same label as the late Otis Redding—where Isaac Hayes and Dave Porter were their Producers. But nothing charted higher than #39 until this. Bigger than any Earth, Wind and Fire single ever, at #3, it’s The Emotions with “Best of My Love.”

The Emotions’ “Best of My Love,” #3 on our Chartcrush Top Ten Countdown for 1977—their second single after Stax-Volt dissolved in ’75. Earth, Wind and Fire’s Maurice White snapped them up for Columbia Records and produced their comeback.

Fellow Stax alum Johnnie Taylor also landed on Columbia and scored the first-ever Platinum-certified single with “Disco Lady” in ’76.

And for the record, the hit that broke Earth, Wind and Fire’s own top ten dry spell? A Beatles cover: “Got to Get You into My Life,” from the Sgt. Pepper’s movie soundtrack in ’78. The Fab Four’s own version from Revolver 1966, put out as a single in 1976 and it got to #7—by far their biggest hit, post-breakup.

#2 Andy Gibb – I Just Want to Be Your Everything

Well we’re down to #2 in the countdown, and it’s the song with the longest chart run of ’77—31 weeks, 26 of those in the top 40, and a record-tying 16 in the top ten. But that record didn’t last long: just a few months later, the Singer’s older Brothers, Barry, Robin and Maurice, broke it with “How Deep Is Your Love” from Saturday Night Fever.

The Brothers, of course, The Bee Gees, and like Earth, Wind and Fire’s Maurice White with the Emotions we just heard at #3, Barry Gibb wrote, co-produced and sang backup on the song—and it was a bigger hit than anything the Bee Gees had done up ’til then. At #2, the debut single off the debut album by then-19-year-old Andy Gibb, “I Just Want to Be Your Everything.”

Now earlier Bee Gees hits like “Jive Talkin’” in ’75 had already demonstrated that that sound—the tight falsettos, breezy grooves and slick production—could slay on the chart. But after Andy Gibb’s “I Just Want to Be Your Everything,” it was everywhere—three #1s for the Bee Gees from Saturday Night Fever, two more for Andy in ’78. And all—same Producers (Barry Gibb, Albhy Galuten and Karl Richardson); same label (RSO Records), and even the same studio: Criteria in North Miami.

And Andy? Instant Tiger Beat Teen royalty, along with Actors-turned-Singers Leif Garrett and Shaun Cassidy, who both took covers of early-’60s hits up the charts in ’77: “Da Doo Ron Ron” for Cassidy, and “Surfin’ U.S.A.” and “Runaround Sue” for Garrett.

By the way, Billboard declared “I Want to Be Your Everything” “Song of the Summer” for 1977, which is a no-brainer on chart points. But doesn’t Meco’s discofied “Star Wars Theme” rate at least an honorable mention? Who cares that its two weeks at #1 were in October?!

#1 Debby Boone – You Light Up My Life

So #1 on our Chartcrush Top Ten Countdown for 1977: it’s the Pop juggernaut I’ve been teasing all hour. Ten weeks atop the Hot100, breaking the 18-year-old record of nine shared by Bobby Darin’s “Mack the Knife” in 1959, Percy Faith’s “Theme from a Summer Place” in 1960 and The Beatles’ “Hey Jude” in ’68. But going forward, the record of ten weeks stood until Boyz II Men’s “End of the Road” in 1992, tied only once by Olivia Newton-John’s “Physical” in ’82.

Its run at #1, all in calendar 1977—October to mid-December—but all but three of those weeks, after Billboard‘s cut-off for the ’77 chart year, so they’ve got it at #3 for 1978—more “chart year” straddling weirdness. But it’s the reason Heatwave’s “Boogie Nights” and Crystal Gayle’s “Don’t It Make My Brown Eyes Blue” didn’t hit #1, and the Singer never even had a hit before! At #1, Debby Boone’s “You Light Up My Life.”

Well when you add it all up, not just the #1 song of 1977, but of the ’70s decade! Debby Boone: Daughter of ’50s Pop Idol Pat Boone, and Granddaughter of Country Legend Red Foley. But her version of “You Light Up My Life?” A cover—of the title song from a hit movie, originally sung on the soundtrack by Ukrainian-American Session Singer Kacey Cisyk. And both versions have the identical backing track produced by the film’s Writer-Director-Composer Joe Brooks.

The story goes that when Cisyk rebuffed Brooks’ advances, he put her version on the B-side of his instrumental single from the soundtrack album, credited only to “Original Cast,” and brought in Debby Boone to re-do the vocal for a proper single release—all to avoid paying Cisyk any royalties. Well, after the song was a runaway smash, Cisyk sued—and won—and years later, Brooks took his own life while awaiting trial for multiple sexual assault charges.

Boone, a devout Christian who talked openly about her faith, never cracked the top 40 again—maybe a little too straight-laced even for the late-’70s. But she found her footing and thrived on the Country and Contemporary Christian charts into the ’80s.

Bonus

Now as I mentioned, most of “You Light Up My Life’s” chart run was after Billboard‘s October 29 cutoff for 1977 and they’ve got it at #3 on the year 1978. But Billboard‘s #1 song of 1977 was also a year straddler—Rod Stewart’s “Tonight’s the Night,” #1 for eight weeks mid-November ’76 to January 1, ’77, so we’ve got that one where it belongs: #1 on the year 1976: an even swap in the top ten—one coming in from ’78, another shifting to ’76.

But remember our three year-straddlers in a row at numbers 7, 6 and 5 that came into our top ten, but weren’t in Billboard‘s? Quick review: Heatwave’s “Boogie Nights,” #7; Leo Sayer’s “You Make Me Feel like Dancing,” #6; and Crystal Gayle’s “Don’t It Make My Brown Eyes Blue,” #5. Well those three coming in to our Chartcrush Top Ten, of course, means three other songs from the top ten on Billboard‘s official published year-end top ten, bumped from ours, so to be thorough, let’s have a look at those in our bonus segment.

#11 Alan O’Day – Undercover Angel

At #9, Billboard had the other ’77 hit about a fantasy lover by a Songwriter-turned-Singer-Songwriter from L.A. We heard Kenny Nolan’s “I Like Dreamin'” back at #9; here’s Alan O’Day’s “Undercover Angel.”

Alan O’Day’s “Undercover Angel” just misses our Chartcrush ’77 top ten at #11—#9 on Billboard‘s year-end tally. His follow-up later in ’77 stalled at #73, but he resurfaced in the 1980s co-writing over 100 songs for the Saturday morning Muppet Babies TV show.

#12 Rita Coolidge – (Your Love Has Lifted Me) Higher and Higher

Next up, the Backup Singer who in 1970, dated both Stephen Stills and Graham Nash of Supergroup Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young—one right after the other. Well that was some drama! Maybe she should’ve sung “Torn Between Two Lovers!” But by ’77 she’d been married for four years to Kris Kristofferson—Streisand’s leading man in A Star Is Born—and scoring her own top ten hits, the first of which peaked at #2 in September behind “Best of My Love” and was #8 on Billboard‘s year-end ranking. It’s Rita Coolidge’s “(Your Love Has Lifted Me) Higher and Higher.”

“(Your Love Keeps Lifting Me) Higher and Higher,” a #6 hit for Soul Legend Jackie Wilson in 1967, re-titled to “(Your Love Has Lifted Me) Higher and Higher” for Rita Coolidge’s mid-tempo cover in 1977—Billboard‘s #8 song of the year; it shakes out at #12 on our Chartcrush ranking.

#13 Hot – Angel in Your Arms

And finally in our bonus segment of songs that made Billboard‘s year-end top ten in ’77, but not our Chartcrush top ten we counted down earlier, a Soul Trio that hit up their Producers for a Country song, and they supplied one of their own—and after five months climbing the charts, it peaked at #6 for two weeks in July. Longevity like that, always rewarded in year-end rankings—even if a song doesn’t crack the top 5 on the weekly chart. Billboard‘s #5 song of 1977 is Hot’s “Angel in Your Arms.”

One-hit wonder Hot’s “Angel in Your Arms,” Billboard‘s #5 song of 1977, notches in at #13 on our Chartcrush ranking.

And that’s all we’ve got for you here on our 1977 edition of the Chartcrush Top Ten Countdown Show. I’ve been your host, Christopher Verdesi.

Hey, if you like what you heard this hour, head over to our website, chartcrush.com for a transcript of the show and a link to stream the podcast version, plus foxy extras like our full top100 chart and interactive line graph of the Billboard chart runs for the top10 hits. We do that for every year, 1940s to now, and it’s all on that website—again, chartcrush.com. Meanwhile, thanks for listening, and tune in again next week, same station, same 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 we unpack a year in Pop music and culture and count down the top ten hits, based on our exclusive ranking of the weekly charts published at the time in Billboard, the music industry’s definitive trade mag.

This week, we’re turning the clock back to one of the most turbulent and transformative years in American history: 1968, kicking off with a shock in Vietnam: the Tet Offensive, which shattered the illusion that America was winning that war. Viet Cong forces launched surprise attacks across South Vietnam, even breaching the U.S. embassy in Saigon.

Half a million American troops were on the ground in ’68, and more than 100,000 of them had been drafted—mostly working-class and minority men not eligible for student deferments. Antiwar protesters had already drawn tens of thousands, mostly young people, but after Tet, even Americans who’d supported the war began to question it. Walter Cronkite, for one—the most trusted man in news—who broke precedent and opined on air that Vietnam was likely to end in a stalemate.

“If I’ve lost Cronkite, I’ve lost middle America,” President Johnson reportedly said, and not long after he dropped out of the presidential race. From there things got darker. Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated in April, and cities still on edge after the “Long Hot Summer” of race riots in 1967 erupted again, notably D.C., Baltimore, and Chicago. Two months later, candidate Bobby Kennedy, gunned down after a victory speech in L.A., and in August the Democratic National Convention turned Chicago into a warzone—protestors clashing with Mayor Daley’s riot police downtown.

And all of it—the War, the protests, the riots, even the assassinations—right there in your living room, “brought to you in living color,” as one network liked to say, right between Laugh-In, Bonanza, and The Beverly Hillbillies. Youth favorite Star Trek, also renewed for a third season in ’68 after a letter-writing campaign—the first time young people swayed a major TV network like that.

And in music, longtime D.C. Bureau Chief Mildred Hall on the front page of Billboard‘s 1968 year in music issue, urging Congress to pay more attention because in the late ’60s, songs weren’t just about dancing and romancing anymore; they were battle cries of a generation demanding a voice in how things were run.

Dad in tie and crew cut; son in fringe jacket, love beads and long hair—the iconic image of the ’60s generation gap, and on the charts in 1966, zero records in common between the year-end top tens on the Hot100 and Billboard‘s chart for adult hits, Easy Listening, later rechristened “Adult Contemporary.” Only one in common in ’67, but in ’68 we’ll be counting down here in a minute, four.

No, Hippies weren’t suddenly grooving to Mantovani, Sinatra and Patti Page, and grownups didn’t reject their pre-Rock ‘n Roll icons, but the seismic cultural churn as Boomers flooded the zone left the old Pop world in the dust, fading in the rearview as caftans and peace sign pendants started showing up at PTA meetings; mustaches, sideburns and Nehru jackets at the office. And dinner parties ditched martinis and cigars for Chablis, fondue, and incense. Hey, a little grooviness went a long way in the ‘burbs.

#10 Archie Bell and The Drells – Tighten Up, Part 1

Another thing that sounded fresh and exciting coming out of the radio in ’68: Funk. Sly and the Family Stone’s first hit “Dance to the Music,” debuted on the charts in February, and James Brown’s biggest hit since 1965—”I Got the Feelin’,” appeared in March, and both were together in the top ten for a week in April, but another hit by an unknown group from Houston that was also in the top ten that week passed them both to become the first ever #1 Funk record, for two weeks in May. At #10 as we kick off our 1968 edition of the Chartcrush Top Ten Countdown Show, it’s Archie Bell & The Drells’ “Tighten Up.”

No protest or dreamy flower-power imagery. No sitars. No acid. No Folk harmonies or lush strings; just a beat, a groove, and Archie Bell emceeing. “Tighten Up,” #10 on our Chartcrush countdown of 1968’s top ten hits, sprinting ahead of James Brown and Sly Stone to become the first #1 Funk record.

A B-side on the tiny Houston label it first came out on, but Atlantic Records issued it nationally as an A-side. The “Tighten Up” dance that inspired the record, something Bell’s bandmate came up with for Archie to dance away his blues after getting his draft notice, and by the time the record topped the charts, he was already in uniform.

#9 Simon and Garfunkel – Mrs. Robinson

Next up at #9, the record that replaced “Tighten Up” at #1 for three weeks in June.

Now, Folk didn’t just survive the British Invasion. It adapted, evolved, and thrived. A force on the Pop charts since 1950, when The Weavers came out of nowhere with four top-five hits in under a year, including the chart-topping “Goodnight Irene.” That run ended with blacklisting at the height of McCarthyism, but Folk surged back in ’58 when a previously unknown Beatnik Coffee Shop Act from San Francisco, the Kingston Trio, took their album cut, “Tom Dooley,” into the top ten for 12 weeks, and from there the Folk Revival exploded— Peter, Paul and Mary, Highwaymen, Brothers Four, Rooftop Singers, New Christy Minstrels—all with major hits on the Pop charts in the early ’60s.

Then in ’65, The Byrds and Turtles, Bob Dylan going electric on Highway 61 Revisited and its six minute hit “Like a Rolling Stone.” The Mamas & Papas and Donovan in ’66. Youth-driven, mostly—but not entirely. While most mid-’60s Pop hits didn’t cross over to Adult Easy Listening, Folk Acts often did. In ’64, Gale Garnett’s “We’ll Sing in the Sunshine;” We Five’s “You Were on My Mind” in ’65, and in ’66, Staff Sgt. Barry Sadler’s “Ballad of the Green Berets“—a pro-military anthem, yes, but unmistakably Folk—#1 Easy Listening for five weeks and the #1 hit of the year on the Hot100.

So when Director Mike Nichols needed music for The Graduate, his movie about a recent College Grad adrift in suburban affluence and questionable affairs, Folk-Rock wasn’t just a good fit, it was the only fit. And Nichols already had a favorite Act: a cerebral, moody East Coast Duo whose music—”Scarborough Fair,” “April Come She Will,” plus their breakout hit from ’66, “The Sound of Silence“—became the film’s sonic palette. But he also got something new—just a demo, but once the movie hit theaters, they finished it, and it wound up their biggest hit yet, and Mike Nichols won Best Director at the Oscars. At #9, Simon & Garfunkel’s “Mrs. Robinson.”

In The Graduate, 21-year-old Benjamin returns home after graduating college and is seduced by his Dad’s Law Partner’s Wife, Mrs. Robinson. Oscar-nominated performances by Dustin Hoffman and Anne Bancroft. But the lyrics of the song “Mrs. Robinson” have nothing to do with “murky generational politics” as Movie Critic Roger Ebert put it. Or youth alienation. Or a 40-something Suburban Cougar.

Until the title was changed for the mostly wordless rush demo version in the movie, it was, according to Paul Simon, an unfinished Nostalgia piece “about times past” and Mrs. Roosevelt, the late widow of President Franklin Roosevelt. And once you know that, the lyrics make a lot more sense.

Well, mostly. “Coo-coo-ca-choo” was borrowed from The Beatles’ “I Am the Walrus.” The Fab Four’s Magical Mystery Tour soundtrack, in the top 20 on the album chart for most of the first half of ’68. Still, adults appreciated the shout out to their glory days: “Mrs. Robinson” got to #4 on the Easy Listening chart.

#8 John Fred and His Playboy Band – Judy in Disguise (With Glasses)

Next on our Chartcrush Top Ten Countdown of 1968’s top ten hits, a record that entered the Hot100 around Thanksgiving of 1967, way too late to rank in Billboard‘s 1967 year-end Hot100 tally. But also too early to have its rise up the chart factored into their 1968 ranking. So not counting those weeks, Billboard has it at just #25 for ’68. Now here at Chartcrush, we always factor every song’s full chart run, ranking it in the calendar year it saw most of its chart action, so year-straddling hits never fall through the cracks, unlike in Billboard to this day, so it’s our #8 song of ’68.

And speaking of Beatles influences, one Group in Baton Rouge, Louisiana was listening a lot to Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, especially the third song, “Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds,” often misheard at the time as “Lucy in Disguise with Diamonds.” In the top ten end of December ’67 to mid-February ’68, #1 for two weeks in January, here’s John Fred & His Playboy Band’s Sgt. Pepper’s-inspired Novelty hit, “Judy in Disguise (With Glasses).”

John Fred and His Playboy Band charted their first record in 1959, but were strictly a regional Louisiana Act until “Judy in Disguise (With Glasses),” #8 on our Chartcrush Countdown of 1968’s top ten hits, so they’re mostly remembered as a one-hit wonder, and the song a period Novelty. But it was one of the first seeds of the flamboyant, genre-melding Piano-Pop that ruled in the early ’70s thanks mainly to Elton John. It’s all there: Bernie Taupin’s tongue-in-cheek pastiche and dense, borderline nonsense in the lyrics, the Louisiana Swamp-Pop drawl that’s authentic in John Fred’s case, but not so much on Elton’s “Crocodile Rock,” “Honky Cat” and “Bennie and the Jets.”

“Judy in Disguise” was the first national hit for the New Orleans-based Paula label, but by ’69, John Fred was on MCA’s Uni label out of L.A., soon to be joined there by Elton himself for his first U.S. hits in 1970.

#7 Herb Alpert – This Guy’s in Love with You

So Adult hits, far and few between at the top of Pop singles charts in the mid ’60s, before grownups started to embrace youthful grooviness. But until The Monkees scored the top two albums of 1967, except for The Beatles, the top ten on Billboard‘s year-end Album charts—still mostly a bastion for the over-30 hi-fi set: Soundtracks, Folk, Barbra Streisand, and our Act at #7, a Latin Jazz Band led by its Trumpeter who from October 16, 1965 to April 29, 1967, had at least one album in the Top 10. That’s 81 consecutive weeks. Only The Kingston Trio and Peter, Paul and Mary had had longer runs up ’til then, notably both Folk Acts.

In ’68 he did a network TV special—same title as his new album just out, The Beat of the Brass—and despite not being a Singer, for the show’s finale he worked up a soft focus vid walking in the woods with his Wife singing this song to her. Well, the switchboard lit up as soon as it aired and just weeks later, the record was #1, where it stayed for four weeks—ten on the Easy Listening chart. At #7, Herb Alpert on trumpet and lead vocals—no Tijuana Brass needed, his Band—”This Guy’s in Love with You.”

Songwriters Burt Bacharach and Hal David were newly signed to the label Herb Alpert co-founded in 1962 with Record Exec Jerry Moss, A&M. That’s short for Alpert and Moss. And they had no plans for “This Guy’s in Love with You” until Alpert asked them if they had any leftovers laying around. Bacharach did the arrangement, the video aired in that prime-time special, the single came out, and it was not only Alpert’s first #1 single, but also the label’s and Bacharach & David’s, after literally dozens of chart entries back to the late ’50s, most notably Dionne Warwick’s string of top10s. Not bad for a “leftover!”

#6 Diana Ross and The Supremes – Love Child

Well we’re counting down the top ten hits of 1968 here on this week’s edition of Chartcrush, and at #6 we have the other year-straddling hit that fell through the cracks on Billboard‘s year-end rankings. Like “Judy in Disguise” we heard at #8, several weeks of its run were outside Billboard‘s 1968 chart year and not counted. But unlike “Judy,” which began its run in ’67 and went into ’68, this one’s last seven weeks were in Billboard‘s 1969 chart year, so it only shakes out a at #27 on their ’68 ranking. But factoring that full run puts it at #6.

Only one Act besides The Beatles scored ten or more #1s in the ’60s. The Fab Four had 18; these gals had 12. Things had been a little shaky for them after the Crew who wrote and produced the first ten—Lamont Dozier and Brothers Brian and Eddie Holland, H-D-H—fell out with Motown Boss Berry Gordy, Jr. Their first post H-D-H single only got to #30. Yikes! That after only one of their singles back to the Summer of ’64 failing to crack the top ten. “Nothing but Heartaches” peaked at #11 in ’65, sandwiched between their #1s “Back in My Arms Again” and “I Hear a Symphony.”

But in response, Gordy tapped four of Motown’s top behind-the-scenes talents, dubbed “The Clan,” and they came up with this, a rare triumph in the annals of “committee decisions.” At #6 it’s The Supremes, newly rechristened Diana Ross & The Supremes, their 11th #1 hit, “Love Child.”

No, Diana Ross & The Supremes and the five Motown Big Shots (including himself) that Berry Gordy, Jr. tasked with coming up with their next hit were not tapping into beads, incense and Aquarian Hippie vibes; “Love Child” was a pejorative for a child born out of wedlock in the ’60s, especially among Black folks. Diana Ross herself was a “Love Child,” and the emotional urgency of her performance of a song that tackled a serious social issue opened up a new chapter.

When they unveiled the song on The Ed Sullivan Show, gone were the shiny matching gowns and glamourous bouffant hairdos. These new Supremes, with Cindy Birdsong replacing Florence Ballard and Ross officially out front, sang in pants and bare feet, and a shabby yellow oversized sweatshirt for Ross.

“Love Child,” replaced at #1 after two weeks by Marvin Gaye’s “I Heard it Through the Grapevine,” another year-straddling Motown hit that was #1 the last three weeks of calendar ’68, but those weeks, after Billboard‘s cut-off for the chart year, so it’s not ranked at all for ’68, and just #86 for 1969 in Billboard.

Counting songs’ full chart runs, “Love Child” is #6 on our Chartcrush ranking for ’68 we’re counting down the top ten from this hour, and “Grapevine,” with its seven total weeks at #1? Well that comes out the #1 song of 1969!

#5 Otis Redding – (Sittin’ On) The Dock of the Bay

Our #5 song this week logged all its chart points in 1968, so Billboard and Chartcrush are mostly in agreement: they have it one notch higher at #4. A record that made history, recorded just three days before the Artist’s plane went down in a Wisconsin lake on approach in December ’67.

Yes, other stars had died suddenly at or before the peak of fame—Glenn Miller, Buddy Clark, Hank Williams, Buddy Holly, Ritchie Valens and the Big Bopper in the “Day the Music Died,” plus Patsy Cline, Sam Cooke—but none had a #1 hit after their death, so this was the first posthumous #1 in Pop chart history. At #5: Otis Redding, “(Sittin’ On) The Dock of the Bay.”

Otis Redding made his name touring the Chitlin’ Circuit in the segregated South and did well enough to buy his 300-acre Big O ranch in Georgia, but his raw, electrifying Soul hits for Memphis’s Stax and Volt labels crossed racial lines just as the Civil Rights movement and Motown were breaking down barriers nationwide. By ’66, he was touring Europe and headlining L.A.’s Whisky a Go Go, a Rock venue, which culminated in his transcendent finale at the Monterey Pop Festival in ’67, backed by Booker T. & The M.G.’s, playing to what he called “The Love Crowd.”

“(Sittin’ On) The Dock of the Bay” was a song for them, inspired by Sgt. Pepper—Otis reaching beyond Soul toward something more universal. And his label, his Band, even his Wife hated it, but it was bold, and timely. Radio stations on both sides of the racial divide were hungry for crossover hits. So that, plus news of his untimely death, made it his first #1. He hadn’t even cracked the Top 20 before.

#4 The Rascals – People Got to Be Free

And speaking of Pop-R&B crossover, at #4 on our Chartcrush countdown of 1968’s top ten hits, the Act Rolling Stone later called “the Blackest White group” in music, with a hit they wrote and recorded as riots erupted in cities across America following the assassination of Dr. King. It also cracked the top 20 on the R&B chart, and they announced that they’d no longer play any gig without a Black Act also on the bill.

The song, a plea for tolerance and understanding that climbed to #1 in mid-August and stayed five weeks as the Democrat Convention in Chicago devolved into a street brawl as Mayor Daley’s blue-helmeted Riot Cops cracked down hard on Hippie Protesters. A better fit for that footage: the #2 song for three of those weeks, Steppenwolf’s Biker Anthem “Born to Be Wild,” but on top, our #4 song, The Rascals’ “People Got to Be Free.”

No American mid-’60s Singles Act with the possible exception of Tommy James & The Shondells worked harder to adapt to the changing times in the late ’60s than The Young Rascals, dropping the “Young” for their first hit of the year, “A Beautiful Morning,” then scoring big with the song we just heard at #4, “People Got to Be Free” in the Summer.

Just as it was climbing the charts, they capped off their mid-’60s AM radio phase with Time Peace, a Greatest Hits album with all their hit singles—”Good Lovin,” “Groovin’,” “How Can I Be Sure.” Then they leapt headfirst into the Album Era with Freedom Suite, a double LP of sprawling, jazz-inflected jams. Critics liked the ambition, but Fans missed the hooks, and their chart action faded.

#3 Bobby Goldsboro – Honey

Well we’re down to the small numbers here on our Chartcrush Countdown of 1968’s top ten hits, and at #3, the best-selling record in the world in 1968, #1 for five weeks right after “Dock of the Bay,” and right after the MLK assassination. A song that either hits you square in the tear ducts or makes your skin crawl. No middle ground.

For some, it’s a heart-wrenching portrait of love and loss. For others, a manipulative Dirge sung by a clueless guy whose “kinda dumb, kinda smart” Wife mysteriously dies after years of his mockery. Either way, it was a massive comeback for the former Roy Orbison Guitarist who’d had a couple of modest solo hits in the mid-’60s, then vanished—until this. United Artists’ fastest-selling single ever up ’til then, #1 in just four weeks. Bobby Goldsboro’s “Honey.”

“Honey,” Bobby Goldsboro, #3 on our Chartcrush Countdown of 1968’s top ten hits—a record that became—and still is—a kind of cultural Rorschach test. Is it one of the most moving, tender Ballads ever? Or, as Critic Robert Christgau wrote in Esquire at the time, “the classiest schlock of the year?” A staple on “worst songs of all time” lists for decades to come?

Some Critics go even further, reading it as a pre-Feminist fantasy about a submissive wife who dies—of what, exactly? Suicide? Illness? The lyrics don’t say—after years of being mocked and misunderstood by her husband, who then catalogues his own textbook toxicity in song. The counterculture, forging a new canon in ’68—and a new masculinity around Dylan, Hendrix and The Beatles, but at the same time the phrase “Silent Majority” surged as Nixon cruised to victory. “Honey” struck a deep chord with that America.

Even the Smothers Brothers couldn’t resist—a sketch on their CBS variety show: Dick Smothers as “The Honey Husband” leading a guided tour through “The Honey House,” crooning earnestly.

#2 Paul Mauriat – Love Is Blue (l’Amour Est Bleu)

Okay, so I’ve been talking a lot about how the Easy Listening charts were changing in ’68 as grownups started opening up their ears to new sounds and new vibes. Well, #2 is exhibit “A”—an Instrumental, complete with the lush strings and horn stabs so beloved by the Hi-Fi Set in the ’60s, not to mention elevator riders and department store shoppers, but with a twist.

Harpsichord—the go-to Baroque flourish of the Psychedelic age, cropping up in hits like Donovan’s “Sunshine Superman,” Simon & Garfunkel’s “Scarborough Fair,” the Stones’ “Lady Jane,” and the one that started it all in ’65, The Beatles album cut “In My Life,” which was actually just a piano tricked out to sound like a harpsichord.

But to hear that sound leading a #1 Easy Listening record for eleven weeks? Well, something was happening. It even topped the Hot100 for five—first instrumental since “Telstar” in ’62. At #2 on our Chartcrush Countdown of 1968’s top ten hits: French Orchestra Leader Paul Mauriat’s “Love Is Blue.”

“Love Is Blue,” Luxembourg’s entry in the 1967 Eurovision Song Contest, where it came in fourth. But Paul Mauriat’s label saw Easy Listening potential in an instrumental version, and he delivered. It dropped in November, and when a Minneapolis DJ gave it a spin, the phones lit up.

It hit the Easy Listening chart in December, then the Hot100 in January on its way to #1 for five weeks, February into March. And if not for Otis Redding’s “Dock of the Bay” it would’ve had two more. #2 on the year and the #1 Easy Listening hit of 1968. But that wasn’t the slam-dunk you might think because another instrumental was hot on its heels. More on that in our bonus segment.

#1 The Beatles – Hey Jude

But first, drumroll please, the #1 song of ’68, which totally was a slam-dunk: nearly 1,500 points in our ranking to “Love Is Blue’s” 918. And Paul Mauriat did a version of it, too, which peaked at #24 on the Easy Listening Chart. And Sergio Mendes’ Bossa Nova version of another of the Group’s songs, “The Fool on the Hill,” got to #1, as did one of the first singles on the Group’s new label, Apple Records, Mary Hopkins’ “Those Were the Days.”

But the Easy Listening Audience was still clutching its pearls over John Lennon’s “bigger than Jesus” comment in ’66, the backlash over which hastened the Group’s retreat from touring for the safety and seclusion of the studio to craft Sgt. Peppers. So even with Adults opening their ears to new sounds in ’68, the year’s #1 Pop hit—nowhere to be found on the Easy Listening chart. But on the Hot100? Nine weeks at #1, tying Bobby Darin’s 1959 record with “Mack the Knife,” and the #1 song of 1968 by a mile. Of course, The Beatles, “Hey Jude.”

That four-plus minute coda: for their first Apple Records single, The Beatles wanted the maximum length that could fit on a 45, and that’s “Hey Jude” at 7 minutes, 11 seconds. It debuted at #10 and shot to #1 after just two weeks, fastest of any 1968 hit. Like “Yesterday” in ’65, capping a chaotic year with something transcendent and personal.

Brainstormed by Paul McCartney driving out to see John Lennon’s first wife Cynthia after John had left her for Yoko Ono. But what began as a song to comfort their five-year-old son Julian—or Jules—during the separation became something much bigger: a universal balm for a generation reeling from the shocks of 1968. The name changed to “Jude,” possibly so John wouldn’t suspect its origin.

And on the flip? Lennon’s “Revolution,” inspired by Student protests and political unrest. That notches in at #74 on our Chartcrush ranking for ’68—neither song on their double album—The White Album—that dropped just weeks later.

Oh, and although The Beatles didn’t make the Easy Listening chart in ’68, George Harrison’s “Something” from Abbey Road did at the end of ’69, and then McCartney’s “Let It Be” became their first Easy Listening #1 in early 1970, just as they were breaking up. John Lennon never topped the Easy Listening or Adult Contemporary chart as a Solo Act, but Julian Lennon did: “Too Late for Goodbyes” in 1985.

Bonus

Well there you have ’em, our Chartcrush Top Ten for 1968. But we’re not quite done ywr because to review, two year-straddling hits that didn’t make Billboard‘s ’68 year-end top ten make ours when you factor their full chart runs and not just weeks within Billboard‘s chart year. Those again: John Fred & His Playboy Band’s “Judy in Disguise (with Glasses)” at #8 and Diana Ross & The Supremes’ “Love Child” at #6. Which means that two songs from Billboard‘s year-end top ten, squeezed out of ours. So to be thorough, let’s look at those.

#18 Hugo Montenegro – The Good, the Bad and the Ugly

At #8, Billboard had the instrumental that nearly beat “Love Is Blue” as the #1 Easy Listening hit of the year—26 weeks on the chart to Mauriat’s 21, but just three at #1. It’s Orchestra Leader Hugo Montenegro’s version of Ennio Morricone’s theme for Sergio Leone’s 1966 Spaghetti Western starring Clint Eastwood, The Good, the Bad and the Ugly.

Hugo Montenegro was an in-demand soundtrack guy in L.A. cutting records for RCA when his album of  Spaghetti Western themes came out in ’68, “The Good, the Bad and the Ugly,” done in one day with Hugo and session guys improvising the sounds from Ennio Morricone’s original. The result? #1 on the Easy Listening chart for three weeks, and #2 on the Hot100 for a week, behind “Mrs. Robinson.” Billboard‘s got it at #8 on the year; it’s #18 on our Chartcrush ranking.

#42 Cream – Sunshine of Your Love

And at #6, Billboard had one of the year’s definitive Rock songs. But the math behind that ranking? A little sketchy. It only peaked at #5—possibly a Hippie fan of the Band in the charts department tweaking the algorithm in ’68? Here’s the single edit of Cream’s “Sunshine of Your Love.”

Cream’s “Sunshine of Your Love” had two runs on the Hot100. It exited in April after peaking at #36. Then it re-entered in July and got to #5—26 total weeks, the most of any Hot100 hit in ’68. The average, about 14 weeks, so there are ranking scenarios that favor longevity on the chart and get it into the top ten. Our Chartcrush ranking, though? We’ve got it at #42.

And that’s all we’ve got for you here on our 1968 edition of The Chartcrush Top Ten Countdown Show. I’ve been your host, Christopher Verdesi and I want to thank you for listening. Hey, if you like what you heard and you want more, head on over to our website, chartcrush.com, where you can stream episodes of the show online, follow along with written transcripts, and check out savage extras like our full top 100 charts and interactive line graphs of the actual chart runs of the top 10 songs.

We do that for every year—’40s to now—and it’s all on that website, again, chartcrush.com. Thanks again, and don’t forget to 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 dive deep into a year in music and culture, and count down the top ten hits according to our exclusive recap of the weekly charts published at the time in Billboard, the music industry’s top trade mag and chart authority. This week it’s 2012, the year the internet train revved its engines, tooted its horn and started chugging out of the station, and for the first time in decades, the old Establishment—labels, radio, media—had serious competition for control of pop culture’s knobs and levers.

After ten years of revenue free-fall from illegal mp3 downloading, influence was just about all the music biz had left, and now even that was slipping away—into a new reality where one viral clip, one lucky meme, a reality show moment, a TV sync, commercial placement, a bedroom Producer with a SoundCloud account, could outpace the most expensive major-label launch.

It’s what tech visionaries had been saying the internet could be for decades. Now it was here—thrilling and unpredictable for fans and a lifeline for indie artists, but for the industry? Kinda like standing on that platform without a ticket watching the train pull out. “What now?”

And it wasn’t like the business hadn’t seen warning signs. For a decade, every step forward into the digital future felt more like a stumble. Sales and revenue circling the drain thanks to filesharing. Major albums leaking online—Eminem’s The Marshall Mathers LP in 2000, 50 Cent’s Get Rich or Die Tryin’ in ’03, Kanye West’s Graduation in ’07—tanking marketing plans and launch schedules. But now the internet was coming for A&R—Artists and Repertoire—the suits at the label whose job is to find and develop the next stars.

Soulja Boy’s “Crank That,” a weird outlier when it topped the Hot100 in 2007, suddenly looked more like a preview: a viral one-man phenom breaking through without a major-label machine behind it. And it kept happening. Jason Derulo’s “Whatcha Say” in ’09; “TiK ToK” (not the app, the Ke$ha song): the #1 hit of 2010; Far East Movement’s “Like a G6“—a totally independent L.A. crew. Underground Mixtape Rapper B.o.B’s “Nothin’ on You,” the hit that introduced Bruno Mars via his feature singing the hook.

And speaking of Mixtape Rap, 2011 was the year The Weeknd became an obsession on edgy Blogs like Pitchfork, The Fader and Complex before labels came a-courtin’. And there were hits that definitely wouldn’t have happened without internet buzz: Rebecca Black’s “Friday,” Kreayshawn’s “Gucci Gucci” and Tyler, the Creator’s “Yonkers.”

So what was Billboard‘s response to all this? Well, as one streaming exec later put it to Rolling Stone, the debate in the charts department over what to measure boiled down to “Do people spend money on it…or do people spend time with it?” In just the first three months of 2012, plays on streaming platforms exploded 65% to nearly half a billion, which all but settled the question. So in March, Billboard launched its first streaming chart, “On Demand Songs,” and even more importantly, started factoring that data into the Hot100 for the first time. Then in 2013, they added YouTube views.

Over the next few years streaming would subsume every other distribution channel, even—finally!—illegal downloads, black market mixtapes and music sharing blogs, none of which Billboard had ever factored into its charts. So starting in 2012, for the first time in the 21st century, the entire music ecosystem began coming back out of the shadows and into the light of Billboard‘s rankings. Five of the ten hits in our 2012 Chartcrush countdown: by Artists who’d never made the charts before 2012. No wonder Billboard declared 2012, in a cover story in the year-in-music issue, “The Year of the Newcomer.”

#10 Ellie Goulding – Lights

And one of the newcomers in our countdown: our Act at #10, with a song that took 52 weeks to reach its peak of #2 breaking the record for slowest climb into the top five previously shared by Kings of Leon’s “Use Somebody” in ’09 and “The Macarena.” It was the title track of her debut album—in 2010; the title track, but oddly only a bonus cut, and only in the U.K. and Germany, and only on iTunes. No wonder it took two years to find its audience! And the song, ironically, inspired by her fear of the dark when she was a kid, it’s Ellie Goulding’s slo-mo breakthrough, “Lights.”

Ellie Goulding, “Lights” at #10 on our Chartcrush Countdown of 2012’s top ten hits. Along with Lana Del Rey’s smoky, cinematic debut album Born to Die and its top10 hit “Summertime Sadness,” it primed the charts for a surge of chill, atmospheric Female Singers soundtracking the rise of mindfulness culture, yoga, and “wellness” aesthetics in the early ’10s: Lorde, Banks, Halsey, Tove Lo, CHVRCHES.

Goulding herself cracked the top 20 again in 2013 with “Burn,” then hit #3 in 2015 with the Fifty Shades of Grey Ballad “Love Me like You Do,” but was derailed by tabloid gossip and fan-fueled drama. Ed Sheeran in his first U.S. top10 in 2014, “Don’t,” all but confirmed rumors that she’d cheated on him with OneDirection’s Niall Horan, and the backlash sent her into seclusion for five years—the darker side of fame in an era of weaponized fandom and social media megaphones.

#9 Kelly Clarkson – Stronger (What Doesn’t Kill You)

Next up at #9, the closest thing to a veteran in our countdown. Her debut single, #1 all the way back in 2002 after she won the first season of American Idol. And by the end of the decade, she was Pop-Rock royalty thanks to her blockbuster album Breakaway, which put three hits in the top 20 on the year in ’05—two of those in the top ten.

But then, just as the Electropop wave was cresting, she doubled down on Rock. Another #1 in ’09, but then a slump in 2010 and ’11, until this—an Empowerment Anthem originally intended for, but passed on by, Beyoncé. At #9, the title track from her fifth album, it’s Kelly Clarkson with “Stronger.”

“Stronger (What Doesn’t Kill You),” Kelly Clarkson at #9 on our Chartcrush Countdown of 2012’s top ten hits: #1 for three weeks early in the year and the best-selling single of her career.

Timing, of course, is everything, and “Stronger” hit just after Katy Perry’s “Firework,” P!nk’s “Raise Your Glass” and Lady Gaga’s “Born this Way” had all cycled out, becoming 2012’s surprise Pride anthem. That same year, President Obama came out in favor of same-sex marriage, so Kelly was tapped to sing “My Country ‘Tis of Thee” at his second inauguration, which she did live, and Beyoncé caught a bunch of flak the next day for lip-syncing the National Anthem.

Kelly never made it back to #1, but just as Electropop was nearing the end of its arc, she finally leaned in and scored one last top10 with the title track of her album Piece by Piece in 2015. And in the late ’10s as she turned to children’s books, judging The Voice and hosting her own daytime talk show on ABC, she managed something few others have: a contemporary Christmas classic! “Underneath the Tree,” one of only a few holiday songs recorded since the 1960s that’s returned to the top 20 every year in the streaming era.

#8 Maroon 5 – Payphone

So Kelly Clarkson might be the closest thing to a veteran in our countdown, but only by a year and a half. In 2004, our Act at #8 roared in with a one-two punch chart debut—two top5s that both made our top ten on the year: “This Love” and “She Will Be Loved.” And like Kelly, they slumped during peak EDM, but cracked the code again in 2011 with the Christina Aguilera collab “Moves like Jagger.”

And then in 2012 they became only the second Act since The Beatles to notch more than one song in a year-end top ten two separate years (Usher was the first since The Beatles). And speaking of judges on NBC’s American Idol knock-off The Voice, the Group’s Frontman Adam Levine? A fixture since the show’s debut in 2011. At #8, the first of two hits in our countdown by Maroon 5, “Payphone.”

Payphones had all but vanished by 2012, but Maroon 5 still wrote a song about one, and scored a massive hit! That was the Radio Version we just heard at #8 here on our Chartcrush Countdown of 2012’s top ten hits—the Wiz Khalifa Rap verse on the album version, replaced with a new bridge sung by Adam Levine, who also re-recorded parts of his own vocal to clean up the language. A lot of effort for a Radio Edit, but it paid off: six weeks at #2 on the Hot 100, and nine at #2 on the Adult Contemporary chart.

Rap, meanwhile, in a rough patch on the Hot100. Between Khalifa’s breakout “Black and Yellow” in early 2011 and Macklemore and Ryan Lewis’ “Thrift Shop” in early ’13, the only Rap song to hit #1 was Flo Rida’s “Whistle” in the Summer of 2012, and he mostly sings on that. And whistles! Possibly related: 2012 was, according to Newsweek, the only year since 2001 with no #1s that required a Parental Advisory label for explicit lyrics!

#7 fun. – Some Nights

At #7 we have the second of the two Acts with two hits in our 2012 top ten countdown: a Trio out of New York whose breakthrough earlier in the year didn’t just break the rules; it torched the rulebook, and radio ate it up.

“Quirky sounds stand out and can go viral quickly,” one Programmer told Billboard. And once songs that “just break all the rules” become hits, another said, “the door is open for more new sounds.” Viral breakthroughs jumping from social to mainstream media—”a signal story of 2012,” Billboard declared.

Well, before all was said and done, the Trio’s second single was also a hit, creeping up the chart while that breakthrough was riding high: 24 weeks to crack the top ten, then 19 in the top ten. At #7, it’s the title track from fun.’s second album, “Some Nights.”

Fun.’s second hit of the year, “Some Nights” at #7 on our Chartcrush Top Ten Countdown for 2012. The Guardian compared it to Queen, and well, yeah. The British Band Muse, already known for—as Entertainment Weekly put it—”Queen-isms:” they also pulled out all the stops on their 2012 album, The 2nd Law.

But not only that, it was a big year for the real deal: a Queen-themed American Idol episode and selling out stadiums in Europe touring with ’09 Idol finalist Adam Lambert standing in for deceased Frontman Freddie Mercury. But fun. wasn’t just riding a wave, they started one with that breakthrough hit I mentioned that dimmed EDM-Pop’s glowstick crown in the Spring. Hang tight, that game-changer, still to come.

#6 LMFAO – Sexy and I Know It

But first at #6, the song that if you were reading the tea leaves in late 2011 into 2012 with a certain—I dunno, jaded pop culture prescience?—might’ve tipped you off that something new was right around the corner: that the decadent day-glo EDM-Pop that’d dominated since Black Eyed Peas and Gaga in ’09 was starting to wear thin.

Once a big Pop trend hits its saturation point and descends into self-parody, it’s usually at or near the end of its arc, right? Well, Disco had the Village People; New Wave had Frankie Goes to Hollywood; Bling Rap had “Laffy Taffy.” And EDM-Pop had these guys, with back-to-back hits that kept them in the top ten continuously from June 2011 to March 2012.

The first, “Party Rock Anthem,” was 2011’s Summer Banger. And then this even more cartoonish follow-up surged in the Fall, hitting #1 the first week of 2012 thanks to a wave of downloads by kiddos who got iTunes gift cards in their Christmas stockings, speculated one columnist in The Village Voice. It’s a cheeky, bass-heavy anthem to bulletproof self-confidence that was both ridiculous and ridiculously catchy. At #6, LMFAO’s “Sexy and I Know It.”

LMFAO’s “Sexy and I Know It” at #6—the video featuring Redfoo and SkyBlu thrusting their pelvises in neon Speedos, banned from daytime rotations on some networks. Of course, EDM-Pop didn’t flame out quite as spectacularly as Disco in ’79 after Disco Demolition Night—one of the genre’s crown jewels is still to come on our Chartcrush countdown of 2012’s top ten hits. But LMFAO did. They split only months after “Sexy and I Know It” topped the charts, as Stereogum’s Tom Breihan wrote, “at the exact moment that the public would’ve gotten sick of them anyway.”

#5 fun. – We Are Young

And right on cue, a very different kind of song was climbing the Hot100. First dropped in September 2011, it flopped—’til the cast of Fox’s Glee did it in an episode that aired in December and the Glee Cast version debuted at #12.

Glee charted 208 songs on the Hot100 from ’09 to ’13—80% of them for just one week. No radio airplay—all paid downloads.

And the original charted the same week, but got an even bigger boost from a Chevy Superbowl commercial, and radio pounced. By mid-March it was #1, where it stayed for six weeks—the first #1 Alternative crossover since Coldplay’s “Viva la Vida” in 2008—four years. At #5, the Anthem that swapped bass drops for big feelings on the charts. We heard the follow-up “Some Nights” at #7; here again, fun., their breakthrough featuring Singer Janelle Monáe, brought in by Producer Jeff Bhasker: “We Are Young.”

To hear fun. Frontman Nate Ruess tell it, he nearly handed the “We Are Young” beat over to Kanye West and Jay-Z to rap over on their Watch the Throne collab album, but he reconsidered, and scored the year’s #5 hit—plus Song of the Year and Best New Artist at the Grammys.

fun. did start working on a new album, but the project fizzled and some songs ended up on Ruess’ solo record in 2015. But Ruess’ biggest post-fun. moment? His Duet with P!nk on “Just Give Me a Reason” in 2013. Guitarist Jack Antonoff, however, went on to Max Martin/Dr. Luke levels of success as a Producer. Among his credits: #1s by Taylor Swift, Kendrick Lamar and Sabrina Carpenter.

#4 Maroon 5 – One More Night

At #4, the second hit by the other Act with two songs in our 2012 Chartcrush Top Ten—and second on the calendar, too, but pushed to radio a little too soon, just as that first hit—”Payphone” we heard back at #8 was starting its five-week run at #1. So after debuting at #42, it dropped to #86. But once “Payphone” began to fade, radio came around and by mid-August it was Billboard‘s top Airplay Gainer—top ten two weeks later, then nine weeks at #1. At #4, how about a little Reggae? Maroon 5’s “One More Night.”

After Maroon 5’s 2010 album Hands All Over flopped, Frontman Adam Levine made some key moves. He joined The Voice and enlisted Benny Blanco and Shellback to produce a bonus cut for the album’s Deluxe Edition release, and “Moves like Jagger,” his Duet with fellow Voice coach Christina Aguilera was Maroon 5’s first #1 in four years.

At the same time, he featured on another Benny Blanco production, Gym Class Heroes’ “Stereo Hearts” and for 14 weeks in the Fall of 2011 while both were in the top ten, you couldn’t turn on a radio without hearing Adam Levine. But after that, Maroon 5’s hits were Maroon 5 in name only. Levine teamed with Blanco and Shellback again on “Payphone.” And “One More Night” we just heard at #4? Shellback and his mentor, the Grand Poohbah of Pop Producers, none other than Max Martin.

And seven of the nine weeks it was #1 in the Fall of 2012, the top two was a cage match: studio-crafted, radio-supported Pop perfection vs. the leftfield internet chaos of Psy’s juggernaut “Gangnam Style,” which couldn’t knock “One More Night” out of the top spot—but only because the Hot100 wasn’t yet factoring YouTube views. The week Billboard made that change in February of 2013, viral chaos debuted at #1 in the form of Baauer’s “Harlem Shake.”

#3 Rihanna – We Found Love

And speaking of hits that blocked other hits from #1, at #3 on our Chartcrush 2012 Top Ten Countdown, the one that ensured that LMFAO’s “Sexy and I Know It” only got two weeks on top instead of ten, late 2011 into ’12.

LMFAO may’ve felt like EDM-Pop’s shark jump, but this? Rolling Stone called it “EDM’s Definitive Anthem.” But not only that—many consider it the Singer’s finest moment and when you add it all up, she’s the top-charting Hot100 Act of the entire EDM-Pop Era, ’06 to 2014. At #3 it’s Rihanna, her 11th #1 since ’06, featuring Rave DJ Calvin Harris: their club-certified guaranteed dancefloor filler, “We Found Love.”

Rihanna was everywhere in 2010 and ’11: three #1s on her 2010 album Loud, plus featured hooks on other artists’ hits. Meanwhile, Calvin Harris opened for her on the European leg of her tour—the breakout EDM Festival Star whose album 18 Months notched a record eight U.K. top10s.

But “We Found Love,” which he pitched to Rihanna during the tour, was his first U.S. hit, and American radio spent 2012 catching up: two more Calvin Harris top 20s by the end of the year, two more in ’13, then his #7 hit “Summer” in 2014.

Fast-forward to 2023, after Rihanna did the Superbowl halftime show, “We Found Love” re-entered the Hot100 for a week, along with two of her other past hits. Definitive EDM anthem, indeed!

#2 Carly Rae Jepsen – Call Me Maybe

But now we’re down to #2, and the top two hits of 2012? Like fun.’s “We Are Young” at #5: viral, homemade, unlikely—redefining fame for the 2010s, because in 2012, the internet stopped being a sideshow and became Pop’s main stage. And get this: all three of those viral hits were back-to-back-to-back at #1—an entire, uninterrupted Summer of leftfield chart toppers.

“We Are Young” kicked it off in March and April; our #1 song, May into June. And at #2, the third—on top late June all the way to mid-August—by a semifinalist on the 2007 season of Canadian Idol, who’d scored a couple minor hits up North, but not a ripple in the States ’til fellow Canadian Justin Bieber home for the holidays heard her new single on Toronto radio and tweeted that it was “possibly the catchiest song I’ve ever heard.”

A few weeks later he posted a video lip-syncing and dancing to it with Selena Gomez and friends, and it debuted at #38 just a week before “We Are Young” hit #1. From there it rose steadily as other lip-sync vids appeared: Katy Perry, Miley Cyrus, troops in Afghanistan. Colin Powell and Gayle King sang it on CBS This Morning, and someone cobbled together Obama soundbites to match the lyrics. So of course it hit #1 for nine weeks and was Billboard‘s “Song of the Summer.” At #2 on our Chartcrush Countdown of 2012’s top ten hits, it’s Carly Rae Jepsen’s “Call Me Maybe.”

Carly Rae Jepsen’s label miscalculated, loading up her rushed 2012 album with A-list Producers and killing any chance of anything on it matching the offbeat charm of “Call Me Maybe.” After one follow-up hit in the Fall—”Good Times” with Owl City—she didn’t crack the top 10 again.

Interestingly, though, “Call Me Maybe” is the only song in our countdown that rated even a mention, let alone a ranking, in Pitchfork‘s “Top 100 Tracks of 2012.” Pitchfork, the early ’10s go-to for “serious” music criticism. But amid the “monolithic Euroclub stomp” of 2012, Writer Amy Phillips wrote, “Call Me Maybe” was a throwback, to the era before the internet “shattered the idea of the all-consuming Song of the Summer into a million little niches.”

Plus, the internet picking the hits was an existential threat to any and all would-be cultural gatekeepers (including Pitchfork), so maybe they were just hedging their bets! But Carly Rae Jepsen despite no hit singles post-2012 kept selling albums and tickets into the ’20s as the Critic-anointed, Hipster-approved Avatar of Pure Pop.

#1 Gotye featuring Kimbra – Somebody That I Used to Know

Not so the Act at #1 in our Chartcrush Top Ten Countdown for 2012, though. By design. After this one world-conquering hit, he never released anything under his name again. He’d been crafting sample-based tracks for a decade in Australia and his album in ’06 had Critics comparing him to Peter Gabriel, but this one topped the charts in Australia for eight weeks in 2011, and went super-viral thanks to its artsy video, shared far and wide on social media, especially Facebook.

Built off a sample of the first measure of a track from a 1967 album he found in a thrift shop—Brazilian Guitarist Luiz Bonfá’s “Seville“—and it was back in the top ten in 2025, liberally sampled on Doechii’s “Anxiety“—here’s the #1 song of 2012, Gotye’s “Somebody That I Used to Know.”

The #1 song of 2012 and Record of the Year at the Grammys, Gotye’s “Somebody That I Used to Know.” The Female Singer with the Woman’s perspective in the last verse? New Zealander Kimbra—tapped to sing it after a more famous Singer canceled last-minute. Who? Gotye won’t say, but he did say he ran into her months later and she admitted, yeah, “maybe that was a mistake.”

It topped the chart for eight weeks after dislodging fun.’s “We Are Young” the last week in April, and then stayed in the top five through most of Carly Rae Jepsen’s reign—as I mentioned, a whole Summer of viral #1s as other internet-fueled stories hijacked the news cycle, like the YouTube documentary Kony 2012 about a Ugandan warlord; plus Alt-R&B Pioneer Frank Ocean coming out as bi; GOP Candidate Mitt Romney’s “Binders full of women;” Honey Boo Boo; “slacktivism.”

And the kicker? Obama Officials Hillary Clinton and Susan Rice blaming the deadly Al-Qaeda attack on the U.S. consulate in Benghazi, Libya on a random YouTube vid—and the media and public mostly buying it, because after a year of viral media taking over the culture, why wouldn’t they?

Bonus

Okay, so that’s our top ten here on our 2012 edition of Chartcrush. But three of the hits we heard this hour, not among Billboard‘s top ten for the year. Maroon 5’s “One More Night” and fun.’s “Some Nights” were too late in the year to have their full chart runs counted towards 2012 in Billboard, so they’ve got those at numbers 18 and 14 respectively. And LMFAO’s “Sexy and I Know It”—that was split between 2011 and 2012, so Billboard‘s got it at #13.

At Chartcrush we count every song’s full chart run regardless of when during the year it was a hit—no splitting. And we rank it in whichever calendar year it saw the majority of its chart action. But those three hits coming in to our 2012 top ten nudges three out from Billboard‘s, so in our bonus segment we’re gonna take a look at those.

#16 One Direction – What Makes You Beautiful

First up, Billboard‘s #10 song was #16 on our Chartcrush 2012 ranking—the first Boy Band to make it big in America since Backstreet Boys and ‘NSYNC at the turn of the century, their first two albums Up All Night and Take Me Home both topping the album chart, and they had two top tens in 2012. The first, in the Spring? “What Makes You Beautiful.” It’s One Direction.

Millennials had Backstreet Boys and ‘NSYNC and Gen-Z had a British Boy Band—One Direction: Niall Horan, Zayn Malik, Liam Payne, Harry Styles and Louis Tomlinson. They charted nearly 30 hits in the early ’10s—”What Makes You Beautiful” was the first, peaking at #4 for two weeks in the Spring—then dozens more as Solo Acts after the split in 2015.

#12 Nicki Minaj – Starships

Well, we’re looking at the hits that made the top ten on Billboard‘s 2012 year-end Hot100 but not our Chartcrush Top Ten we counted down earlier, and their #9 song is the early ’10s top charting Female Rapper with her fifth top10, including features. But it’s only her second as a Headliner, after “Super Bass” in 2011—Nicki Minaj, “Starships.”

“Starships” only got as high as #5 during its 31 weeks on the Hot100, but 15 of them were the top ten, March to July during that run of viral hits at #1. Billboard‘s #9 song of 2012; #12 on our Chartcrush ranking.

#13 The Wanted – Glad You Came

And finally, Billboard‘s #6 song. We’ve got it at #13—the other British Boy Band that made waves in 2012. OneDirection’s “What Makes You Beautiful” peaked at #4; well, these guys got to #3, propelled—like fun.’s “We Are Young”—by a Glee Cast cover that aired in February (no Superbowl commercial though!). It’s The Wanted with “Glad You Came.”

British-Irish Boy Band The Wanted, “Glad You Came.” Combined, One Direction and members Zayn Malik, Harry Styles and Liam Payne notched ten top10s in the ’10s decade, but The Wanted, despite beating 1D into the top ten by five weeks in the Spring of 2012 and getting their own E! network reality show, The Wanted Life, had just that one.

And that’s all we have for you here on our 2012 edition of the Chartcrush Top Ten Countdown Show. I’ve been your host, Christopher Verdesi. Hey, if you like what you heard this hour, head over to our website, chartcrush.com, for a transcript of the show and a link to stream the podcast version, plus wack extras like our full top100 chart and interactive line graph of the Billboard chart runs for the top10 hits. Which we do that for every year, 1940s to now, and it’s all on the website, again, chartcrush.com. Meanwhile, thanks for listening, and tune in again next week, same station, same time, for another year and another edition of Chartcrush.

::end transcript::

::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 different year in Pop and count down the top ten according to our recap of the weekly charts published at the time in Billboard, the music industry’s leading trade mag.

This week, we’re turning the clock back to 1950, a bridge between eras, and the charts tell the story. America’s World War II victory buzz, fading after five years, and the Baby Boom of ’46 and ’47? Cooling off as headlines turned grim.

In ’49, the Soviets tested their first A-bomb and China fell to communism. Then came June of 1950: war in Korea as North invaded South, dragging the U.S. into another hot conflict—this time against a shadowy, ideological enemy that wasn’t just “over there,” but creeping around right in our back yards.

In January, Alger Hiss—a big shot in the Roosevelt State Department—nailed for lying about his Soviet spy ties. Then a married couple, the Rosenbergs—Julius and Ethel—busted for passing atomic secrets. Suddenly, your new detached single-family home out in a suburb that barely existed five years ago? Feels a little less cozy and idyllic when you’re side-eyein’ your new neighbors over the picket fence. And every night, TV—brand-new itself—beamed Senator Joe McCarthy of Wisconsin, stoking that paranoia, saying communist infiltrators are everywhere.

Suburbs, spies, cold wars, nukes… TV: all that newness had Americans looking for solace, comfort and validation, and they found it—many of them—in nostalgia.

You know how during the Covid-19 pandemic, Kate Bush’s “Running Up That Hill” from the ’80s was in the top ten for five weeks after appearing in Netflix’s Stranger Things? Well, in 1947 as the Cold War was coming into focus, a record from 1933 was #1 for 15 weeks, Ted Weems’ “Heartaches.” And at the same time, ’20s Singer Al Jolson, back in the top five with “Anniversary Song” just as three different top10 versions of “The Old Lamplighter” were finishing out their runs—an ode to gaslit streets (most towns had switched to electric during the war).

In ’48 it was Dixieland, throwback Jazz from the early ’20s: Pee Wee Hunt’s “Twelfth Street Rag,” #1 for six weeks, and in ’49, Western music topped the charts: Vaughn Monroe’s “Riders in the Sky (A Cowboy Legend),” #1 for 13 weeks, and right after, Frankie Laine locking down the top spot all Fall—15 straight weeks—with his two Western-themed hits “That Lucky Old Sun” and “Mule Train,” as Singing Cowboy Jimmy Wakely’s Novelty Duet “Slippin’ Around” with Margaret Whiting beckoned at #2 or 3.

And Hollywood leaned in. The Musical Annie Get Your Gun hit theaters in 1950 starring Actress (and Pop Star since the mid-’40s) Betty Hutton: Variety‘s #5 top-grossing film of 1950. And Westerns soon outnumbered all other movie genres combined. Moviegoers couldn’t get enough. The Wild West “Frontier Era” and the real Annie Oakley in Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Shows, still within living memory for millions.

Big Band Swing also had a comeback of sorts in ’49 and ’50, and a music craze out of New York’s Greenwich Village had Decca Records’ new head of A&R doing end runs around his colleagues to sign a Vocal Group that, once they hit, had Billboard and Variety convening joint seminars with Musicologists to classify them. Were they Country? Pop? R&B? More on those as we count down the top hits from 1950 here on this week’s Chartcrush.

#10 Anton Karas – The Third Man Theme

But we’re kicking off at #10 with something new for 1950: a theme from an acclaimed film noir that unleashed, not just a new song and Artist, but an instrument no one had heard before. Its vibrating strings, the background of the film’s title sequence, and the London Records 45 says it right on the label “zither solo.”

It’s the first of two different versions of the theme in our countdown: the original heard in the film, by the Busker that Movie Director Carol Reed hired off the street outside a Vienna wine bar to do the film’s music. And it only notched one week at #1 in our Chartcrush ranking for 1950 that, as we do for all pre-Hot100 years, combines Billboard‘s three separate weekly Pop charts—Sales, Airplay and Jukeboxes—into a single Hot100-style weekly ranking, and from that we rank the year with the same algorithm as Hot100 years.

But it had 13 weeks in the top ten on that combined ranking thanks to 11 at the top of the Best-Sellers chart, which gets it into the countdown at #10: Anton Karas’ “The Third Man Theme.”

The Third Man, voted best British movie all-time by the British Film Institute in 1999, about a Writer who travels to Vienna for a job, only to learn upon arrival that the guy who hired him has just been fatally hit by a car crossing the street—and from there the plot thickens, with twists and turns aplenty. It’s the movie Roger Ebert said inspired him to become a critic.

Anton Karas, the Viennese Street Busker, at first scoffed at the idea of doing a film score and got homesick while working on it in England, but it made him an international star—a Teen Princess Margaret among his biggest fans.

Again, we’re not done with “The Third Man Theme.” Karas’ topped Billboard‘s Best Sellers, but a less quirky, smoothed-out version with guitar—no zither—ruled on Jukeboxes for 11 weeks, and that’s still to come here on our 1950 Chartcrush countdown.

#9 Kay Starr – Bonaparte’s Retreat

Next up at #9, a Singer who cut her first records at just 16 filling in for Marion Hutton in Glenn Miller’s Band for two weeks in 1938, but it was another 12 years before she broke through as a Solo Act in 1950. The Polka “Hoop-De-Doo,” her first top ten in July, but Perry Como’s version grabbed the bigger slice of the chart action. Her only competition with this one, though, was version by Jazz Drummer Gene Krupa’s Band with a Male Vocalist, so she pretty much had a clear lane with the song and got 16 weeks in the top ten. At #9 it’s Kay Starr with “Bonaparte’s Retreat.”

“Bonaparte’s Retreat,” the second of Kay Starr’s 11 top tens through ’56, making her the #2 top-charting Female Solo Act of the ’50s, pre-Elvis. Her last big hit in ’56, “The Rock and Roll Waltz” was #1 the week “Heartbreak Hotel” debuted.

The song “Bonaparte’s Retreat,” a relic from the 1800s, but with a twist: Country Bandleader Pee Wee King and Fiddler Redd Stewart’s lyrics, which have the Singer wooing a girl while a Fiddler plays the old standard in the background. Does that sound familiar? Well, King recycled that narrative gimmick from his 1946 song “The Tennessee Waltz,” which Patti Page took to #1 on all three Billboard charts—Sales, Airplay, Jukeboxes—for eight straight weeks at the start of ’51, and simultaneously #1 on the Country and R&B charts to boot.

#8 Patti Page – All My Love (Bolero)

Page, the #1 Female Solo Act in the pre-Rock ‘n Roll Pop Singer (or Crooner) ’50s, and her breakout hit is up next in our Chartcrush Top Ten Countdown for 1950. Her signature multi-tracked vocals—at first just a studio workaround when Mercury wouldn’t approve a Backup Singer: honed to perfection on previous discs back to ’48, but not this one, and it was still her first #1, for a week at Thanksgiving, just before “Tennessee Waltz” (with overdubbed harmonies aplenty) conquered the world.

At #8, it’s Patti Page’s version of a French tune with a bolero rhythm, new English lyrics and a snappy Tex-Mex arrangement, “All My Love.”

Clara Ann Fowler started out singing on the radio in high school in Tulsa, Oklahoma—dubbed “Patti Page” when she got her own 15-minute show sponsored by the local dairy, Page Milk. In town for a gig with the Band he managed, Jack Rael heard her scanning the radio dial in his hotel room, tracked her down, and next thing she’s in Chicago, on the air nationally, sitting in with the “King of Swing,” Benny Goodman, and signed to then-fledgling Mercury Records, where she stayed ’til 1962. And her partnership with Rael lasted nearly 50 years.

Her breakout hit “All My Love” we just heard at #8 on our Chartcrush Top Ten Countdown for 1950: eclipsed just weeks later by “Tennessee Waltz,” our #1 song of 1951. “I Went to Your Wedding” was 1952’s #6 song and “The Doggie in the Window“, #6 for ’53. That’s four straight years with a record in the top ten on the year—something only one other Act in the 20th century managed: Elton John in the mid-’70s.

#7 Swing and Sway with Sammy Kaye (vocal, Don Cornell) – It Isn’t Fair

Now speaking of Benny Goodman and for that matter all the Big Swing Jazz Bands, the hits had gotten pretty scarce since the War, for reasons explored in other episodes: the ’42-’44 musicians’ strike, the rise of star Vocalists like Sinatra and Perry Como, wartime rationing, the draft, the federal cabaret tax on—not all venues, just ones that permitted dancing!

But Postwar, the booming economy and white picket fences out in the ‘burbs made Dance Bands even less relevant. What were you gonna do, Lindy Hop to a Hot Jazz record in your living room? And what looked better on your tiny black and white TV screen, a wide shot of a Bandstand or a glamorous Singer? C’mon!

Yet some Big Bands thrived: so-called “Sweet Bands” cranking out polished renditions of Pop tunes for radios, parlors and genteel gatherings, not dance halls, making bank on record royalties, network radio and extended hotel residencies.

At #7, one of the quintessential Sweet Bands since the late ’30s, featuring a Singer who’d been with the Band since before the War, but gets a rare on-record namecheck here. He was already halfway out the door to start his solo career. Swing and Sway with Sammy Kaye, vocal by Don Cornell, “It Isn’t Fair.”

“More sway than swing,” wrote the New York Times in Sammy Kaye’s 1987 obituary. Swing and Sway with Sammy Kaye featuring Don Cornell on an update of a 1933 hit, “It Isn’t Fair,” #7 on our Chartcrush Countdown of 1950’s top ten hits.

Now while Postwar Pop clearly favored Singers and “Sweet Bands,” Swing Jazz did stage a brief comeback on the charts in ’49 and ’50. Tommy Dorsey, back with two top tens in late ’49, and Ralph Flanagan, a newcomer channeling the ghost of Glenn Miller with eerie precision, and scoring 11 minor hits in 1950. Even Benny Goodman grazed the DJ chart with his version of “It Isn’t Fair.” Just a blip compared to the continuing success of Sweet Bands, but ten years after its heyday, Swing, finally getting a little retro-hip love from the tastemakers.

#6 Tony Martin – There’s No Tomorrow

At #6, a Movie Star/Crooner whose career stretched back to the mid-’30s—though it nearly derailed during the War when he got bounced from the Navy for trying to bribe his way into an officer’s rank. But fate had other plans. Drafted into the Army, he was assigned to Captain Glenn Miller’s Army Air Forces Band—like “stumbl[ing] into heaven through the side door,” he later said.

Now, like Kay Starr back at #9, Pop superstardom had eluded him for years, but not anymore. A song adapted from the Italian classic “O Sole Mio“—same tune that inspired Elvis’ “It’s Now or Never” a decade later—it’s Tony Martin’s “There’s No Tomorrow.”

Taking a cue from Vic Damone and Frankie Laine’s emotive hits in ’49, Tony Martin leaned in to the drama and flexed his pipes like never before on “There’s No Tomorrow,” 18 weeks in the top ten, January to April and #6 here on our Chartcrush Top Ten Countdown for 1950.

And it led a parade of similar chart-toppers over the next few years by Eddie Fisher, Mario Lanza, Tony Bennett, Johnnie Ray, Al Martino—the era of operatic Male belt-it-out crooning, perfect for early TV and not equaled ’til the Female equivalent 40 years later with Whitney, Mariah, Celine and Toni Braxton in the ’90s.

In 1958, at a Friars Club Roast for Desi Arnaz and Lucille Ball, Comedian Harry Einstein (father of Albert Brooks and Bob “Super Dave” Einstein) suffered a fatal heart attack and Martin, put on the spot to sing, launched into “There’s No Tomorrow.” Yikes! His big ’51 hit, the playful “I Get Ideas” might’ve worked better.

But epic gaffes aside, Tony Martin stayed hitched to Actress/Dancer Cyd Charisse from 1948 until her death in 2008 a month after their sixtieth anniversary. File under successful showbiz marriages. Martin died in 2012 at age 98.

#5 Ames Brothers – Sentimental Me

At #5, another breakout act in 1950—and another first: the prototype, if you will, of the clean-cut White Male Vocal Groups that soon flooded the charts. Matching sweaters, starched smiles, at least one guy named Vic—and always, always four of them. Four Lads, Four Aces, Four Coins, Four Preps… Crew Cuts.

They were on a new label too: the first top tens for Coral Records, future launchpad of The McGuire Sisters, Buddy Holly, and Don Cornell, the Singer of our #7 song “It Isn’t Fair,” after his solo debut on RCA fizzled. The record was a double-sided hit. The Novelty shout-along “Rag Mop” on the A-side briefly hit #1 first, beating six competing versions including one by the aforementioned Ralph Flanagan Orchestra: the “Glenn Miller Sound” guys. But it was the flip that stuck around: sentimental, sweet, and smooth as a fresh dab of Brylcreem. At #5, it’s The Ames Brothers’ “Sentimental Me.”

The Ames Brothers, “Sentimental Me,” #5 on our Chartcrush Top Ten Countdown for 1950—the second (after “Rag Mop” on the A-side) of their over 30 chart hits in the ’50s, which include our #2 song of 1953, “You You You.”

And they were actual Brothers—Joe, Gene, Vic, and Ed—sons of Russian-Jewish immigrants in the Boston area. And they knew how to scratch America’s Nostalgia itch in 1950 just right: simpler times, sweeter songs—no global crises, no atomic chess; just clean harmony and a chorus to slow dance to at home with the lights down low.

#4 Guy Lombardo and His Royal Canadians (guitar, Don Rodney) – The 3rd Man Theme

OK, at #4, the last gasp of a chart phenomenon that’d happened every year since 1943: a song so big that more than one version of it made the year’s top ten records. In 1947, there were two! But it didn’t happen again after 1950, and 1957 was the last year the same song notched two versions the year’s top 100.

The music biz was shifting, away from Tin Pan Alley Publishers, Composers and “plug songs” to recordings as definitive works: shaped by Performers, Producers, Labels—even Hollywood studios. “Tennessee Waltz” was the last song to sell over a million copies of sheet music, and in ’63 Billboard pulled the plug on its Honor Roll of Hits chart that ranked songs—not records—tallying all versions plus sheet music sales.

Back at #10 we heard the Anton Karas original from the movie—the one that topped the Sales charts and started a zither craze. At #4, the one with guitar that also sold well but absolutely dominated on Jukeboxes. Speaking of “Sweet Bands” soldiering on into the ’50s, it’s Guy Lombardo and the Royal Canadians’ smoothed-out version of “The 3rd Man Theme.”

Bandleader Guy Lombardo’s version of “The Third Man Theme,” #4 on our Chartcrush Top Ten Countdown for 1950. Haunting and mysterious in the film, but in Lombardo’s hands? Silky-smooth and ballroom-ready—noir interpreted from the bandstand of the Roosevelt Hotel!

And no surprise that it was the bigger hit. Until Anton Karas’ original, it was almost unheard of for the actual version of a song in a movie to even be released as a single in the U.S., let alone crack the top ten. Different story across the pond, though: in the U.K., Karas’ was out as “The Harry Lime Theme” and even more ubiquitous. So much so, in fact, that if you caught Peter Jackson’s Beatles doc Get Back, you saw the Fab Four casually jamming it in the studio, in 1969.

#3 Swing and Sway with Sammy Kaye (vocal, Tony Alamo and The Kaydets) – Harbor Lights

At #3, a familiar standard by 1950, published in Britain in ’37 and two American versions were minor hits. Then it turned up as the theme to John Ford’s 1940 seafaring Drama The Long Voyage Home. But in 1950, it went full Hawaiian: gauzy harmonies and a sleepy steel guitar that had folks swapping Cold War jitters for sunny daydreams and coconut-scented breezes.

It’s Sammy Kaye again, now on Columbia after 12 years with RCA, and with a different Singer—remember, Don Cornell went solo after cutting “It Isn’t Fair.” At #3, “Harbor Lights.”

“Harbor Lights,” Swing and Sway with Sammy Kaye’s second hit in our countdown, vocal by Tony Alamo—not the rhinestone-studded cult leader and convicted child sex trafficker, just a Crooner who, unfortunately, had the same name.

Kaye and his Band had been doing the song for years on his radio show Sunday Serenade, and his record left six others in the dust, topping the Jukebox chart for four weeks and Best-Sellers for two.

Hawaiian sounds had first wowed crowds all the way back in 1915 at The Panama Pacific Exposition in San Francisco, and then again in 1938, after “Sweet Leilani” from the Musical Waikīkī Wedding starring Bing Crosby won Best Song at the Oscars.

But all wrapped in Postwar studio gloss, Kaye’s version fed a nation hungry for lush, faraway sounds—and just a year later, Capitol Records’ House Arranger/Conductor Les Baxter’s Ritual of the Savage LP launched a whole genre that scratched the itch through the hi-fi ’50s and beyond: Exotica. More on Baxter in a few.

#2 Gordon Jenkins and His Orchestra and The Weavers – Goodnight Irene

But first, the record Billboard named 1950’s #1, but here our Chartcrush Top Ten Countdown, it’s #2—just a hair behind our #1, which had a couple more weeks in the top ten. Seven weeks at #1 on all three Billboard charts, driven by the same hunger for rootsy sounds that powered 1949’s Cowboy-themed hits.

That crowd got something new in 1950 thanks to Decca Records’ new top A&R man—a guy from Webster Groves, Missouri known for lush, cinematic orchestrations, whose own debut LP Manhattan Tower in ’46 was a spoken-word song cycle about a glamor-struck Midwesterner dazzled by New York.

Now living the dream in the Big Apple for real, he comes under the spell of the hottest Act down in hip Greenwich Village and is eager to sign them. But his colleagues at the label? Not so much—including Dave Kapp, the brother of Decca’s founder. So he brings the Group in to one of his own sessions and gives himself top billing on the record. Sneaky! And it’s a huge hit—what a coup! Just one problem: it’s 1950 and the group? Well, they’re Communists!

At #2 it’s Gordon Jenkins & Orchestra and The Weavers, a song they learned from Bluesman Huddie “Leadbelly” Ledbetter who’d been spending a lot of time in the Village since his release from the Louisiana State Pen, “Goodnight Irene.”

“Goodnight Irene,” Gordon Jenkins and The Weavers at #2, with the flip, “Tzena Tzena Tzena,” a respectable #21 on our Chartcrush 1950 ranking. But just before they debuted on the charts in July, the hammer dropped: Pete Seeger, one of 151 media personalities outed in Red Channels, the blueprint for the Hollywood blacklist, first published in the anticommunist journal Counterattack in June, literally the same week North Korea invaded the South and the Cold War turned hot.

Back in ’46, the new hardline General Secretary of the American Communist Party had called for party members to use art as a “weapon in the class struggle,” and Seeger had answered with the bi-coastal activist song collective People’s Songs. And his earlier group The Almanac Singers had been so outspoken that a major New York paper ran the headline “Commie Singers Try to Infiltrate Radio” after they sang on network radio in ’42.

Country music legend Tex Ritter had been part of the Greenwich Village scene in the late ’40s and later told The New York Times: “It got to the point there for a few years where it was very difficult to tell where Folk music ended and Communism began.”

Still, the blacklist didn’t bite right away; The Weavers notched two more top tens in ’51. But airplay faded, gigs dried up, and by ’53 they were so radioactive, Decca didn’t just drop them—they scrubbed their entire catalog. And aside from a splashy Weavers reunion at Carnegie Hall post-McCarthy in ’55, the whole Folk genre stayed on life support until “Tom Dooley” in 1958 by the squeaky-clean Kingston Trio.

#1 Nat “King” Cole – Mona Lisa

Well, we’ve been counting down the top ten hits of 1950 here on this week’s Chartcrush Top Ten Countdown Show, and we’re down to #1: the first year-end chart topper by a Black Artist since The Ink Spots’ “The Gypsy” in 1946, per our Chartcrush rankings.

It’s the biggest hit version of 1950’s Oscar-winning Best Song, from Paramount’s Captain Carey, U.S.A.—like The Third Man, a film noir set in Postwar Europe, starring Alan Ladd as an ex-intelligence officer hunting a traitor. In flashbacks, a Street Accordionist plays the haunting melody when German patrols appear.

All the labels rushed out versions, but none of the other six that charted even cracked the top ten. This one dominated, with nine weeks at #1 on our blended Sales, Airplay, and Jukebox ranking—and another nine at #2 stuck behind “Goodnight Irene.” It was close, but at #1, it’s Nat “King” Cole’s “Mona Lisa.”

Nat “King” Cole’s “Mona Lisa” at #1 on our Chartcrush countdown of 1950’s top hits: his second appearance in a year-end top ten. “(I Love You) For Sentimental Reasons,” our #7 song of 1947, when he was billed as The King Cole Trio, his Jazz Combo. And his first solo hit, “Nature Boy,” just misses our 1948 countdown at #11.

Believe it or not, Cole never set out to be a Singer, just a Jazz Pianist. But the story goes, a drunk patron at a bar in L.A. goaded him into singing during a set, and the tune he picked, “Sweet Lorraine,” became his first record.

Of the dozen or so versions of “Mona Lisa” cut in 1950, Songwriter Jay Livingston was very clearly partial to Nat’s. Not only did he pitch him the song to record (for the B-side of his latest single); together they hit the promo circuit, hand-delivering copies to radio stations, and that hustle flipped the script: “Mona Lisa” was the hit, and the A-side Capitol was pushing didn’t even chart.

By the way, Les Baxter I mentioned earlier: the credited Arranger/Conductor on “Mona Lisa,” as on numerous other Capitol releases, but word is, all he did was wave that baton. The plush, hypnotic arrangement, cooked up by his young protégé: future Sinatra collaborator Nelson Riddle.

Bonus

Well there you go: the top ten songs of 1950 according to our Chartcrush recap of Billboard‘s weekly Sales, Airplay and Jukebox charts. Again, our ranking derived by combining those three pre-Hot100 charts into a Hot100-style chart, then applying the same method we use for Hot100 years to rank the songs.

But going back to the source—Billboard‘s three published year-end Pop charts for 1950—there were records that made the top ten on two out of the three, yet missed the top ten on our Chartcrush ranking. So since we have some extra time, let’s shine a little light on those.

#15 Gary Crosby and Friend with Matty Matlock’s All-Stars – Play a Simple Melody

…starting with the one that notches in at #15 on our ranking, but Billboard had it at #8 on its year-end Jukebox chart, and #5 Sales: reviving a 1914 Ragtime number from Irving Berlin’s very first Broadway score, Watch Your Step.

Decca Records’ Dave Kapp—yes, the same executive who tried to block Gordon Jenkins from signing The Weavers—convinced the label’s biggest name since the ’30s to cut a few tracks with his 17-year-old son, and the song’s cheeky generation-gap lyrics were perfect. Billed simply as Gary Crosby and Friend, here’s “Play a Simple Melody.”

And the Friend? Of course, Gary Crosby’s dad, Bing—who’d known “Play a Simple Melody” since he was a kid. Now 47, Bing had weathered the early ’30s Crooner backlash that sidelined rivals like Rudy Vallée and Russ Columbo, cruised through the Sinatra and Como Bobbysoxer crazes of the ’40s, and notched eight top tens in the postwar ’40s to stay on top.

But “Simple Melody,” and its flip “Sam’s Song:” his last hurrah on the hit parade—ironically, uncredited. His name wasn’t even on the record! By the end of 1950, the big-voiced Belters were moving in, and then came Rock ‘n Roll. Bing’s final charting hit that wasn’t “White Christmas?” That was in 1957.

#14 Teresa Brewer with The Dixieland All Stars – (Put Another Nickel In) Music! Music! Music!

Next in our bonus segment of big 1950 hits that didn’t quite crack our Chartcrush top ten: #14 on our list, but all the way up at #6 on Billboard‘s year-end Sales and Jukebox charts. So why the gap? Well, it was only #27 on the year-end DJ chart. The lyrics, too racy for radio: 1950’s Pop “bad girl” Teresa Brewer. Her breakthrough “Music! Music! Music!”

“Put another nickel in!” followed by “I’d do anything for you!” Oh, you bet that raised some eyebrows in 1950! Gene Rayburn may’ve been the only one playing it on the air—yeah, that Gene Rayburn, before Match Game a morning-drive DJ on WNEW in New York, who got Teresa Brewer to cut it, mostly to prove he had the clout to turn any record into a hit—even a throwaway B-side of a Dixieland Novelty number by an unknown Teen!

#13 Eileen Barton with The New Yorkers – If I Knew You Were Comin’ (I’d’ve Baked a Cake)

Next up: #13 on our Chartcrush ranking, but #5 on Billboard‘s year-end Jukebox chart and top ten Airplay. It missed on the Sales chart: the small National label couldn’t keep up with demand—and anyway, it was already playing in every diner and five-and-dime, so who needed the record?

A bouncy Novelty with a wink big enough to jerk a soda fountain—yet radio still played it! It’s former vaudeville and radio child star since age three, now all grown up at 24: Eileen Barton, “If I Knew You Were Comin’, I’d’ve Baked a Cake.”

Not just a hit, a full-blown catchphrase—”cake” became shorthand for flirty domesticity, echoed since in everything from M*A*S*H to Muppets to The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel. Eileen Barton never cracked the top ten again, but how do you follow a record that had Housewives blushing and Frat Boys howling—over cake?

#11 Red Foley – Chattanoogie Shoe Shine Boy

And finally in our Chartcrush 1950 bonus segment of hits that made Billboard‘s year-end top ten lists but missed our countdown, a Country record that cracked the code on the Pop charts months before “Goodnight Irene” made Folk mainstream.

Not a Pop Singer dabbling like Vaughn Monroe or Frankie Laine—this was a Grand Ole Opry star since the ’30s, recording in Nashville with a pedal steel and Owen Bradley producing. That’s as Country as it gets! Numbers 8 and 4 on Billboard‘s year-end Sales and Jukebox charts, respectively, it’s Red Foley’s “Chattanoogie Shoe Shine Boy.”

Thigh slap percussion mimicking a popping shine rag on Red Foley’s “Chattanoogie Shoe Shine Boy,” the first true Country-Pop crossover hit. So I guess we can forgive the label, Decca, for putting out Bing Crosby’s version at the same time and probably costing Foley a top ten placement on Billboard‘s year-end DJ chart, where it was #16.

Stations squeamish about Hillbilly twang also had Frank Sinatra and Phil Harris‘ versions on other labels. Those also cracked the top ten on the weekly DJ chart, but none could touch Foley’s in stores and on jukes, so on our Chartcrush ranking that factors all three Billboard charts, it’s 1950’s #11 hit.

Well that’s all we have for you here on our 1950 edition of the Chartcrush Top Ten Countdown Show. I’ve been your host, Christopher Verdesi. Hey, if you have a minute and like what you heard this hour, head over to our website, chartcrush.com, for a transcript of the show and link to stream the podcast version, plus genned-up extras like our full top100 chart and interactive line graph of the Billboard chart runs for the top ten hits. Which we do for every year, 1940s to now, and it’s all on that website, again, chartcrush.com. Thanks for listening and tune in again next week, same station, same 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 and count down the top ten songs according to our exclusive recap of the weekly charts published at the time in the music industry’s top trade mag, Billboard. This week on Chartcrush, we’re rewinding to 2003.

War—now that’s something that’s always rattled Pop’s cages, right? And ’03 was the invasion of Iraq. The buildup, already barreling ahead at the start of the year, experts saying that once convoys started rolling, soldiers would be facing sarin, mustard gas, anthrax, botulinum—maybe even nukes: all the horrible WMD nasties George W. Bush and his administration had been ticking off in ’02 to make what CIA chief George Tenet called its “slam-dunk” case for removing Iraqi Dictator Saddam Hussein. CNN, looping footage of soldiers in gas masks and MOPP suits clutching atropine injectors to drive home the point.

Then March 20: the “shock and awe” air strikes in Baghdad; April 9, down comes Saddam’s statue in Baghdad’s Tahrir Square; and May 1, “Mission Accomplished:” W on the aircraft carrier flight deck, declaring major combat operations over. After just six weeks! Or so we thought.

But the nail-biting rollercoaster of dread and triumph on the news pushed emotions to extremes, and that came through loud and clear on the charts. Hip-Hop/R&B on the one hand, the only genre in ’03 with the swagger and flex to reflect the bravado of the buildup and at the same time offer an escapist party bubble potent enough to meet the moment. And on the other, Rock: its angsty, brooding Emo bent post-Grunge, a pressure valve for the cynicism, paranoia and unease seeping into the cultural groundwater since the end of the Cold War, but especially after 9/11.

Both charted big in ’03, as we’ll be hearing this hour, but calming sounds from Adult radio formats also crossed over in ’03, just not as big: Norah Jones’ “Don’t Know Why,” Christina Aguilera’s “Beautiful,” Coldplay’s “Clocks,” Fleetwood Mac’s “Peacekeeper,” Erykah Badu’s “Love of My Life;” and from over on Country radio, sentimental, easy-on-the-ears crossovers like Dixie Chicks’ cover of “Landslide” (speaking of Fleetwood Mac), Darryl Worley’s “Have You Forgotten,” and Kid Rock’s surprise duet with Sheryl Crow on “Picture.”

Dixie Chicks, at their commercial peak in ’03, but after Natalie Maines dissed President Bush and the looming Iraq War from the stage in the U.K., Country Radio blacklisted them and “Landslide” dropped from #10 to #43 on Hot 100 in just one week; gone completely the next.

Radio, really the whole game on the charts in ’03, with sales of physical singles down a whopping 88% since 1998, when Billboard dropped its rule that only songs in stores as physical singles could chart on the Hot100. Stores to buy them in were disappearing too; Billboard estimated that 1,000 record stores closed in ’03.

Apple launched the online iTunes store in March, where fans could download mp3 songs for 99 cents apiece and load up their iPods legally. The iPod, launched in ’01: that, of course, was what ended up replacing the physical single. Just a couple months after the iTunes store appeared, digital tracks were outselling physical singles according to Billboard.

But they didn’t see fit to factor those paid downloads into the calculus for the Hot100 until ’05, and of course they never factored the exponentially larger trade in mp3s ripped by users from CDs and shared for free on peer-to-peer networks. Shutting down the original mp3 download site, Napster, in ’01 had done little to stem the tide of online music piracy.

#10 3 Doors Down – When I’m Gone

So it was all about radio spins on the charts in the early ’00s, and at #10 as we kick things off here on our 2003 edition of Chartcrush, a song that hit Rock radio at just the right time, and with just the right mood and message to ride the Iraq buildup to chart glory as soldiers geared up to deploy.

The Band from Escatawpa, Mississippi, scoring big a second time after their explosive debut “Kryptonite” in ’01. The lead single from their second album, it hit #1 on the Rock chart Thanksgiving ’02 and stayed for 17 straight weeks, ’til just before the ground invasion in March. On the Hot100 it only got as high as #4 but was in the top ten for ten weeks, straight through May. At #10, 3 Doors Down’s “When I’m Gone.”

“Love me when I’m gone,” the eternal wish of soldiers off to war, but also of guys in Rock Bands on tour, and 3 Doors Down wrote “When I’m Gone” while playing in Europe for the first time. You wouldn’t know that from the video, though, which has them performing it live on an aircraft carrier, interspersed with footage of troops saying goodbye to loved ones.

In ’03, the Lower Manhattan Development Corporation held a design competition for the site of the World Trade Center destroyed in the terrorist attacks of 9/11/01. The winner from over 5,000 entries? Michael Arad and Peter Walker’s “Reflecting Absence.” Loss and longing, the base of the emotional stew as America’s War on Terror unfolded, served up raw and loud by Three Doors Down on “When I’m Gone,” #10 on our Chartcrush countdown of 2003’s top hits, and they’d double down later in the year with “Here Without You.” More on that one in our ’04 episode.

#9 Nelly, P. Diddy and Murphy Lee – Shake Ya Tailfeather

But now we’re gonna flip the dial for the first of the four Hip-Hop Bangers in our countdown: a slice of pure wartime swagger from the P. Diddy-produced Bad Boys II soundtrack. It’s even got a War Chant: the Florida State Seminoles boozy crowd call started in 1984 by Frat Boys in the stands in Tallahassee and later repurposed—complete with foam tomahawks—by baseball’s Atlanta Braves.

The Rapper, at his peak after back-to-back #1s in ’02, “Hot in Herre” and “Dilemma” with Destiny’s Childs’ Kelly Rowland. But he was between albums in ’03, so a soundtrack hit was just the thing to keep him on the charts. At #9 it’s Nelly, P. Diddy, and Murphy Lee from Nelly’s hometown St. Louis posse, the St. Lunatics, “Shake Ya Tailfeather.”

Michael Bay’s long-delayed sequel Bad Boys II grossed twice as much as the first one in ’95, but was panned by critics. “Two and a half hours of explosions and witless banter:” the consensus on review site Rotten Tomatoes and “Shake Ya Tailfeather” is five minutes of the same thing in a song. But both were exactly what audiences were looking for in the Summer of ’03.

Just months later though, Nelly and Diddy shared the stage at Superbowl 38, and didn’t do it. Nelly did “Hot in Herre” and Diddy did his verse from “Mo’ Money Mo’ Problems,” the Notorious B.I.G.’s second posthumous #1 from 1997. No “Tailfeather.” It even won the Grammy for Best Rap Performance by a Duo or Group a week after that halftime show, but has never been sampled in any charting Hip-Hop hit since: a true ’03 snapshot relic.

#8 Chingy – Right Thurr

As is our #8 song. No clever segue needed here! It’s another St. Louis Rapper, signed by Ludacris in the wake of Nelly’s success in ’01 and ’02. Ludacris, from Atlanta, and so-called “Dirty South” Hip-Hop, at its peak in ’03. Even the album by the aforementioned St. Lunatics (Nelly’s posse), went Platinum.

Our Rapper at #8 is standing with the Gateway Arch in the background on his album cover and his breakthrough hit’s got more St. Louis double-r pronunciations than you can shake a tailfeather at. It’s Chingy, with “Right Thurr.”

Chingy had all the makings of a one-hit wonder riding fellow St. Louisan Nelly’s coattails to score the #8 song in our Chartcrush 2003 countdown. But no! Once his album dropped the same week its advance lead single “Right Thurr” cracked the top ten, it spawned two more big hits in ’03: “Holidae In” with Ludacris and Snoop Dogg, and “One Call Away” featuring ’90s sitcom Actor turned Singer Jason Weaver as J-Weav on the chorus. And Chingy’s own TV appearances on Punk’d and The George Lopez Show among others helped keep him out front and charting in the top 20 through ’06.

#7 Sean Paul – Get Busy

Now I mentioned the iTunes launch in the intro; at #7, the first new #1 hit of the iTunes era—for three weeks in May. New tech, new sounds, and this sound was Dancehall—the fast, gritty, talk-heavy Reggae offshoot that revved up in Jamaica parallel to Hip-Hop in America.

Snow’s “Informer” and Ini Kamoze’s “Here Comes The Hotstepper”—two one-hit wonder Novelties that broke the ice in the ’90s, and then Shaggy’s gravelly Reggae-Dancehall Pop on “Boombastic,” “It Wasn’t Me” and “Angel” kept the island vibe going on the charts, but ’03 was the year that Dancehall entered the Pop mainstream more or less undiluted, with this hit. At #7, from Kingston, Jamaica, it’s Sean Paul with “Get Busy.”

Sean Paul, “Get Busy” at #7 here on our 2003 edition of the Chartcrush Top Ten Countdown Show—17 weeks in the top ten, April to July.

The foundation of a Hip-Hop record, of course: the beat, created by a Producer or DJs, and then the MC raps over it. Well, same concept in Dancehall, except that a single backing track (or riddim—r-i-d-d-i-m) might wind up on dozens of records by different MCs, and that was the case with Jamaican Producer Steven “Lenky” Marsden’s Diwali Riddim, the basis of, not just “Get Busy,” but two other hits on the charts at the same time in ’03: Jamaican Wayne Wonder’s Ballad “No Letting Go” and Teen Spanish Harlemite Lumidee’s “Never Leave You,” which got all the way to #3 in August.

But “Get Busy,” with Paul’s trancelike toasting, hit pop culture like a tsunami. His album Dutty Rock sold two million by the end of ’03, he headlined or featured on six more top tens over the next few years, and Rihanna’s first hit in ’05, “Pon de Replay?” Not just Dancehall, but even based on that same Diwali riddim as “Get Busy.”

#6 R. Kelly – Ignition (Remix)

At #6, a comeback to (almost) the top of the charts by the top Male R&B Singer in a decade that had a lot of big-name Male R&B Singers, the ’90s. The song, kept out of the #1 spot all five of its weeks at #2 in the Spring by our #1 Banger of ’03 we’ll be hearing later, but its bouncy, beep-beep swagger was a bold flip-off to his prosecution in ’02 on child porn charges after a sex tape leaked to the Chicago Sun-Times.

And it came about because, just months after the scandal broke, the album he was getting set to release leaked on the internet and was scrapped. At #6, the advance lead single off the rejiggered album, R. Kelly’s completely reimagined remix of one of the leaked songs, “Ignition.”

“Ignition” took its sweet time climbing the charts—five months—to #2, but all told its 42 weeks on the chart and 15 in the top ten make it the #6 song in our Chartcrush countdown of 2003’s top ten hits. Billboard had it at #2 on its year-end Hot100 for ’03.

R. Kelly’s legal spiral, of course, was only getting started. It took six years and a sensational trial in ’08, but he was acquitted of the ’02 charges. In 2019, though, within a month of the Lifetime miniseries Surviving R. Kelly airing, his label dropped him, he was evicted from his recording studio, and looking at ten new federal counts—racketeering and sex trafficking. In 2021 he was convicted of nine of them and got 30 years in prison.

#5 Lil Jon and The East Side Boyz featuring Ying Yang Twins – Get Low

Up next at #5, another hit that peaked at #2 and took a good long time to get there: nearly six months, but unlike “Ignition” whose full chart run was in Billboard‘s ’03 chart year, December 7, ’02 to the last week in November ’03, this one still had three months to go at the cutoff, so Billboard has it at #11 for ’03 and #70 for ’04. But counting that full chart run puts it squarely in the top ten for ’03: #5 by our reckoning here on the Chartcrush Top Ten Countdown Show.

And like Sean Paul’s “Get Busy” with Dancehall, it was the breakthrough not just for the Artist but for the genre he became synonymous with, Crunk—Dirty South Atlanta’s booming high-energy brand of Hip-Hop, heavy on party vibes. Sean Paul wanted us to “Get Busy;” Lil Jon and The East Side Boyz with Ying Yang Twins’ message: “Get Low.”

The radio version of Lil Jon’s “Get Low:” not censored, but practically re-written and re-recorded. Nearly every line needed a tweak or two to pass muster on the airwaves.

In ’04, Lil Jon was tapped to craft a Club Banger as the lead single for Usher’s new album Confessions, and they came up with “Yeah!,” the #1 song of ’04, so Lil Jon’s impact was seismic in the mid ’00s. The raw aggression and escape of Crunk? A big part of how America shook off post-9/11 wartime anxieties.

#4 matchbox twenty – Unwell

But while Crunk was raging, as I said at the top of the show and when we heard 3 Doors Down’s “When I’m Gone” back at #10, Rock was wallowing in anxiety and vulnerability, and at #4, the song that proclaimed in ’03, “it’s OK not to be OK,” written by Lead Singer Rob Thomas for people who are “messed up and feel alone like that. We all feel a little messed up sometimes… you’re not alone,” he said.

And speaking of chart longevity, this one had 54 weeks; nothing else in ’03 came close. The second single from their third album, More Than You Think You Are, it’s matchbox twenty’s “Unwell.”

Writing in Psychology Today in 2024, therapist Jennifer Gerlach called “Unwell” “a window into early psychosis;” its lyrics about paranoia, hearing voices, trouble sleeping, seeing visions—basically a list of the classic symptoms.

Matchbox Twenty’s last big hit: #4 as we count down the top ten here on our ’03 edition of Chartcrush. They put the Band on ice mid-decade to work on solo projects and in ’06, Rob Thomas peaked at #6 with “Lonely No More,” but subsequent matchbox twenty reunion albums and tours from ’07 all the way into the 2020’s leaned on a loyal, graying fan base, not current chart juice.

#3 Beyoncé featuring Jay-Z – Crazy in Love

Not so our next Act though, whose solo breakthrough cracked the top ten the same week as “Unwell,” June 14, and four weeks later was #1. “Unwell” only got to #5. The first two singles off her debut album Dangerously in Love: both #1 hits, and they’re back-to-back at numbers 3 and 2. That’s right, it’s a top five twofer here on our ’03 Chartcrush countdown!

They were nearly back-to-back at #1 too in late Summer and Fall; just five weeks apart—and with those two hits she owned the top of the Hot100 for 17 weeks: most of the second half of the year. Featuring then-just-rumored beau Jay-Z on the intro and featured rap, the first of those #1’s, it’s Beyoncé’s “Crazy in Love.”

Beyoncé was already a force by the time “Crazy in Love” hit: the heartbeat of R&B Girl Group Destiny’s Child since ’97 when she was just 16, TLC’s heirs with sass to spare, championing independence and calling out cheaters, losers and users. By ‘03, she’d vamped in MTV’s Carmen: A Hip Hopera, strutted as groovy Spy Foxxy Cleopatra in ‘02’s big Summer blockbuster Austin Powers Goldmember, and featured on a #4 hit, Jay-Z’s “’03 Bonnie & Clyde” at the end of ’02.

But her funky soundtrack cut from Goldmember, “Work It Out,” didn’t chart and her Destiny’s Child cohort Kelly Rowland beat her to #1 paired with Nelly on “Dilemma,” ’02’s #2 song, all of which delayed Bey’s album release.

And when it finally did drop in June of ’03, she had New York Times critic Kelefa Sanneh infamously proclaiming that she was “no Ashanti.” Ashanti, the Murder, Inc. label Singer who’d just scored in ’02 singing the hooks on Ja Rule and Fat Joe’s ’02 Rap smashes, then her solo debut “Foolish,” our #3 song of ’02.

#2 Beyoncé featuring Sean Paul – Baby Boy

“Crazy in Love,” of course, slapped down the doubters, but then that second #1 right on its heels sealed the deal. It’s our #2 song of 2003, again, Beyoncé, this time featuring Sean Paul, whose we just heard at #7, “Baby Boy.”

Now 21, Beyoncé ditched Destiny’s Child’s flirty sass for a solo strut—sex, soul and vulnerability oozing from “Crazy in Love” and “Baby Boy,” our #2 in the ’03 Chartcrush countdown. Both songs, completed while the album was on hold reacting to Kelly Rowland’s coup with “Dilemma” and Ashanti’s reign, as that New York Times Critic put it, “telling gruff Rappers how much she loved them.” It was a fierce pivot that Beyoncé mined for years while still rocking Destiny’s no-nonsense grit.

By the way, the Raga feel and that sitar twang at the end of “Baby Boy?” A bold nod to Eastern vibes only months into the Iraq war. Iraq, not India of course, but a provocative Pop curveball post-9/11 and “shock and awe.”

Over the next 20 years, Beyoncé scored 17 more top10s as a Headliner or featured Singer, including six #1s.

#1 50 Cent – In da Club

And that gets us to our #1 song of 2003, which also snagged Billboard‘s top spot, and they crowed that “Hip-Hop has its first song of the year since 1995.” But hold up, that ’95 hit, Coolio’s “Gangsta’s Paradise,” was only #50 on their own year-end Airplay chart. The Hot100, a hot mess from ’95 to ’98; check our late ’90s episodes for the scoop on that.

And then there’s ’02, when Eminem’s “Lose Yourself” was #1 for 12 weeks. But that run spilled over into ’03, so it ranked low on both year-end recaps when it was really the #1 song of 2002 (hear all about that in our ’02 episode).

So the headline should be: ’03, the second year in a row that a Hip-Hop record is the song of the year—a truer nod to Hip-Hop’s early ’00s explosion, don’t you think?

Anyway, no debate about what the #1 song of ’03 was. It was a New York Rapper who seemed hell-bent on dissing his way into an early grave, and he almost did—shot nine times and lived in 2000—until Eminem and Dr. Dre heard his ’02 mixtape Guess Who’s Back? and signed him. Hyped as the most-anticipated Rap debut in a decade, at #1, the lead single from his first studio album Get Rich or Die Tryin’, it’s 50 Cent’s “In da Club.”

Even exurban dads of kids watching Dragon Tales in ’03 were aware of “In da Club,” said one commenter on Stereogum’s “Number Ones” column. And NPR’s Franny Kelly credited it with helping start the ringtone craze: “Two years later,” she wrote in 2009, “it was a tongue-in-cheek…retro move to still have it vibrating the table when your mom called.”

“In da Club” didn’t just rule the charts in the Spring of ’03 (nine weeks at #1, March to May), it transformed clubs into escape pods as “shock and awe” dominated the headlines: 50 Cent’s bullet-scarred grit, swagger and supervillain charm wrapped in an over-the-top party vibe that cemented Hip-Hop’s bling era and reshaped Rap’s mainstream with scientific precision. The video even has Eminem and Dre in white coats in a remote lab constructing the ultimate Rapper. Mission accomplished!

Bonus

And there you have ’em: our top ten songs of 2003 here on our ’03 edition of Chartcrush. Billboard’s top ten mostly aligns. No epic “Lose Yourself”-style flub (our #1 song of ’02, split between their ’02 and ’03 recaps), but counting full chart runs the Chartcrush way, Beyoncé’s ‘Baby Boy,’ Lil Jon’s ‘Get Low,’ and Nelly’s ‘Shake Ya Tailfeather’ elbow into our top ten, nudging out Billboard’s #8, 9, and 10 songs. To be thorough, let’s have a look at those near-misses.

#17 Evanescence – Bring Me to Life

First up, a Nu Metal Lament by a classically-influenced Band from Arkansas that notched 12 weeks in the top ten mid-year and won the Grammy for Best Hard Rock song. Billboard‘s #10; it shakes out a #17 on our Chartcrush ranking. It’s Evanescence’s “Bring Me to Life.”

Evanescence Songwriter and Frontwoman Amy Lee didn’t want the Male vocal counterpoint (courtesy of 12 Stones Singer Paul McCoy) on “Bring Me to Life;” the label insisted. But it was her Band’s breakthrough: showing up first in the Ben Affleck superhero movie Daredevil and its soundtrack, then the lead single from the Band’s debut album.

#16 Kid Rock featuring Sheryl Crow – Picture

Next on our mini-countdown on the songs that made Billboard‘s year-end top ten for ’03 but not our Chartcrush Top Ten we counted down earlier in the show, Detroit’s Rap-Rock Rebel dials it down with a Duet that hit #4 blending whiskey drawl and Country twang—and Sheryl Crow sold the heartbreak. Billboard had it at #9; it’s #16 on our Chartcrush ’03 ranking: Kid Rock’s “Picture.”

That’s the album version of Kid Rock’s “Picture” featuring Sheryl Crow, who co-wrote it, but the intended radio version had Country Singer-Songwriter Allison Moorer, since Sheryl Crow’s label wouldn’t let Kid Rock’s label put out as a single. Most radio stations ignored that and played the Crow version anyway.

#13 Aaliyah – Miss You

And finally, Billboard‘s #8 song of ’03 that shakes out at #13 on our Chartcrush ranking we counted down the top ten from earlier: a posthumous gem cut before the Singer was killed in a plane crash in August of ’01 sending shock waves through the music world. Smooth R&B laced with loss, it’s Aaliyah’s “Miss You.”

Aaliyah’s posthumous hit “Miss You,” 13 weeks in the top ten February to April, lifted mid-run in March by Rapper Jay-Z’s tribute remix, after which it peaked at #3. Billboard doesn’t chart remix versions separately.

And that concludes our ’03 bonus trio, and our ’03 episode of The Chartcrush Top Ten Countdown Show. Hey, if you like what you heard and want more, visit our website, chartcrush.com for a written transcript of the show and a link to stream the podcast version online, plus ragin’ extras like our full top 100 chart and interactive line graph of the actual chart runs of the top ten songs. Which we do for every year, ’40s to the present, and it’s all on the website, again, chartcrush.com.

I’ve been your host, Christopher Verdesi. I want to thank you for listening, and be sure and tune in again next week, same station and time, for another year, and another edition of Chartcrush.

::end transcript::

::start transcript::

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

This week we’re turning the clock back to 1948, the year TVs first flickered on in the parlors of the richest one or two percent of U.S. households, while everyone else gawked at appliance store windows or packed the local bar to catch Milton Berle’s Texaco Star Theater Tuesday nights at 8—all anyone was gonna be talking about Wednesday morning.

In the Summer, all four networks, NBC, CBS, ABC and Dumont, covered the party conventions: the first presidential election since ’28 without Franklin Roosevelt. Billboard‘s verdict on that coverage? “Better Than Being in the Hall.” And in the Fall of ’48, all four nets, for the first time, had full primetime lineups.

TV was a game changer on the charts. Just ask Perry Como, who’d slumped in ’47, but was instantaneously back on top of the Crooner heap once NBC put his weekly Chesterfield Supper Club radio show on the tube. Six top10s in ’49.

It was also a game changer for radio. The networks all thought “Who wants a box with just sound when there’s a box with sound and video?” so the FCC started handing out previously-impossible-to-get radio broadcast licenses like candy, and a cheap way for those startups to fill the time was to play records.

Well as it turned out, that wasn’t just cheap, it was popular. Lots of folks wanted the box with just sound if the sound was the latest hits. Kiddos, for one, since mom and dad were in charge of the TV set.

Less than one in four families with a car had a radio in it according to a 1948 study. By 1963 that was 60%.

So radio managed to carve out a lane and thrive in the TV era. Not so much jukeboxes though: before TV, the only passive entertainment in taverns, Teen hangouts, social clubs and community centers. Once all those places got TVs, the weekly haul of jukebox nickels got a lot lighter, so dime-a-play jukes started cropping up, especially at swankier locations, as Billboard meticulously chronicled in its back-of-the-book “Coin Machines” section throughout ’48 and ’49.

Jukeboxes, though, still way ahead of owned records when Billboard asked college students how they were getting their tunes in its annual College Poll in ’48. Only one in four had a record player—probably the same one in four whose families had a car radio!

And given that, why is it that almost every source—even Billboard itself—defaults to Retail Best Sellers when talking about pre-Hot100 charts, when there were also separate weekly Airplay and Jukebox charts? Well, at Chartcrush, we sum the three into a single Hot100-style weekly ranking. Not only is that more inclusive (not just rich folks with record collections); it lets us rank the songs with the exact same algorithm we use for Hot100 years post-1958.

Now last but definitely not least as we get set to spin the records, also meticulously chronicled by Billboard in ’48: the second American Federation of Musicians strike against record companies. AFM President James Caesar Petrillo, still not seeing any possible upside for musicians in making records, getting them in jukeboxes and on the air or really anything but performing live.

The recording ban in ’42 to ’44 had gotten record companies to finance an AFM-administered royalty fund, but in ’47, the first Republican Congress since the New Deal outlawed that in the anti-union Taft-Hartley bill. So with the contract expiring at the end of the year, plus TV and the explosion of records being played on radio, the walls were closing in and Petrillo was desperate for a win.

#10 Margaret Whiting – A Tree in the Meadow

Naturally, as the ban approached, as in ’42, record companies kept studios buzzing 24/7 to stockpile recordings. But in ’48 there were ways around the ban that just weren’t available the first time, and we get to kick things off at #10 with one of the most creative!

It’s an American version of a big British hit, and to make it, Capitol Records sent House Bandleader Frank DeVol overseas to record an Orchestra there. Couldn’t do that during the first ban with the War on! And couldn’t surreptitiously record the Singer and overdub her vocal on top of that orchestra either. But they could, and did, in ’48, with tape. Unbeknownst to her they had their brand new cutting-edge wire recorder going.

At #10 it’s Margaret Whiting: what she thought was just a casual audition, but it was her first #1 after two years of near misses: “A Tree in the Meadow.”

“A Tree in the Meadow,” Margaret Whiting at #10, in the top five late August to the end of November, throughout the heated Presidential campaign that culminated with the iconic photo of a grinning President Harry S. Truman holding up the Chicago Tribune with the incorrect front-page headline “Dewey Defeats Truman” the day after the election. Dapper, pencil-stached New York Governor Thomas E. Dewey, Truman’s heavily-favored opponent.

No fewer than seven different versions of “Tree” charted in ’48. The one that was a hit in Britain for Welsh Singer Dorothy Squires? Not among them.

#9 Bing Crosby – Now Is the Hour (Maori Farewell Song)

But that wasn’t the case with our #9 song: another American version of a British hit, but here, the one by veteran English Singer Gracie Fields that was #1 in the U.K. 24 weeks in 1947 led on the charts at first thanks to London Records’ aggressive plugging and “the biggest shipment of foreign records ever to hit the U.S.,” as Time reported, prompted by a DJ on KXOK in St. Louis playing it over the holidays—the first British Invasion!

Decca U.K. spun off its London subsidiary in ’47 just in time to supply Americans with fully-orchestrated records during the recording ban. But it was a version on Decca U.S. that overtook it and was the bigger hit. The Crooner who at age 45—20 years into his hitmaking career—was still tops with College students in that poll I mentioned, at #9, Bing Crosby’s version of “Now Is the Hour.”

Bing Crosby’s “Now Is the Hour (Maori Farewell Song)” at #9 on our Chartcrush Top Ten Countdown for 1948, one of six versions cut by U.S. labels in the final days before the second Petrillo recording ban, to compete with the imported U.K. hit version by Gracie Fields. And all those versions combined made it the #1 song of 1948 on Billboard‘s Honor Roll of Hits, their chart that ranked songs by title, combining all recorded versions plus sheet music sales.

Bing’s we just heard almost could’ve been recorded during the ban with that backing by the Ken Darby Choir, but as the label on the record tells us, there’s piano, celeste, guitar and bass on it—all union instruments.

Again, Bing, the top Crooner in Billboard‘s College Poll, but heading into the ’50s the paradigm was shifting and the relaxed, intimate style he pioneered was going out of style. He never topped a Billboard chart again but continued to score hits over the next decade including nine top10s. Plus, “White Christmas,” which returned every Holiday season, and still does!

#8 Pied Pipers – My Happiness

So labels all got their waxings of “Now Is the Hour” in under the wire in late December, but the song at #8 on our Chartcrush Top Ten Countdown for 1948 was an unexpected smash in the Spring after the Petrillo AFM recording ban was already in effect. The original by an unknown Act on a startup label out of Kansas City cracked the top ten on all three of Billboard‘s charts in just its second week. And of the five versions that charted, two are in our countdown. At #8, the biggest of the ban-compliant copycats, Capitol’s Pied Pipers, “My Happiness.”

Toy instrument players: in a different union that rep’d Vaudeville and Novelty musicians, so the ukelele and xylophone accompaniment on The Pied Pipers version of “My Happiness” recorded mid-April during the ban was 100% compliant. Vocalists, too by the way, different union that had no beef with the record biz.

The Pipers had been at it since 1939, first backing Frank Sinatra on his early hits with the Tommy Dorsey Big Band, then on their own and paired with Johnny Mercer for his string of massive hits in ’44 and ’45.

Jo Stafford, the Lead Singer until ’44, and after going solo she scored 15 top10s over the next decade. June Hutton, her replacement, the Lead on “My Happiness” we just heard at #8 on our Chartcrush 1948 Top Ten Countdown.

Fun fact: both Pied Pipers Lead Singers married Bandleader-Arrangers less than a year apart in ’51 and ’52, and 41 years later, Mariah Carey and Shania Twain, two of the ’90s top Female Singers, married the modern equivalent of Bandleader-Arrangers, their Producers.

#7 Gordon Jenkins and His Orchestra (vocal Charles LaVere and The Swingtettes) – Maybe You’ll Be There

At #7, the chart breakthrough by one of the most important Bandleader-Arrangers in the decade between Swing and Rock ‘n Roll as labels and Singers eclipsed touring name Bands as Pop’s center of gravity.

On staff at Decca after scoring hits for Singer Dick Haymes, he got to make his own records, and his first, a four-part narrative concept album called Manhattan Tower first released in ’46, got him a Key to the City from New York’s Mayor when he performed all 16 minutes of it on The Ed Sullivan Show in 1950. That was a major TV event.

But at #7, his first million-seller, released as a B-side in ’47, but during the ban in ’48, Decca re-issued it as an A-side, and it notched one of the year’s longest chart runs, 31 weeks. It’s Gordon Jenkins and Orchestra, vocal by Singer and Bandleader himself Charlie LaVere who also played piano on the record, “Maybe You’ll Be There.”

Gordon Jenkins’ first charting hit, “Maybe You’ll Be There” at #7 on our Chartcrush Top Ten Countdown of 1948’s biggest hits. Within a year Jenkins was Decca’s Musical Director and scored again in ’49 arranging and conducting The Andrews Sisters hit “I Can Dream, Can’t I?” But his biggest coup? Bucking Decca brass to sign unknown New York Folk Group The Weavers, then scoring the second biggest hit of 1950 with them, “Goodnight Irene.” Pete Seeger, the most famous Weaver.

#6 Jon and Sondra Steele – My Happiness

At #6 a Folk-sounding hit, kinda, not by Folkies, but a Husband-Wife Lounge Act, the B-side of whose primitive-sounding record on Kansas City’s indie Damon Records was the first charting version of the song we heard back at #8 by The Pied Pipers, a much more polished version.

Vocal Jazz legend Ella Fitzgerald also cut a ban-compliant a capella version out on Decca, and two others besides made the charts. But the original hung on to be the bigger hit: at #6, Jon and Sondra Steele’s “My Happiness.”

Kansas City Bandleader Borney Bergantine wrote “My Happiness” in the early ’30s, submitted it for publication, and it sat in a desk for 15 years until the Publisher’s son dusted it off and copyrighted it with new lyrics by his Wife. What we just heard at #6 here on our Chartcrush Countdown of 1948’s top records, the demo they brought Jon and Sondra Steele in to do so they could shop the song around to labels. But no takers, so the owner of Damon Studios where it was recorded (in the same building) decided to start his own label and put it out.

The A-side was a Novelty about, of all things, Petrillo and the musicians strike (“They All Recorded to Beat the Ban“), but it was “My Happiness” on the flip that resonated, and in April Billboard reported Vic Damon saying he’d already sold 100,000 plugging it to DJs and jukebox operators in Kansas City, St. Louis and Chicago. He wasn’t bluffing; five weeks later, it debuted in the top ten—very rare in the late ’40s even for established Acts.

Major labels had hoped the second ban would wipe out upstart indies encroaching on the charts, and Chicago’s Majestic and Vitacoustic did fold. But Mercury and MGM survived and others cropped up, like Damon with “My Happiness.”

By the way, five years after it was a hit, in 1953, 18-year-old Elvis Presley walked into Sam Phillips’ Memphis Recording Service and paid $3.25 to make his first record: two Ballads, and one of them was “My Happiness.”

#5 Al Trace and His New Orchestra (vocal Bob Vincent) – You Call Everybody Darlin’

At #5, yet another leftfield smash that got the majors scrambling to release competing versions. Regent Records was out of Newark, New Jersey: not just an indie; a subsidiary of an indie. Savoy Records, also based in Newark, acquired it just before our #5 record made the charts.

It’s Bandleader/Composer, and starting with his fluky indie Novelty hit “Mairzy Doats” in ’44, Vocalist Al Trace, with his “New Orchestra,” with Singer and future Talent Agent Bob Vincent (his only record credit): “You Call Everybody Darlin'”

Al Trace’s “You Call Everybody Darlin'” at #5 on our 1948 edition of the Chartcrush Top Ten Countdown Show. No fewer than seven competing versions of that one on the charts at the same time in the late Summer and Early Fall, even an earlier recording by Trace and Singer Bob Vincent reissued on a different label, but Billboard didn’t chart those separately.

Most of the copycat ban versions done in ’48 were a capella or used the permitted “toy instruments,” but the Andrews Sisters got to travel to the U.K. to do theirs with Billy Ternent’s Orchestra in London. That took time, though, so Trace’s original got a three month head start and was already #1 when the Sisters’ fully orchestrated version on Decca came out.

#4 Vaughn Monroe and His Orchestra (vocal Vaughn Monroe & The Moon Maids) – Ballerina

At #4, the only other record in our countdown besides “My Happiness” that debuted in the top ten going by our calculated Hot100-style weekly combined chart derived from Billboard‘s published weekly Sales, Airplay and Jukebox charts from the era.

It’s a Band that scored its first hits in 1940, but thrived as all the Golden Age Big Bands went by the wayside and Singers became the new Headliners. Why? Because in this Band, the Bandleader was the Singer. His chart action had waned a bit in ’46, but between November ’47 and January ’48—three months—he roared back with four top10s. This was the biggest. At #4 it’s Vaughn Monroe and Orchestra, “Ballerina.”

The #4 song of 1948 here on our ’48 edition of The Chartcrush Top Ten Countdown Show, Vaughn Monroe’s “Ballerina,” #1 the first eight weeks of the year.

Now, you wouldn’t know it from his records, but Monroe’s Band boasted some Ace Jazz Players, treating listeners of his weekly live Camel Caravan radio show on CBS to occasional bursts of Swing. But in ’49 he was the unlikely catalyst for a massive Country-Western crossover surge that permanently reshaped the music biz.

Within weeks of his unstoppable chart-topper “(Ghost) Riders in the Sky,” Mercury then Columbia A&R Genius Mitch Miller had Crooner Frankie Laine cutting “Mule Train” and “That Lucky Old Sun,” and the Singer whose “A Tree in the Meadow” we heard at #10, Margaret Whiting, was scoring the first of her long string of Novelty-ish Duets with Cowboy Singer Jimmy Wakely on Capitol: “Slippin’ Around.”

#3 Pee Wee Hunt and His Orchestra – Twelfth Street Rag

But speaking of Swing, next up we have a Band led by the Trombonist/Singer who co-founded one of the first successful Swing Groups, the Casa Loma Orchestra, in 1929. And even by then, the style of Jazz on our #3 record was passe!

They’d played it as a goof winding down a session in ’46: their parody of an amateur Dixieland Band circa 1921. But Capitol had kept the mics hot, and after a Nostalgia wave swept a reissue of Ted Weems’ “Heartaches” from 1933 to #1 for 15 weeks in ’47, and with the recording ban in ’48, they put it out and it sold three million. At #3, Pee Wee Hunt and Orchestra: “Twelfth Street Rag.”

“A staple at patio parties and basement beer gardens throughout mid-century, middle-class Middle America,” as Michigan Radio Legend arwulf arwulf put it on allmusic.com, Pee Wee Hunt’s “Twelfth Street Rag,” #1 on Billboard‘s year-end Best-Sellers chart and the #3 record of 1948 overall here on our ’48 edition of the Chartcrush Top Ten Countdown Show.

Hunt continued cutting Dixieland throwback sides for Capitol, scored big again in ’53 with “Oh!” and by ’54 was famous enough to be roasted in an MGM cartoon, Tex Avery’s Dixieland Droopy, as Pee Wee Runt and his All-Flea Dixieland Band.

#2 Peggy Lee with Dave Barbour and The Brazilians – Mañana (Is Soon Enough for Me)

And at #2 we have the record that topped the year-end DJ chart—the biggest radio hit of the year—by a Singer (and Songwriter) who’d been on the charts since 1941 when she replaced the abruptly-departed Helen Forrest as the Girl Singer in the Benny Goodman Orchestra.

But about a year in to that high-profile gig, she had an affair with—then married—the Guitar Player, Dave Barbour, which got him canned for violating Goodman’s strict “no fraternizing” policy. Well, she quit too and tried to be a housewife—and once the baby was born later in ’43, a stay-at-home mom—but was back in the biz in under a year, signed to Capitol as a Solo Act. And Hubby was on all her records, playing guitar and/or directing the Band.

At #2, her first #1, a song they co-wrote on vacation in Mexico. It’s Peggy Lee with Dave Barbour and The Brazilians (Singer/Actress and Fruit Hat Wearer Carmen Miranda’s Band), “Mañana.”

So Bing Crosby took top Male Singer in Billboard‘s 1948 College Poll. Peggy Lee was the top Female. And I should add that three of the top four Female chart newcomers in that poll were Black—Sarah Vaughan, Nellie Lutcher and Rose Murphy. The times they were a-changin’. And there was the great Ella Fitzgerald as well, whose big Novelty hit “Stone Cold Dead in the Market” with Louis Jordan in ’46 also had a put-on ethnic accent.

But the very White, very blonde Peggy Lee drew fire for “Mañana,” even then, for mocking Mexican culture with that stereotypical accent borrowed from Comedy sketches: a criticism Lee took to heart, but insisted that the Narrator’s carefree, leave-it-till-tomorrow attitude is a thing to be envied, not laughed at—and she could point to other songs she wrote that expressed similar notions, without an accent.

But maybe her best defense: at a gig in Texas after the vacation in Mexico where she and Barbour wrote the song, she described a cocktail she’d had to the bartender, who subbed tequila, lime and salt for the brandy, lemon and sugar in his classic sidecar cocktail recipe trying to replicate it. Peggy, of course, short for Margaret, or, en Español, Margarita. “Mañana,” #2 on our Chartcrush Countdown of 1948’s top ten hits.

#1 Dinah Shore and Her Happy Valley Boys – Buttons and Bows

And it would be #1 if, like Billboard‘s always done out of necessity, we only factored weeks within a set timeframe. But we don’t do that. In our Chartcrush rankings, every song’s full chart run gets counted, and our #1 song’s went from September ’48 to March ’49, big on all three Billboard charts, but especially the Jukebox chart.

And it also won Best Song at the Oscars, from Paramount’s Western Comedy The Paleface. Stars Bob Hope and Jane Russell do it as a Duet in the movie, but the biggest chart hit was Dinah Shore’s. At #1, “Buttons and Bows.”

All six charting versions of “Buttons and Bows,” recorded in late ’47 before the ban, but held back ’til The Paleface hit theaters in late ’48. Dinah Shore’s on Columbia, the runaway favorite and the #1 record of the year on our Chartcrush countdown for 1948.

Dinah was the ’40s top charting Solo Female with 21 top10s in the decade, but “Buttons and Bows” was only her second #1 after her a capella “I’ll Walk Alone” in ’44 during the first Petrillo AFM ban.

Bonus

And that’s our top ten records, but in an era when multiple versions of songs were going head-to-head on the charts, some of the biggest hits simply aren’t going to show up at or near the top of a ranking of records. And sure enough, for ’48, when you rank the year by song titles instead of records (like that Billboard Honor Roll of Hits chart I mentioned), four of ’48’s biggest hits did not land a record in the top ten, so to be thorough, let’s zero in on those.

#12 Kay Kyser and His Orchestra (vocal Gloria Wood) – Woody Wood-Pecker

First, the theme song of an iconic cartoon bird eight years after his debut, and mid-makeover into his cuter, less aggressive ’50s and ’60s persona. Three charting versions combined make it the #10 song of ’48, and the biggest of ’em was the Kay Kyser Orchestra’s, recorded before the ban, of course—vocals by ubiquitous Radio and TV Commercial Singer Gloria Wood and laughs by longtime Kyser Vocalist Harry Babbit, “Woody Wood-Pecker.”

The Kay Kyser Orchestra’s version of “Woody Wood-Pecker” notches in at #12 on our Chartcrush records ranking for 1948 we just counted down the top ten from, but combining the points for all three charting records makes it the #10 song of the year.

Now, the second biggest version was an immediate smash on radio because it had Mel Blanc on it, the actual guy who did Woody’s laugh in the cartoons, but it dropped too late to overtake Kyser’s.

#19 Doris Day – It’s Magic

Our next song comes out 1948’s #6 hit combining all versions: a Jule Styne/Sammy Cahn Ballad written for Warner Brothers’ Romance on the High Seas, and the biggest of the six that charted was by the Actress who sings it in the movie. That usually wasn’t the case in the ’40s and ’50s, but this Actress was a Singer first with ten charting hits since her explosive debut in the Summer of ’45 on the back-to-back #1s “My Dreams Are Getting Better All the Time” and “Sentimental Journey” with the Les Brown Orchestra. So when she sang a song in a movie, it was hard to beat on the charts. Here’s Doris Day’s version of “It’s Magic.”

Doris Day’s first Solo hit from her Acting debut in Romance on the High Seas, “It’s Magic.” Six charting versions that combined make it the #6 song of the year, but Day’s was the only record that cracked the top five on any chart and it shakes out at #19 on our 1948 Chartcrush records ranking we counted down the top ten from earlier.

#13 Ken Griffin at the Organ (vocal Jerry Wayne) – You Can’t Be True, Dear

Next, a song first cut as an instrumental by “The Wizard of the Organ,” as he was billed in an ad. But a VP at the small Rondo label in Chicago decided to write lyrics, bring in a Singer and put it out with an overdubbed vocal, and that was a huge leftfield hit during the recording ban, with six major label copycats charting over the Summer that combined make it 1948’s #3 song.

Rondo extended its run on the charts issuing the original instrumental at the height of the frenzy, and London Records’ imported version with full orchestra was English Singer Vera Lynn’s first U.S. hit. But the original overdubbed one is tops in our 1948 records ranking at #13. It’s Ken Griffin at the Organ with vocals by Jerry Wayne, “You Can’t Be True Dear.”

Since remixes became a thing in the ’90s, Billboard has combined all versions for ranking on the charts. Had they done that in ’48, the vocal and instrumental versions of Organist Ken Griffin’s “You Can’t Be True Dear” would’ve been the #2 record of the year in our Chartcrush countdown we heard earlier. But they were separate so the vocal is #13 and the instrumental, #32.

That instrumental though, many a record worn out from repeated playing at skating rinks through the ’50s and ’60s!

#17 Kay Kyser and His Orchestra (vocal Harry Babbitt and Gloria Wood) – On a Slow Boat to China

And finally, 1948’s #2 song: a top Tin Pan Alley plug in late ’47, written by A-list Songwriter Frank Loesser and seeded (or leaked) pre-publication to select labels, who all got versions in their stockpiles before the ban, then simultaneously unleashed them in the Fall of ’48—top names like Benny Goodman, Freddy Martin, Eddy Howard, and the one that was the biggest hit, but not by much. Same configuration as “Woody Woodpecker,” it’s Kay Kyser and his Orchestra with Singers Harry Babbitt and Gloria Wood: “On a Slow Boat to China.”

“I’d like to get you on a slow boat to China” was a poker night wisecrack originally: something to say to the player who’s losing. Songwriter Frank Loesser repurposed it as a romantic sentiment and it was the second biggest song on the charts in ’48.

Another travel-themed hit with multiple top10 versions was right on its heels heading into ’49, “Faraway Places.” The biggest of those? Margaret Whiting, whose sneakily overdubbed version of “A Tree in the Meadow” we heard back at #10.

Which completes the circle here on our 1948 edition of Chartcrush! I’ve been your host, Christopher Verdesi, and I want to thank you for listening this hour. Hey if you want more, you’re gonna want to check out the Chartcrush website at chartcrush.com for a transcript and a link to stream the extended podcast versions of this and all other Chartcrush episodes online, plus our full top100 charts, chart run line graphs and other hep 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.

::end transcript::

::start transcript::

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

This week it’s 1998. Still the ’90s, but the table was being set for what was to come, with one commenter on a Buzzfeed feature calling ’98 “the perfect balance of technology and real world life” before things descended into chaos with social media and iPhones. “We had the internet,” another observed, “but it didn’t yet control every aspect of our lives.”

But the main story, even bigger than tech: the new generation starting to flex its cultural (and economic) muscle. Yep, here came Millennials in ’98, with their well-over $100 billion (with a “b”) in disposable income. Self-obsessed Boomer media at first called them “Echo Boomers:” condescending to Millennials, of course, but totally dismissive of Generation X, the generation between Boomers and Millennials, every member of which in ’98, in the coveted 18 to 34 target group for ads and media: Gen-X’s cultural peak.

But just like the Silent Generation in ’63 and ’64 whose peak was cut short by young Boomers flooding the zone with their Surf, Motown, “Louie Louie” and Beatlemania, you’d never know it. Xers as a rule, skeptical of wealth, consumerism, upward mobility… Disney. And Millennials, by contrast, breathing it all in like oxygen.

Tech Visionary Steve Jobs was back running Apple and his comeback product in ’98? The stylish and relatively inexpensive iMac (CPU and monitor all-in-one) with its famous Rolling Stones “She’s a Rainbow” TV ad showing off the six different candy colors it came in.

Earlier ads with Actor Jeff Goldblum had emphasized its internet readiness, hence the “i:” a major selling point the year the Drudge Report broke the Monica Lewinski scandal that dominated news and politics in ’98: President Bill Clinton’s affair with a White House intern in her early 20s. Newsweek had spiked the story last minute. And just like that, as scholar J.D. Lasica put it, “the internet came of age as a news medium.” Clinton and Ken Starr, the Independent Counsel in charge of investigating, shared Time Magazine’s Man of the Year cover at the end of ’98 after Clinton was impeached over the scandal.

Apple sold nearly a million iMacs in ’98, for many Millennials—aged 2 to 17—their first connected device.

Two ’90s “appointment TV” institutions ended in ’98: Seinfeld and The Larry Sanders Show, and Melrose Place and Beverly Hills 90210 were on life support. New on the dial in ’98? Dawson’s Creek, Sex and the City, Total Request Live, Powerpuff Girls and Teletubbies! And in bookstores, Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone.

In tech, politics and TV, the pages were turning as Millennials came of age. And in music too, as we’ll be hearing this hour.

But a note about the charts before we kick things off. 1998 was the fourth year in a row that songs in the top ten on Billboard‘s year-end Hot100 chart were not even among the top 30 on the year-end Airplay chart. And the fourth year that some of the year’s top hits on Radio weren’t on the Hot100 at all because of Billboard‘s outdated rule that songs be out as physical singles.

For the Country chart, Billboard effectively jettisoned that rule all the way back in 1990 when Airplay on Country radio became the sole factor on that chart. Which made sense because 45 rpm vinyl singles were going extinct. But for some reason, it remained in force for the Hot100, causing a disconnect between the Hot100 and Airplay charts.

Casey Kasem returned to American Top 40 in 1998 after ten years and used his own proprietary chart instead of the Hot100. And at Chartcrush, our rankings for 1995 to ’98, which we call the “broken Hot100 years:” based on Billboard‘s weekly Radio Songs chart.

#10 K-Ci & JoJo – All My Life

And at #10 on our ranking as we kick things off, a song that was #3 on that chart for nine weeks, April to June, and #1 on the Hot100 for three weeks during that run: one of only four songs in our Airplay-derived top ten that was also in the top ten on Billboard‘s year-end Hot100 for ’98: Brothers Cedric and Joel Hailey from the defunct R&B Group Jodeci, now working as a Duo.

They debuted with a song on the Bulletproof soundtrack—the buddy cop action flick starring Damon Wayans and Adam Sandler—then sang the hook on Rapper 2Pac’s first (and only) Hot100 #1 “How Do U Want It” in ’96. Their first two singles off their ’97 album only made a ripple, but the third was a splash. At #10 it’s K-Ci & JoJo’s “All My Life.”

Ironic that members of Jodeci, the ’90s’ ultimate bad boy seduction Group, scored one of the decade’s top Wedding Songs, the Slow Jam “All My Life.” K-Ci & JoJo at #10 as we count down the top ten Radio hits of 1998, here on our 1998 edition of the Chartcrush Top Ten Countdown Show. Over on Billboard‘s year-end Hot100, they had it at #7.

Songs like that dominated in the early ’90s, so, already kind of throwback for ’98, but it worked, despite fallout from K-Ci’s abuse of R&B Singer Mary J. Blige during their just-ended four-year relationship. Doubtful the Duo could’ve weathered that post-social media, but they scored two more Platinum albums and a #2 hit, “Tell Me It’s Real” in 1999, before their chart action gradually waned into the ’00s.

#9 Next – Too Close

Sticking with R&B for our #9 song that only got as high as #4 on the Airplay chart, but had a nice long run in the top ten, 21 weeks, racking up those ranking points week after week. But its 23 weeks in the top ten on the Hot100, with five at #1 made it Billboard‘s #1 Hot100 song of 1998. Breakout hit by a previously unknown Group was always a good bet for single sales—especially when it has a taboo double meaning that somehow flies completely under the radar of Gatekeepers at radio! At #9, Minneapolis, Minnesota Trio Next, with “Too Close.”

Next’s “Too Close,” Billboard‘s #1 Hot100 song of 1998, and also their #1 R&B song of the year—and a big hit on the airwaves; just not as big: #9 on our Chartcrush Countdown of 1998’s top ten Radio songs.

The groove in the song lifted from Rap Pioneer Kurtis Blow’s “Christmas Rappin’” from 1979—not a sample, but Blow still got a co-writing credit.

Next scored one more top 20 Airplay hit with “Wifey” in 2000 but didn’t fare well after Clive Davis’ ouster from Arista Records. Eventually they landed at Davis’ new label, J, but by then, their time had passed.

#8 Backstreet Boys – As Long as You Love Me

Well we kicked off our 1998 countdown with a pair of Airplay hits that also made the top ten on Billboard‘s year-end Hot100. At #8, the first of five—count ’em five—of the year’s top ten Airplay hits we’ll be hearing this hour that didn’t chart on the Hot100 at all. Again, ’95 to ’98: the broken Hot100 years, when Billboard‘s rule that songs be out as physical singles rendered the Hot100 all but irrelevant as a popularity gauge—and why, for those years, our Chartcrush rankings are based on the Radio Songs chart instead.

Now as I mentioned in the intro, MTV’s Total Request Live debuted in ’98, September 18 to be exact: ground zero of Millennials’ arrival on the cultural landscape: throngs of Teen Girls taking over New York’s Times Square Monday through Thursday afternoons as Carson Daly hosted behind a big window, and sparking a flurry of thinkpieces and explainers in the mainstream press to explore the phenomenon.

New York Times Critic Jon Pareles’ dismissive “When Pop Becomes the Toy of Teenyboppers,” and an 8,000-word expose titled “The Secret Life of Teenage Girls” in Rolling Stone, by a Reporter who embedded herself among Teen Girls in Connecticut for 18 months—just two notable examples.

Our Act at #8, #1 on TRL‘s very first countdown with their fourth charting radio hit, “I’ll Never Break Your Heart,” but this one from earlier in the year pre-TRL was their biggest hit of ’98, never released as a single so it didn’t chart on the Hot100. It’s Backstreet Boys’ “As Long as You Love Me.”

Backstreet Boys’ “As Long as You Love Me” at #8 on our Chartcrush Top Ten Countdown of 1998’s top ten radio hits, but fun fact: its 26 weeks in the top ten on the Adult Contemporary chart was five more than on the all-genre Airplay chart our Countdown is based on. In that Times piece I mentioned, Jon Pareles explains that as “kiddie pop’s pledges of love stak[ing] out the romantic middle of the road that Bread or Boyz II Men once occupied.”

But after nearly ten years of Gen-X’s Alt, Grunge and Gangsta Rap, Backstreet Boys and ‘NSYNC (their upstart rival they narrowly beat on that first TRL countdown) were a return to normalcy for Boomers, inside the box and accessible: definitely a happy compromise while chauffeuring the kiddos around town in the minivan.

Both acts were repackaging the sound and style of Black R&B Boy Bands topping the charts since the early ’90s, two latter-day examples of which we kicked off with at numbers 10 and 9, K-Ci & JoJo from Jodeci, and Next.

’99, of course: peak Teen Pop after Britney Spears and Christina Aguilera joined the fray.

#7 Celine Dion – My Heart Will Go On

Now it might not be obvious at first glance, but our #7 hit: also a product of the Millennial Pop explosion, in that (as Vulture Writer Craig Marks observed) the Teens and Tweens who made Backstreet Boys’ Millennium the #1 album of 1999, were a huge factor in making the movie soundtrack containing the song the #1 album of 1998—and the movie itself the #1 grossing film of, not just the year, but of all-time up ’til then.

It was #1 on the Hot100 for two weeks but topped the Airplay chart for ten. Her third Hot100 #1 after “The Power of Love” in ’94 and “Because You Loved Me” in ’96, at #7, the song from Titanic, Celine Dion’s “My Heart Will Go On.”

Not only was Titanic the #1 album of the year; Celine Dion’s own Let’s Talk about Love was #2. The ’90s: a decade of Pop Divas: Mariah Carey, Whitney Houston, Mary J. Blige, Vanessa Williams, Amy Grant, Toni Braxton. And Celine, of course, in that mix all the way back to her first top10 in 1991, “Where Does My Heart Beat Now.” But “My Heart Will Go On” was the final undiluted ’90s Diva chart topper.

Celine announced a hiatus in ’99 to help her husband fight his cancer, and then, with highly-publicized IVF treatments, have a son. She returned with a new album in 2002 but by then, Teen Pop and Hip-Hop-inflected R&B had changed everything on the charts and going forward, she was only able to crack the top 20 on the Adult Contemporary and Album charts.

#6 Paula Cole – I Don’t Want to Wait

Well we are counting down the top ten Radio hits of 1998 here on this week’s edition of The Chartcrush Top Ten Countdown Show and at #6, it’s yet another hit that owes its success to a Millennial TV phenomenon. I mentioned the show in the intro, the Drama Dawson’s Creek, which premiered on The Teen-targeted WB Network as a mid-season replacement in January, and was a breakout hit despite criticism for its “almost obsessive focus on pre-marital sexual activity.”

Well, the title of the show’s theme song after Producers failed to get permission to use Alanis Morrisette’s “Hand in My Pocket:” very much in line with that criticism. At #6 it’s Paula Cole’s “I Don’t Want to Wait.”

Paula Cole at #6 on our Chartcrush Countdown of 1998’s top ten radio hits with “I Don’t Want to Wait,” the theme of the Teen Drama Dawson’s Creek. It also made the top ten on Billboard‘s year-end Hot100: the first song since 1974 to do so without ever cracking the top ten on the weekly Hot100, where it only got as high as #11. But its 56 weeks on the chart: longer than any other 1998 hit except for LeAnn Rimes’ “How Do I Live,” which notched 69.

It was Cole’s second hit after her widely-misunderstood Feminist Anthem “Where Have All the Cowboys Gone?” in ’97, and, as it turned out, her last. She was on the main stage of the all-Female Lilith Fair festival tour in ’97 and ’98 and won Best New Artist at the ’98 Grammys, but she re-vamped her sound for her next album and it didn’t connect, so she retreated to raise her daughter.

Dawson’s Creek ran ’til 2003 and spawned two hit soundtrack albums. Sixpence None the Richer’s “Kiss Me” from the first of those: that’s our #9 song of 1999.

#5 Smash Mouth – Walkin’ on the Sun

At #5 the second of the five hits in our countdown of 1998’s top ten Radio songs that didn’t chart on the Hot100 because they weren’t out as singles. For eight straight weeks over the holidays in ’97 into ’98 though, it was #3 on the Airplay chart behind Chumbawamba’s “Tubthumping” and Sugar Ray’s “Fly“, then hit #2 for a week and stayed on the chart all the way to September—its motifs and gimmicks connecting with a wide swath of fans of Retro Kitch.

That was a sub-current that percolated through the ’90s encompassing ’60 Garage, Surf and Northern Soul, ’50s and ’60s Lounge, Exotica and Cocktail music, bad vintage Sci-Fi, Beach and Biker flicks—and other suddenly-hip-again memes.

SNL star Mike Meyers’ Spy Comedy Austin Powers rode that wave to box office glory in the Summer of ’97, but then these unknowns from San Jose took their song written in 1992 about (of all things) the Rodney King riots in L.A., and did for Retro Kitsch in a three-and-a-half minute song what it took Austin Powers a whole movie to do. At #5, it’s Smash Mouth’s breakthrough, “Walkin’ on the Sun.”

Smash Mouth’s “Walkin’ on the Sun,” #5 on our Chartcrush Top Ten Countdown for 1998, tacked on last-minute to their debut album, Fush Yu Mang: the only way to get the song once it was a hit, because, remember, no single. But as two million fans who spent $18 bucks to find out, nothing else on that album sounded even remotely like “Walkin’ on the Sun.”

Smash Mouth was a Ska-Punk Bro Band with zero roots in ’50s and ’60s Revivalism, unlike the countless Bands out there toiling away on vintage instruments, decked out in period attire playing to small niche crowds since the ’80s. The Cramps or Fuzztones or Chesterfield Kings or Marshmallow Overcoat should’ve scored the big hit, but alas, the Pop charts are only rarely predictable, and even less often fair. Smash Mouth’s fluky success did made them instant converts, though. Look no further than the Retro Kitschy title of their next album, Astro Lounge!

#4 Matchbox Twenty – 3AM

At #4, another Alt-Rock Act and the third of the five hits in our countdown that didn’t chart on the Hot100 because again, no single. They’re also the second of the two Acts in our countdown from Orlando, Florida, home of Disneyworld. Backstreet Boys, the other, and ‘NSYNC, also based there.

The Band had been playing around Orlando since 1990 under the moniker Tabitha’s Secret, but once labels came a-knocking in ’95, three of the members quit and signed with Atlantic Records with a new name, and the first single “Push” off their debut album was an immediate hit on Alternative radio in ’97.

But then, this carry-over from the old Band was a massive crossover smash on the all-format Radio Songs chart, so the two guys still trying to make a go of it as Tabitha’s Secret down there in Florida sued, and after three years, settled out of court for an undisclosed sum. At #5, the song all that fuss was about: matchbox 20 with “3AM.”

matchbox 20, “3AM,” the #5 Airplay song of 1998 according to our exclusive ranking based on Billboard‘s weekly published Radio Songs chart. We’re counting down the top ten from that ranking here on our 1998 edition of Chartcrush.

Matchbox 20 was only just getting started. Later in ’98, Lead Singer Rob Thomas took a random call from a Label Exec that led to him co-writing and singing “Smooth,” the lead single off legendary Rock Guitarist Carlos Santana’s comeback album: our #1 song of 2000 and one of Billboard’s top five charting hits of all time.

But not even counting “Smooth,” matchbox 20 was the top Rock Band of the first three years of the ’00s on the Hot100. “Bent,” our #9 song of 2000; “If You’re Gone,” #9 for ’01, and “Unwell,” #4 for ’03.

Creed, 3 Doors Down, Train, StainD and Linkin Park, further down on that early ’00s Band ranking.

#3 Savage Garden – Truly Madly Deeply

Well, it’s back to Teen Pop for our #3 hit, which was #1 on Billboard‘s year-end Radio Songs recap for ’98. Like its year-end Hot100, all Billboard‘s year-end charts—including Radio Songs—only count weeks within their “chart year,” which for ’98 was the first week of December ’97 to the last week of November ’98. That’s so they can get those recaps out by New Years.

But the downside, of course, for ’98 and all years: songs with weeks before or after the cut-offs aren’t fully counted, which gives hits that were all within the chart year a built-in advantage, and this was one of those. And it was out as a physical single so it charted on the Hot100 too: #1 for two weeks in January there.

Not a Boy Band, but a Boy Duo who started out with a great Teen Pop name, Crush, but changed it to the scary Alt-Metalish sounding Savage Garden from a phrase in Anne Rice’s Vampire Chronicles. At #3, “Truly Madly Deeply.”

Savage Garden, “Truly Madly Deeply” at #3 on our Chartcrush Top Ten Countdown of Billboard‘s biggest Radio hits of 1998. Their first hit, “I Want You” entered the top ten in April ’97, four weeks before Hanson’s “MMMbop” and 13 before Backstreet Boys first hit, “Quit Playing Games (With My Heart),” so technically, Savage Garden was Millennial Teen Pop’s debut on the charts.

But that’s obscured by how huge they were on Adult Contemporary. Backstreet Boys’ “As Long as You Love Me” we heard at #8 had 26 weeks in the AC top ten; “Truly Madly Deeply” had 58, including 11 at #1, and stayed on the AC chart all the way ’til February 2000—123 weeks. So based on that and their being Australian, you could just as easily say they were the late ’90s version of Air Supply!

After their next and last #1 hit “I Knew I Loved You” was on the AC chart for 124 weeks, they split to pursue solo projects, and never re-formed.

#2 Natalie Imbruglia – Torn

At #2 another Aussie, but this time a one-hit wonder by a former Soap Opera star: her first attempt at singing. And if it wasn’t for Billboard’s rule about songs having to be out as singles she would’ve very likely been the first Australian Female to score a #1 hit on the Hot100 since Olivia Newton-John.

It’s a cover of an obscure track by an L.A. Alternative Band totally re-worked into what Billboard‘s Larry Flick called “a slice of pure pop” that stayed on lite-FM playlists for years. At #2, Natalie Imbruglia, “Torn.”

The #1 song on America’s airwaves for 14 weeks in 1998, which makes it the #2 Airplay hit of the year, Natalie Imbruglia’s “Torn.” She stayed in music and was still scoring top20s in the U.K. and her native Australia as late as 2005, but her run on the American charts began—and ended—in 1998.

As I mentioned, not out as a single, but it did make the Hot100 the last two weeks of its 43-week run on the Airplay chart. How’s that? Well at the end of 1998, for its 1999 chart year, Billboard finally scrapped its outdated single rule.

“The goal is deceptively simple,” they said, “to reveal the most popular songs in the United States. Period. End of sentence.” So henceforth, songs could make the Hot100 on Airplay alone. And the week of the announcement, “Torn” debuted at #42…

#1 Goo Goo Dolls – Iris

…and our #1 song debuted at #9 that week, eight months after entering the Airplay chart for a run with a record 18 weeks on top. It replaced “Torn” at #1 August 1 and dominated ’til December, but without much competition.

Curiously, it’s the only song in our Chartcrush Top Ten Countdown for 1998 that was moving up the chart in the second half of the year; everything else had peaked by April. The calm before Britney Spears’ explosive debut in November? Or maybe folks were just too preoccupied with the unfolding Clinton-Lewinsky scandal, or figuring out their new iMacs, or reading Harry Potter.

It was another milestone in the mainstreaming of Post-Grunge in the mid-to-late ’90s: crossover hits combining the sonic touchstones of early ’90s Grunge with first-person Emo lyrics and a less threatening, less confrontational attitude.

Written for the Romantic Fantasy City of Angels starring Nic Cage and Meg Ryan, about an angel who wants to be human so he can be with the woman he loves, at #1, Goo Goo Dolls, “Iris.”

Goo Goo Dolls’ “Iris,” the #1 song of 1998 on our Radio Songs-derived Chartcrush ranking we counted down the top ten from this hour, and the only song in our top ten that was rising up the charts in the second half of 1998.

Certainly not the only hit without the title in the lyrics, but there was no Iris in the movie City of Angels either. As it turns out, Songwriter John Rzeznik got the title from concert listings in a free weekly he was paging through: Iris DeMent, a Country Folk Singer-Songwriter. That’s it. That’s how he got the title!

Bonus

Well there you have ’em, the top ten hits of 1998 based on our Chartcrush recap of Billboard‘s weekly Radio Songs charts, which for all the reasons I’ve been mentioning is the best source for what was broadly popular from 1995 to ’98. But given how out of sync the Hot100 was with what was on radio in those years, no surprise that several of the songs that made the top ten on Billboard‘s year-end Hot100 were not in our ’98 countdown.

Six to be exact, and of those, two were also in the top ten on Billboard‘s 1997 year-end Hot100. Recall that Billboard only counts weeks within its discrete “chart years” to compile its year-end charts, so both Elton John’s Lady Diana tribute “Candle in the Wind ’97” and LeAnn Rimes’ Ballad “How Do I Live” made the year-end top ten two years in a row. Incredibly, though, neither were top ten Airplay hits in either year, which leaves four of Billboard’s year-end top ten Hot100 singles for ’98 to shout out.

#40 Usher – Nice & Slow

At #9, Billboard had the first #1 by the kid snapped up in Atlanta by LaFace Records’ honcho L.A. Reid and handed over to P. Diddy for mentorship at Diddy’s so-called “Flavor Camp,” and then? Thud—the sound his debut album made upon release in ’94. But then he hooked up with Atlanta Producer Jermaine Dupri, who helped him craft his breakthrough, “You Make Me Wanna…” and this follow-up co-written with Dupri. It’s Usher’s “Nice & Slow.”

Billboard‘s #9 Hot100 song of 1998, Usher’s “Nice & Slow” as we count down the hits from the published Hot100 year-end top ten that didn’t make our Chartcrush top ten based on the Airplay chart. We have it at #40.

#15 Janet Jackson – Together Again

Next up, at #6 Billboard had a hit that came out of a music biz consensus that Electronica was gonna be the next big thing once Alt-Rock plateaued. Millennial Teens and up-and-coming Hip Hop impresarios, of course, had other plans for the ’00s, but when it was still looking like a possibility, Pop’s highest paid Act ever up to then, Janet Jackson, scored her first #1 in four years in the genre: “Together Again.”

Janet Jackson’s “Together Again,” #6 on Billboard‘s year-end Hot100 for ’98, and a very respectable #15 on our Chartcrush ranking we counted down the top ten from earlier in the show, based on the Airplay chart.

#13 Shania Twain – You’re Still the One

So I mentioned before we heard our #1 song, Goo Goo Dolls’ “Iris,” that it was the only hit from the second half of ’98 in our countdown. But of course other hits were rising during that pre-Britney lull, and two of them were Billboard‘s #3 and #2 Hot100 singles of the year.

Both got tons of airplay, but topping the all-format Radio Songs chart meant conquering several formats, not just one or two. But if you were listening to Country or Adult Contemporary stations in late ’98, you can’t believe that this one isn’t in the top ten on the year!

She was the closest thing there was to a Country Pop Diva in the late ’90 with an album, Come On Over, that was in the top 30 for a record 99 weeks: Billboard’s #1 Country album of all time. It’s Shania Twain’s sixth Country #1, but her first to crack the top 30 on the Pop chart, “You’re Still the One.”

Shania Twain’s “You’re Still the One,” Billboard‘s #3 year-end Hot100 song of 1998; #13 on our Airplay-derived Chartcrush ranking. It was #2 on the Hot100 for eight straight weeks late June into August…

#23 Brandy and Monica – The Boy Is Mine

…behind our next song that was #1 for 13 weeks and was Billboard‘s #2 Hot100 hit of the year. And if you were listening to Urban radio, you can’t believe that this one isn’t in the top ten Airplay hits of the year, but it’s just #23 on our ranking.

Two of the mid-’90s top young Female R&B newcomers, Brandy & Monica, mining their media-ginned rivalry for a hit, and they got it: the first #1 for both on the Hot100: “The Boy Is Mine.”

Brandy wrote “The Boy Is Mine,” inspired by the bleep-heavy daytime talk TV show that was so over-the-top that it needed onstage Bouncers, the Jerry Springer Show. Then, Monica punched Brandy backstage at an awards show rehearsal and they did the song on opposite ends of the stage, so the rivalry wasn’t just a media concoction after all.

And that’s all we’ve got for ya on our 1998 edition of the Chartcrush Top Ten Countdown Show. I’ve been your host, Christopher Verdesi and I want to thank you for listening! Hey, if you like what you heard, head on over to our website, chartcrush.com, where you’ll find written transcripts and links to stream the podcast versions of this and other Chartcrush shows, plus chart run line graphs, our full top100 charts and other dank 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.

::end transcript::

::start transcript::

Welcome to the Chartcrush Top Ten Countdown Show, I’m your host, Christopher Verdesi. And every week on Chartcrush, we do a deep dive into a year in Pop music and culture and count down the top ten hits according to our exclusive recap of the weekly charts published at the time in Billboard, the music industry’s top trade mag.

This week on Chartcrush, we’re counting down 1985, the year the Pop revolution wrought by MTV, video and New Wave had unquestionably triumphed, and in so doing, crystalized into a slick, glossed-up “new normal” of precise beats, thunderous gated drums, processed guitars and atmospheric, cinematic soundscapes thanks to all the new synthesizers and sequencing and sampling tech that was coming online in the ’80s.

And it all sounded fresh and exciting on radio, records and of course on CDs with zero clicks, pops or static. CDs, still just 9% of music biz revenue in ’85, but that was three times what it was in ’84, and by ’86 it had more than doubled again. Dire Straits’ Brothers in Arms: the first album recorded digitally and the first to sell a million on CD.

But the singular purpose to which all this new sonic wizardry was being marshalled in ’85? Well, it was right there every time you turned on your radio. Melodrama! Close your eyes (or for that matter open them if you’re watching MTV), and you’re climbing a mountain, soaring like a bird, walking through fire. All three if the song was John Parr’s theme from St. Elmo’s Fire, the brat-pack flick. And all as Bono wailed on U2’s Martin Luther King, Jr. homage “Pride,” in the name of love.

But why? How’d we go from vegemite sandwiches, getting physical and Tastee Freez chili dogs to all this over-the-top melodrama? Was it all the New Coke people were drinking (or, as it turned out, not drinking!)? Well, seeing it through a political lens (as critics are known to do sometimes), maybe it was a way to compensate for the shallow, materialistic values and ostentatious displays of wealth that got so much media attention as President Reagan sought to transition the country from government dependency programs to economic opportunity.

Reagan, of course, sworn in for his second term in ’85 as President after the biggest election landslide since 1972.

Or maybe emotionally-intense songs were resonating because people were inspired by Reagan and the new sense of pride and purpose he embodied.

Well, both those takes hold water, but a much simpler reason? Video! For decades, Hollywood had been using music to enhance the emotional impact of movies and sell tickets. Now, for the first time though, the music biz had all those tools of cinema to hit people right in the feels and sell records not just musically, but also visually.

MTV’s first Video Music Awards were at the end of ’84, and by ’85 it wasn’t just that a song had to have a video to be a hit; it had to be a great video. And even for a run-of-the-mill song, a great video could propel it into the top ten. Just ask Norwegian one-hit wonders a-ha, whose song “Take On Me” was released three times, but went nowhere until its famous pencil-sketch animation video hit MTV in ’85.

#10 Tears for Fears – Everybody Wants to Rule the World

That was Billboard‘s #10 year-end Hot100 hit of 1985, which shakes out at #18 on our Chartcrush ranking, so we’ll be kicking off our countdown with a different #10 that was Billboard‘s #7 song of the year: the U.S. chart breakthrough by a Duo that, unlike a-ha, had three more top10s later in the ’80s and even topped Billboard‘s Modern Rock chart launched in ’88—in 1993. Which put them on a pretty short list of successful ’80s New Wave acts that stayed relevant into the ’90s. At #10 it’s Tears for Fears’ “Everybody Wants to Rule the World.”

Roland Orzabal and Curt Smith (a.k.a. Tears for Fears) scored big in their native U.K. with their first album and its three top five singles in ’83, but it was “Everybody Wants to Rule the World” off their second set, #10 on our Chartcrush Countdown of 1985’s top ten hits, that cracked the code in the U.S.: #1 for two weeks in June.

Their anthem “Shout” was next: #1 for three weeks in August, but not on the chart as long, so it comes out #12 on the year.

“Everybody Wants to Rule” showed up later in ’85 in the closing scene of the movie Real Genius, then stayed on the radar through the ’90s as the theme song of HBO’s Dennis Miller Live, the precursor to Real Time with Bill Maher.

#9 Madonna – Crazy for You

Now after ’84 when five of the top ten songs of the year were from movies, ’85 was another a big year for theme songs: the aforementioned theme from St. Elmo’s Fire “Man in Motion,” Huey Lewis & The News’ “Power of Love” from the year’s top box office hit Back to the Future, Duran Duran’s Bond theme, “View to a Kill” and from John Hughes’ era-defining film The Breakfast Club, Simple Minds’ “(Don’t You) Forget About Me.” All those hit #1, plus one from TV, Jan Hammer’s “Miami Vice Theme.”

But only two soundtrack hits are in the top ten on the year and up next at #9, one by the Singer who, it turned out, was Billboard‘s Top Artist of ’85, but back in ’83 when the filmmakers tapped her to sing it, that wasn’t at all clear. And the movie Vision Quest came out February ’85, just after the song that made her an icon had completed its six weeks at #1. At #9, Madonna’s first of many hit Ballads “Crazy for You.”

Madonna also appears in Vision Quest singing “Crazy for You” fronting a live band in a dive bar while the stars Matthew Modine and Lisa Fiorentino share a slow dance. No dialog, but a month later, her supporting role as the title character in Desperately Seeking Susan hit theaters, and suddenly she was a movie star as well as the year’s top Pop phenom.

#8 Dire Straits – Money for Nothing

So like radio in the ’50s and ’60s, cable TV in the ’80s wasn’t controlled by a handful of big corporations. A patchwork of small, local operators decided what to carry, and subscriber demand, obviously, an important consideration. Enter veteran Ad Man George Lois, who repurposed a slogan used to sell Maypo syrup-flavored baby oatmeal in the ’50s, and turned it into one of the most iconic and effective pull campaigns of all time, “I Want My MTV.”

Print, radio, cable, broadcast, buses, subways, billboards and of course, on MTV itself; the ads were everywhere: Pop stars telling folks to pester their local cable providers to add MTV. And in 1985, the Band Dire Straits borrowed the slogan again, and made it their first and only #1. At #8, “Money for Nothing.”

Dire Straits at #8, with an assist from Police frontman Sting, who also happened to be on the Caribbean island of Monserrat windsurfing. So he dropped by the studio for dinner, sang “I Want My MTV” to the tune of the Police’s “Don’t Stand So Close to Me” and got a co-songwriting credit for a #1 hit.

Ditto Dire Straits Songwriter Mark Knopfler, who’d been a news reporter in a past life, so when an appliance installer on break at a New York electronics store he was in started talking smack about Pop stars in front of a wall of TVs all tuned to MTV, out came the trusty pen and pad, and that’s the rest of the lyrics, transcribed verbatim.

“Money for Nothing,” indeed!

#7 Mr. Mister – Broken Wings

Well, we’re counting down the top ten hits of 1985 here on this week’s edition of Chartcrush, and at #7, a sterling example of the sonic and lyrical melodrama I was alluding to at the top of the show. It hit #1 for two weeks in December and all but the last eight of its 22 weeks on the chart were in calendar 1985, but you won’t find it anywhere on Billboard‘s year-end Hot100 because they unveiled a new policy in ’85: songs moving up the charts the last week of their chart year get their full runs counted the following year. So they have it as the #5 song of 1986.

Now at Chartcrush, we always count full chart runs, and we go by calendar years, not “chart years,” so we have it at #7 for 1985.

The black and white video of front man Tim Page cruising around the desert in a ’59 T-Bird convertible packs the same visual melodrama and smoldering suspense as does the song. At #7, it’s Mr. Mister, “Broken Wings.”

“Broken Wings,” Mr. Mister at #7 as we count down the top hits of 1985 here on this week’s edition of the Chartcrush Top Ten Countdown Show.

So Billboard‘s new policy I mentioned of counting songs’ full chart runs for its year-end rankings? That was a long time coming! Up to ’85, they only factored weeks in the “chart year,” and the year-end charts came with a disclaimer, something like “these rankings don’t reflect the total popularity of records that peaked late last year or haven’t yet reached their peak.”

Well, no more! Now year-straddlers got the same shot at ranking high as hits with their whole chart runs within the chart year. Which worked out great—until 1989 when Chicago’s “Look Away,” a song that’d peaked in 1988 and already seemed dated, was, as renowned chart geek Chris Molanphy put it, the “what-the-fuckest of all of Billboard #1 end-of-year songs.”

So in 1990 Billboard reverted back to the old policy of counting just weeks in the chart year. But don’t worry, we’ve got you covered at Chartcrush: counting full chart runs and using the exact same rules and point system to rank every year, ’40s to the present.

Mr. Mister was back in the top ten on the year in ’86 with their follow up, “Kyrie,” which also got two weeks at #1.

#6 REO Speedwagon – Can’t Fight This Feeling

At #6, more mid-’80s Rock Power Ballad melodrama, this time from the act who practically invented it, or at least re-invented it for the ’80s, with their lighters-up, eve of MTV chart-topper “Keep On Loving You,” Billboard‘s #10 song of 1981 that just misses our Chartcrush ’81 ranking at #12.

Flip that though for this one in ’85 though: #6 on our ranking and Billboard has it at #13 despite its three weeks at #1 in March. The Band had been at it since 1971 and this was the second single off their 11th studio album. It’s REO Speedwagon’s “Can’t Fight This Feeling.”

Well, add crawling on floors, crashing through doors, and throwing away oars to the list of dramatic gestures that ’80s Power Balladeers will do for love. REO Speedwagon’s “Can’t Fight This Feeling,” #6 on our Chartcrush Top Ten Countdown for 1985: the song that kept “Material Girl” from becoming Madonna’s second #1, and instead it was the Ballad “Crazy for You” we heard at #9.

#5 Phil Collins and Marilyn Martin – Separate Lives

Which was the first of the two soundtrack hits in our countdown. At #5, the second from the musical drama White Nights starring Mikhail Baryshnikov and Gregory Hines about Dancers with shifting allegiances during the Cold War, notable for its scenes shot in the Soviet Union’s second largest city, Leningrad.

It was Director Taylor Hackford’s follow-up to his 1984 Noir remake Against All Odds, for which our Artist at #5 had written and recorded the title song, and it became his first #1 and got him an Oscar nomination.

So they tried it again, this time a Duet, and a song written by Soft Rocker Stephen Bishop, whose own chart fortunes had waned since 1983. But not so our act at #5. “Against All Odds” was barely off the charts when his third album No Jacket Required dropped, and in early ’85 its first two singles “Sussudio” and “One More Night” had become his second and third #1s, respectively. So he was red hot. At #5, it’s Phil Collins teamed with Singer Marilyn Martin, “Separate Lives.”

Phil Collins, “Separate Lives” at #5, duetting there with Marilyn Martin. Never heard of her? Well, you’re not alone. She was a backup and session Singer that Atlantic Records’ chief Doug Morris tried to break, unsuccessfully, it turned out. Her album, which dropped while “Separate Lives” was still in the top ten yielded only one minor hit.

As for Collins, it was on to the next project by his group Genesis, their 13th studio album Invisible Touch and its string of five top10s in ’86 and ’87.

#4 U.S.A. for Africa – We Are the World

So Billboard‘s year-in-review article for ’85 leads off with the observation that Rock turned 30 in ’85. Bummer. But “maturity has its positive side, like awareness of the world community and willingness to do something for it.” The big “something” in ’85 was U.S.A. for Africa, which staged the Live Aid benefit in July.

By the way, Phil Collins, the only act that played both Live Aid stages, London and Philadelphia, thanks to the supersonic Concorde jet and its three-and-a-half hour trans-Atlantic flight time.

But months before Live Aid, Thriller Producer Quincy Jones got a who’s who of Pop talent already in L.A. for the American Music Awards in January to come to a studio afterward for an all-night session to record what became the bestselling single of all-time ’til then, co-written by Michael Jackson and Lionel Richie, with all proceeds going to poverty relief in Africa.

It got four weeks at #1 but only shook out at #20 on Billboard‘s year-end Hot100. On our Chartcrush ranking for 1985 we’re counting down the top ten from this hour, it’s #4: U.S.A. for Africa’s “We Are the World.”

Prince, the big no-show at the “We Are the World” sessions. He wanted to contribute a guitar solo and Quincy Jones said “no thanks,” so he partied at a nightclub a few blocks away instead, and caught a ton of flak for that, including, some say, Purple Rain losing Best Album at the Grammys a month later to Lionel Richie’s Can’t Slow Down. He didn’t play Live Aid in July either, but he did contribute a song for the We Are the World album.

#3 Foreigner – I Want to Know What Love Is

Well we’re down to #3 in our Chartcrush Top Ten Countdown for 1985, and if you thought we were done with melodrama, hold on—this one’s got a full Gospel choir and lyrics about climbing a mountain!

It was the group’s second trip to the Power Ballad well; their first in ’81, “Waiting for a Girl like You,” spent nine weeks at #2 behind Olivia Newton-John’s “Physical,” and then Hall & Oates’ “I Can’t Go for That (No Can Do)” moved up and made it ten weeks, shattering the record for weeks at #2 without ever getting to #1.

Four years later in ’85, though, they got their first chart topper, two weeks in February. At #3, the lead single from Foreigner’s fifth studio album Agent Provocateur, “I Want to Know What Love Is.”

Foreigner, with “I Want to Know What Love Is.” #3 on our ranking of 1985’s hits we’re counting down the top ten from here on this week’s edition of Chartcrush. Billboard had it #4 on the year.

Lou Gramm with that melodramatic vocal, but Songwriter Mick Jones roughed out the song in the middle of the night and woke up his soon-to-be second wife, British-born New York Socialite and Jewelry Designer Anne Dexter to hear it. “What do you mean?” she asked with a fixed stare. “Don’t you already know what love is?”

Whoops! But despite that, they stayed married 25 years, then divorced in 2007 and remarried ten years later.

Hey, it’s a process, learning what love is!

By the way, Dexter is DJ/Producer Mark Ronson’s mom from her first marriage. Ronson scored 2015’s top hit, “Uptown Funk!” featuring Bruno Mars.

#2 Wham! featuring George Michael – Careless Whisper

Next up, the Duo that had two hits in the top ten on Billboard‘s year-end Hot100 for ’85: their U.S. breakthrough from late ’84 and its even bigger follow-up which they named the #1 hit of the year.

Now by our reckoning, that first hit, “Wake Me Up Before You Go-Go” is a 1984 song, so we have just the follow-up: the one Billboard named #1. But it comes out #2 on our ranking. Billboard‘s point system for ’85, much more generous for weeks in the top ten than ours, so that’s the difference.

At #2 it’s Wham! featuring George Michael (credited as a George Michael solo record everywhere but the U.S.), “Careless Whisper.”

In Wham’s first big U.S. hit, “Wake Me Up Before You Go-Go,” George Michael sings “I’m not planning on going solo.” But with “Careless Whisper” we just heard at #2, he did just that! The idea was to broaden his appeal beyond Wham!’s Teen audience, and it worked! “Careless Whisper” was #1 on the Adult Contemporary chart two weeks longer than the Hot100, and Billboard described it as “a ballad adored by 12-year-old girls and their grandmothers alike.”

Michael and partner Andrew Ridgeley, as Wham!, became the first Western Pop act to tour communist China in ’85, but in ’86 the split became official.

#1 Madonna – Like a Virgin

So if not “Careless Whisper,” what is the #1 song here on our 1985 Chartcrush Top Ten Countdown? Well we’re about to find out! Billboard had it at #2 on the year despite its six weeks at #1 to “Careless Whisper’s” three.

The Singer’s 1983 debut album yielded a pair of top10s and put her on the map as an up-and-coming Dance Pop Act, but she still didn’t rate an invite from Quincy Jones to sing on “We Are the World.” And then, in September ’84 at the first MTV Video Music Awards, she debuted the title song from her upcoming second album wearing a white-lace bustier, fingerless gloves and “Boy Toy” belt, and the next day it was all anyone was talking about.

Who else but Madonna? We heard her first hit Ballad from later in ’85 back at #9, “Crazy for You,” but at #1, the hit that made her an overnight icon, “Like a Virgin.”

Now given Madonna’s penchant for courting controversy with her own carefully crafted material going forward, you’d think “Like a Virgin” was her song. But nope; it was handed to her by her label A&R guy, written by pro Songwriters Billy Steinberg and Tom Kelly—two dudes!

But Madonna loved it from the jump, and with Nile Rodgers in the control room and his band Chic backing her, she made it her first of seven #1s in the ’80s and her signature song, prompting Parents Music Resource Center co-founder Susan Baker to accuse her of teaching little girls to act like “a porn queen in heat.” The PMRC’s high-profile Senate hearings in September led to Parental Advisory stickers on offensive records and CDs.

And that’s the top ten here on our 1985 edition of Chartcrush, but with all the differences in ranking methodology, four songs from the top ten on Billboard‘s year-end Hot100 for ’85 are absent from ours; three because they shake out as 1984 hits when you do things by calendar years instead of Billboard‘s chart years. I mentioned Wham!’s “Wake Me Up Before You Go-Go.” They had that at #3 for ’85; we have it at #12 for ’84. Chaka Khan’s “I Feel for You,” #5 Billboard; our #17 song, again, of ’84, not ’85. And Hall & Oates’ “Out of Touch,” #6 for ’85 in Billboard; #11 in our ’84 Chartcrush ranking.

Which leaves one legit 1985 hit.

#18 a-ha – Take On Me

Which was #10 song on Billboard‘s ’85 ranking. I mentioned it in the intro as an example of a song that was lifted on the charts by its innovative, must-see storytelling video that mixed live action with pencil-sketch animation: a-ha’s “Take On Me.”

Turn on MTV for an hour in the Fall of ’85 and you were bound to see Steve Barron’s riveting video of a-ha members jumping back and forth between live-action and pencil-sketch animation universes that won six moon-man trophies at MTV’s third Video Music Awards in ’86.

And speaking of 1986, three songs from Billboard‘s ’86 top ten were really 1985 hits doing things by calendar years. Mr. Mister’s “Broken Wings” was Billboard‘s #5 song of ’86; that was in our ’85 countdown at #7. The other two didn’t fare as well though.

#19 Eddie Murphy – Party All the Time

Billboard‘s #7 song of ’86: #19 on our ’85 ranking. SNL and Beverly Hills Cop star Eddie Murphy cut it, he said, to settle a bet with Richard Pryor over whether he could sing: “Party All the Time.”

#2 for three weeks December ’85 into January ’86 behind Lionel Richie’s “Say You, Say Me,” Eddie Murphy’s wager song to prove he could sing, “Party All the Time.” I wonder if Richard Pryor paid up?

#17 Klymaxx – I Miss You

And finally, the third song from Billboard‘s year-end top ten for 1986 that shakes out as a 1985 hit in our Chartcrush rankings. It was on the chart 29 weeks, longer than any other song in either year, and peaked at #5 for four, also while “Say You, Say Me” was #1 December into January. Again, Billboard was being very generous to weeks in the top ten in those years, so they ranked it #3 for ’86. It’s the breakthrough hit by L.A. Girl Group Klymaxx, “I Miss You.”

Klymaxx’s “I Miss You,” Billboard‘s #3 song of 1986 but it peaked the last week of 1985 and racked up more ranking points scaling up the chart than the tail end of its run in early ’86 so we have it at #17 for 1985.

And that’s gonna be a wrap for our 1985 edition of the Chartcrush Top Ten Countdown Show. I’ve been your host, Christopher Verdesi. Hey, if you have a minute and you like what you heard this hour, why not head over to our website, chartcrush.com for a transcript of the show and a link to stream the podcast version, plus rad extras like our full top100 chart and interactive line graph of the Billboard chart runs for the top10 hits. Which we do for every year, 1940s to now, and it’s all on that website, again, chartcrush.com. Thanks for listening and tune in again next week, same station, same time, for another year and another edition of Chartcrush.

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