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Welcome! This is the Chartcrush Top Ten Countdown Show and I’m your host Christopher Verdesi. Every week we set our sights on a different 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 by the music industry’s top trade mag, Billboard magazine. This week, we’re turning the clock back to 1986, a transitional year when the currents that’d made the early ’80s MTV revolution fresh and exciting were fading and new sounds were coming up from the underground and streets.

Hip-Hop, for one. MTV treated it like a novelty and it didn’t even have its own Billboard chart ’til 1989, but in ’86, Run-D.M.C.’s Raising Hell shared the top five on the album chart the seven weeks after Labor Day with the likes of Madonna, Lionel Richie, Steve Winwood and the Top Gun Soundtrack, and their remake of Aerosmith’s “Walk This Way” with Aerosmith was all over MTV. And right after that in the Fall of ’86, what Billboard Chart Beat editor Paul Grein called the Thriller of Glam Metal, Bon Jovi’s Slippery When Wet, shot into the top five, and it was a whole new bag on the charts heading into ’87.

Other more gradual changes were reaching tipping points too: smooth R&B replacing Soft Rock and Country Pop as the dominant sound on Adult Contemporary radio, and so-called “College Rock” bands like U2 and R.E.M. nearing the cusp of superstardom. And as in other transitional periods, nostalgia was big. The Rock ‘n Roll Hall of Fame honored its first inductees in ’86; Classic Rock was now a thing on radio, and after the demise of AM Top 40 earlier in the decade, FM Oldies, never bigger.

And Doo-Wop was charting again: not just Billy Joel’s obvious throwbacks “Uptown Girl” and “The Longest Time,” but modern-sounding hits by Wham!, Huey Lewis & The News, Hall & Oates and even Madonna: enough of those that the smart alecks who invented the genre “Yacht Rock” in the ’00s to retroactively classify certain ’70s and ’80s Soft Rock hits, came up with a genre for that too: “Nu Wop!”

The Monkees were back in ’86: on tour with six of their albums from the ’60s back on the charts at the same time. And James Brown back in the top ten for the first time since 1968 (“Living in America” from Rocky IV). Ben E. King’s “Stand by Me” and The Beatles “Twist and Shout,” both charted again thanks to movies.

And after a decade of abstract, escapist Prog; lusty, hedonistic Disco; angsty, nihilistic Punk; and flippant, aloof New Wave, Pop had a conscience again, even if it sometimes felt more top-down and prefab than bottom-up and organic, like a nostalgia trip for Woodstock Nation 40-somethings. Live Aid and Farm Aid in ’85, and the Amnesty International shows in ’86 were massive events that did raise awareness (and money) for neglected causes: hunger in Africa, family farm foreclosures and human rights.

But while the late ’60s were the tail end of the Postwar economic Boom and Boomers had had the luxury to take up causes, the ’80s were more like the beginning of it the late ’40s and early ’50s, after years of Depression and War. ’70s stagflation, “malaise” and urban collapse weren’t quite that bad, but coming out of it, people weren’t taking their opportunities for granted. They were focused on building careers, businesses and nest eggs. Which, according to President Reagan and Economist Milton Freedman, was also the best way to solve the big problems. So the ’80s, not exactly fertile soil for Progressive activists, but just try keeping people away from an all-day A-list music extravaganza!

#10 Mr. Mister – Kyrie

And with that, let’s kick off our countdown! At #10, the second of two consecutive #1’s for a group of L.A. session guys who decided to form a Rock band, and their second album connected the last year before Glam Metal exploded. The front man had turned down offers to be the lead singer in Toto and to replace Peter Cetera in Chicago. Wise choices, it turned out, once their song “Broken Wings” hit #1. And then then this topped the chart just a few months later. It’s Mr. Mister’s “Kyrie.”

The slick, synthy Arena Rock sound perfected by Mr. Mister on “Kyrie” and other 1986 Rock hits like Europe’s “Final Countdown” and Survivor’s “Burning Heart:” swamped by grittier, keyboard-averse Glam Metal once Bon Jovi’s Slippery When Wet album came out at the end of ’86, soon followed by Cinderella, Poison, Motley Crue and Def Leppard.

“Kyrie’s” chorus was among the top misheard lyrics in ’80s Rock: “Give me a laser down the road that I must travel” was what many heard, but those who paid attention when the DJ said the title, many of them, figured it was about a girl named Kyrie, and sure enough, 164 couples gave their baby girls that name in ’86 according to the Social Security Administration.

But like the band’s run on the charts, the girls name Kyrie was a blip. Mr. Mister had two #1s in four months, and by the end of the decade they didn’t even have a label. But the name made a comeback on the boy’s list in 2012, Kyrie Irving’s rookie year with the Cleveland Cavaliers.

By the way, the actual lyric is “Kyrie eleison down this road that I must travel:” an ancient prayer invocation that means “Lord, have mercy.” Were churchgoers even listening to Rock in the mid-’80s, as preachers and Senators’ wives in the PMRC railed against smutty lyrics? Maybe a few.

#9 Falco – Rock Me Amadeus

So the Berlin Wall was in the news throughout the ’80s, culminating in 1987 with Reagan’s iconic “Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall” speech, and in ’89, Berliners did just that.

German songs had scored big on the U.S. charts in other eras when Berlin was in the news. “Forever and Ever” was a top hit during the Berlin Airlift in 1949, adapted from the German Air Force’s theme song in World War 2. Then in 1952 when East Germany sealed its border and cut power and phone lines to West Berlin, Vera Lynn’s “Auf Wiederseh’n, Sweetheart” was #1 for seven weeks. And in ’61, the year the wall went up, unknown singer Joe Dowell took a German Folk song, “Wooden Heart,” to #1.

But in the ’80s, it wasn’t just German songs, it was German artists singing them, in German. At #9 on our 1986 Chartcrush Top Ten Countdown, an Austrian who’d made the top ten on the Dance chart in ’83 with his original version of “Der Kommisar” as British band After the Fire took their English one to #5 on the Hot100. But in ’86 he scored his own U.S. Pop smash, in German, inspired by Miloš Forman’s blockbuster Mozart biopic Amadeus, which won eight Oscars including Best Picture. #1 for three weeks in the Spring of ’86, it’s Falco’s “Rock Me Amadeus.”

Falco, “Rock Me Amadeus,” #9 on our Chartcrush Top Ten Countdown for 1986 and the second big hit in German on the U.S. Pop charts in two years. Nena’s “99 Luftballons” had gotten to #2 in 1984, in German even though their English version, “99 Red Balloons,” was on the flip, so Falco didn’t bother, and Americans didn’t seem to have a problem with that.

#8 Bruce Hornsby & The Range – The Way It Is

At #8 we have the most overtly political #1, lyrically-speaking, since Folkie Barry McGuire’s “Eve of Destruction” in 1965 or Edwin Starr’s “War” in ’70, and until Oliver Anthony’s “Rich Men North of Richmond” in 2023. But while those other songs sound raw and angry, this one is polished and nonchalant, by a previously unknown Singer-Songwriter, son of an uber-rich Virginia real-estate developer who himself was a generation removed from his dad who amassed the family’s wealth in the oil business.

The Steinway grand in the living room was where he honed his piano chops growing up, and the song tackles racism and the wealth gap exactly like you’d expect from a guy with that background: a detached, fly-on-the-wall perspective on two emblematic rich guy/poor person interactions and a tidbit from Social Studies class about Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society in the ’60s to drive home the point.

But his bright, shimmering piano transcended the song’s understated, ho-hum moralizing. Conservative talker Sean Hannity actually used the intro for years as bumper music on his radio show! At #8, it’s Bruce Hornsby & The Range, “The Way It Is.”

Bruce Hornsby & The Range’s “The Way It Is,” #8 on our Chartcrush Top Ten Countdown for 1986. Since it didn’t hit #1 ’til December 13th, after the cut-off for Billboard’s 1986 chart year for their year-end rankings, they have it as the #8 song of 1987.

In the ’90s, Rappers Tupac Shakur and E-40 both built top40 charting Hip-Hop tracks around Hornsby’s infectious piano riff. He later scored two apolitical top tens with “Mandolin Rain” in ’87 and “The Valley Road” in ’88, and his piano showed up on dozens of records including Don Henley’s hit “The End of the Innocence” in ’89, but in ’91 he disbanded The Range and became the Grateful Dead’s fulltime touring keyboardist: over 100 shows until Dead guitarist Jerry Garcia passed away in ’95.

#7 Huey Lewis & The News – Stuck with You

Next at #7, the closest thing to a Summer hit in our countdown. ’86 was weird that way. Of the nine #1s in the Summer, only two had more than a single week at #1. Those were Peter Cetera’s “Glory of Love” from The Karate Kid II and Madonna’s “Papa Don’t Preach,” each with two weeks on top.

But in that weird zone after Labor Day when it’s still technically Summer but school’s back in session and everyone’s in their Fall clothes, the lead single from these guys’ first album in three years hit the airwaves, and its goofy story video (they were known for those) was all over MTV. It was the first song to hold down the #1 spot for more than two weeks since early June. Coming off their first #1 hit the previous Summer with “Power of Love” from Back to the Future, it’s Huey Lewis & The News’, “Stuck with You.”

A song for couples ratcheting down their relationship expectations, or, the ultimate pandemic quarantine track? Those are two of the dubious latter-day honors bestowed on Huey Lewis & The News’ “Stuck with You,” #7 on our Chartcrush Top Ten Countdown for 1986. Good-natured ironic understatement (“ehhh, you’re okay, I guess I’ll keep you around, wink wink”): apparently that went extinct sometime in the Emo ’00s. Maybe just a Boomer thing!

In ’87, Huey & The News notched five top10s including a second #1, “Jacob’s Ladder,” but their brand of good-timey Pub Rock didn’t track much beyond the Reagan era. They kept touring and making albums into the 2020s though, with four original members including Huey.

#6 Whitney Houston – Greatest Love of All

At numbers six and five we have a two-fer. That’s two songs by the same artist back-to-back: the third and second, respectively, of her record-breaking string of seven consecutive #1s from ’85 to ’88. That record still stands.

There may not’ve been a single standout Summer hit in ’86, but make no mistake: the Summer of ’86 was the Summer of Whitney Houston, and the song that got Arista honcho Clive Davis to sign her in the first place when he saw her sing it at Sweetwater’s near Lincoln Center in Manhattan in 1983 is our song at #6, “Greatest Love of All.”

Whitney Houston, “Greatest Love of All,” #6. There was no one then on the charts who could sing like that. Adult contemporary listeners got to hear her first: “Hold Me,” Whitney’s duet with Teddy Pendergrass, a #6 AC hit in the Summer of ’84. Once her album was out in the Spring of ’85, her first solo single “You Give Good Love” hit the R&B bullseye, and Arista’s next move was to target AC again with “Saving All My Love for You.”

Well, when that topped not only the AC chart, but also the R&B chart and became her first #1 on the Hot100, Clive Davis was validated and Whitney was a multi-format superstar. From there, the label staggered her single releases between Adult Contemporary ballads and lively Pop songs, and they were all #1 hits.

#5 Whitney Houston – How Will I Know

“Greatest Love of All,” the second ballad after “Saving All My Love,” and between them, yep, the upbeat Pop song that won over the MTV crowd, and that’s the #5 hit here on our 1986 Chartcrush Top Ten Countdown. It had just come out when the space shuttle Challenger exploded in flight at the end of January, and hard to conceive of two more jarringly opposite things simultaneously on the minds of impressionable Teens. But the two are closely linked in many GenX-ers’ memories. Again, it’s Whitney Houston with “How Will I Know.”

The hit that showed the MTV generation that Whitney Houston wasn’t just a Ballad Singer, “How Will I Know,” #5 on our Chartcrush Top Ten Countdown for 1986. Written for Janet Jackson, but her managers rejected it so Arista secured it for the unknown Whitney. And Clive Davis had to lean hard on Narada Michael Walden to get him produce, with his plate already full working on Aretha Franklin’s comeback album, Who’s Zoomin’ Who? Aretha’s “Freeway of Love” and Whitney’s “How Will I Know,” recorded in the same session!

By the way, both of Whitney’s first two #1 ballads, “Saving All My Love” and “Greatest Love of All” which we just heard at #6, produced by Michael Masser and also co-written by him, but in the late ’70s for other artists. That’s right, Whitney’s were both covers! “Saving,” originally a Marilyn McCoo and Billy Davis, Jr. album cut in 1978, and “Greatest,” first done (and charted) by George Benson for the 1977 Muhammad Ali biopic The Greatest.

#4 Patti Labelle & Michael McDonald – On My Own

Our #4 song may be the first example of a collaboration where the artists recorded their parts separately, thousands of miles apart: piece of cake with the internet, right? But not sure how they pulled it off before most folks had even heard of FedEx. And they weren’t together for the video either! It’s a split screen. In fact, the first time they were ever in the same room was the day before they sang the song together on The Tonight Show, Joan Rivers guest-hosting, just as it was about to crack the top20 in late April.

Married Producer/Songwriters Burt Bacharach and Carole Bayer Sager recruited the Singers and put the whole thing together. It’s Patti LaBelle coming off her hit “New Attitude” from Beverly Hills Cop, and former Doobie Brother Michael McDonald, “On My Own.”

Patti LaBelle and Michael McDonald, #4 on our Chartcrush Top Ten Countdown for 1986. “On My Own,” was Patti’s first #1 since her group LaBelle’s Disco smash “Lady Marmalade” in 1975, and McDonald’s first since “What a Fool Believes” with the Doobie Brothers in ’79. His highest charting solo hit? “I Keep Forgettin‘,” #4 in 1982, the year the Doobies split up.

Right after “On My Own,” McDonald’s “Sweet Freedom” from the Billy Crystal/Gregory Hines buddy-cop flick Running Scared made it to #7, and he continued charting on the AC charts ’til 2008. And Patti Labelle stayed hot on the R&B chart well into the ’90s. She surged again after the all-star cover of “Lady Marmalade” for Baz Luhrman’s Moulin Rouge! hit #1 for five weeks in 2001 and L.A. Reid signed her to Def Jam.

Her ’04 Def Jam album Timeless Journey was her first to crack the top 20 since ’86, and then her reunion with Nona Hendryx and Sarah Dash in LaBelle debuted at #45 in ’08. Those three had first performed together all the way back in 1962!

#3 The Bangles – Walk like an Egyptian

At #3 we have the last big, goofy MTV New Wave chart topper of the ’80s, although the B-52’s “Love Shack” did make it to #3 as late as 1989. This one’s got nonsense lyrics about cops in donut shops and gold crocodiles who want your cigarette. And a suitably goofy video and dance too, that was ubiquitous ’86 into ’87. It’s The Bangles’ “Walk Like an Egyptian.”

Now you’d think that ’60s revivalism would’ve been bigger in the ’80s, but while The Stray Cats and Billy Joel were mainlining pure ’50s sounds onto the charts, only one of the literally hundreds of Bands worldwide in or adjacent to the 60’s-obsessed Paisley Underground scene centered in L.A. made it past college radio and ’60s-themed clubs to the top of the charts: all-Girl Group The Bangles.

Columbia signed them in ’83 to compete with The Go-Go’s, but their debut album in ’84 was a commercial dud. As luck would have it, though, The Go-Go’s cleared the lane by breaking up, and Bangle Susanna Hoffs caught Prince’s eye in the middle of his Paisley-influenced “Raspberry Beret” phase.

His jangly song “Manic Monday” became The Bangles breakthrough hit in early ’86, but “Walk like an Egyptian” sealed the deal, #1 for four weeks at the end of the year. Too late to make Billboard’s 1986 year-end ranking so they have it as the #1 song of 1987, but most of its chart action was before New Years so it’s #3 in our 1986 edition of The Chartcrush Top Ten Countdown Show.

#2 Lionel Richie – Say You, Say Me (Title Song from White Nights)

Well we’re down to #2: the only soundtrack hit in our countdown the year after the Phil Collins/Marilyn Martin duet “Separate Lives” was the only soundtrack hit in our 1985 top ten, from the same movie, Taylor Hackford’s Cold War musical drama White Nights starring Gregory Hines and Mikhail Baryshnikov.

OK, technically, it’s not a soundtrack hit because the artist’s label, Motown, wouldn’t clear it for release on a rival label. But yet it was the movie’s theme song! Fresh from co-writing U.S.A. for Africa’s “We Are the World” #1 Live Aid charity single with Michael Jackson in ’85, and an unbroken string of nine top10 solo hits going back to 1980, it’s Lionel Richie with “Say You, Say Me.”

Lionel Richie’s “Say You, Say Me,” #2 on our 1986 Chartcrush Top Ten Countdown. Director Taylor Hackford had a real knack for picking award-winning #1 ballad hits to put in his movies: Joe Cocker and Jennifer Warnes’ “Up Where We Belong” from An Officer and a Gentleman, #1 in ’82, Phil Collins’ “Against All Odds” from the movie of the same name, #1 in ’84, both of those nominated for Best Original Song Oscars, and “Up Where We Belong” won. So did “Say You, Say Me,” beating out “Separate Lives,” from the same movie, also nominated.

Richie’s Dancing on the Ceiling album yielded three more top10s in ’86 into ’87, but things cooled off for him on the charts as his marital woes dominated the tabloids from ’88 ’til his divorce in ’93. He continued charting AC hits into the ’10s, though, and was the elder-statesman judge on American Idol three years running in the late ’10s.

#1 Dionne & Friends – That’s What Friends Are For

Now with all the big benefit concerts in the ’80s, surprising that there wasn’t one for the worsening AIDS crisis ’til 1992: the benefit in London after Queen front man Freddie Mercury died.

But in ’86, after veteran actor Rock Hudson became the first big celebrity to die of AIDS, veteran actress Elizabeth Taylor and veteran playwright Neil Simon suggested to veteran Songwriters Burt Bacharach and Carole Bayer Sager (remember them from “On Our Own” at #4?) that the Duet they were working on with two veteran Singers could be an AIDS charity single. Well, after adding two more veteran Singers, that’s what it became. And with ten weeks in the top ten and four at #1, it’s the #1 song of 1986.

Billed on the record as Dionne Warwick & Friends, the “Friends” were Stevie Wonder, Gladys Knight and Elton John. That’s a century of combined chart action between them. And the record raised millions for AIDS research. At #1, “That’s What Friends Are For.”

#1 on our Chartcrush Top Ten Countdown for 1986, Dionne Warwick & Friends, “That’s What Friends Are For,” the Bacharach/Bayer-Sager song first recorded by Rod Stewart for the 1982 Ron Howard movie Night Shift starring Michael Keaton but not released as a single.

Burt Bacharach and Dionne Warwick went way back, to their amazing string of over 30 chart hits including seven top10s in the ’60s, which came to a messy end in 1972 when Bacharach’s long partnership with lyricist Hal David dissolved and Dionne found herself without Songwriters or Producers, having just signed a multi-million-dollar contract with a new label. “Friends” was the first time they’d worked together in 14 years.

Bonus

Well, there you have ’em: our Chartcrush Top Ten hits of 1986, based on their performance on Billboard’s weekly charts and ranked using our formula that we apply to every year’s songs.

Up to the ’90s, that’s how Billboard got its year-end rankings too: recap the published charts. But they kept tweaking the formula every year, ostensibly to improve accuracy, and in the mid-’80s they started doing some very complex stuff—including, for the first time ever, trying to solve the problem of hits still on the charts at their press deadline for the year-end issue not getting their full chart runs counted toward any year-end ranking; instead split between chart years.

From ’84 to ’89, songs moving up the chart at the deadline: kicked into the following year. And hits that’d already peaked but were still on the chart had points added based on Billboard‘s estimate of their remaining chart life.

Now, at Chartcrush, with the benefit of hindsight, we can factor songs’ actual full chart runs, and rank them in the calendar years in which they had most of their chart action. Billboard‘s chart years end several weeks before the end of the calendar year—that press deadline for the year-end issue.

So as I mentioned when we heard them earlier, Bruce Hornsby’s “The Way It Is” and The Bangles’ “Walk like an Egyptian” were hits late in the year so Billboard kicked them into ’87, but we still have them in ’86 since they peaked December 13 and 20, respectively, after Billboard‘s December 6 chart year cutoff but before the end of the calendar year.

Plus, three songs that made our top ten did not make Billboard‘s. They’ve got Whitney Houston’s “Greatest Love of All” at #11, and strangely, Huey Lewis’ “Stuck on You” and Falco’s “Rock Me Amadeus” didn’t even make Billboard‘s top 20 on the year, despite three weeks each at #1 in a year when the #1 song had just four. That’s a head-scratcher!

But five songs not in Billboard‘s top ten, of course, leaves five from Billboard‘s that weren’t in ours, so in the time we have left, let’s run through those.

#20 Robert Palmer – Addicted to Love

At #10 they had a British Rocker who’d been charting albums and singles since the mid-’70s. “Bad Case of Loving You (Doctor, Doctor),” his biggest hit up to ’86, #14 in ’79. But heavy rotation on MTV got him his first (and only) career #1, for a single week in May. It shakes out at #20 on our Chartcrush 1986 ranking we counted down the top ten from this hour: Robert Palmer’s “Addicted to Love.”

The video for Robert Palmer’s “Addicted to Love,” (off his eighth album) was all over MTV in the Spring, helping propel it to #1 for its one week in May. We have it at #20 on the year.

#12 Survivor – Burning Heart

Billboard‘s #8 song of ’86 as we run through the hits that made their year-end top ten but not our Chartcrush top ten we counted down this hour, had 16 weeks in the top 40, just one shy of Dionne & Friends’ 17, but it never got to #1 and we have it at #12: Survivor’s “Burning Heart.”

Like Mr. Mister, Survivor did not—ahem—survive into the late ’80s Glam Metal era. “Burning Heart” was their final record to crack the top 40.

Now there are three other hits from Billboard’s year-end top ten for ’86 that didn’t make our Chartcrush top ten: Eddie Murphy’s “Party All the Time” at #7, Mr. Mister’s “Broken Wings” at #5 and Klymaxx’s “I Miss You” at #3.

But just like Bruce Hornsby and The Bangles shifted from ’87 to ’86 in our rankings, all three of those songs hit their chart peaks in December ’85, so—you guessed it—you can hear those in our 1985 episode. And spoiler alert: of the three only “Broken Wings” is in our top ten for ’85. Hey, I told you, this stuff gets complicated for the mid-’80s!

But we got through it, didn’t we? And that’s gonna have to be a wrap for our 1986 edition of the Chartcrush Top Ten Countdown Show. I’m Christopher Verdesi and thanks for listening. If you like what you heard be sure and check out our website, chartcrush.com, for links to stream all our Chartcrush episodes online, plus written episode transcripts, our full top100 charts, chart run line graphs and other gnarly extras. We count down a different year every week on this show, 1940s to now, so tune again next week—same station, same time—for another edition of Chartcrush.

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Welcome! This is the Chartcrush Top Ten Countdown Show, I’m your host, Christopher Verdesi. Every week we do a deep dive into a year in music and culture and count down the top ten songs according to our exclusive recap of the weekly Pop charts published at the time in the music industry’s top trade mag and chart authority, Billboard magazine. This week on Chartcrush, we’re turning the clock back to 2013.

In the Year in Music issue at the end of 2013, CBS Radio’s top programmer Kevin Weatherly summed up the year with an observation that, really, sums up the whole ’10s decade. “This time,” he said, “feels less about any particular movement and more about how young people are discovering music.” Social media, including YouTube, was how young people were discovering music.

A tough thing for a veteran radio programmer to admit, but viral videos had already been propelling songs onto the charts for a few years when Billboard officially added YouTube to its Hot100 song ranking calculus, making 2013 the peak year in one of the handful of brief periods in pop culture when organic, bottom-up trends could, and did, break through, with little or no help or approval from cultural buzz-leaders.

Often the opposite! The gatekeepers in the music biz and tapping away at keyboards in entertainment media had watched in horror as things like Rebecca Black’s “Friday” in 2011 and PSY’s “Gangnam Style” in 2012 did end runs around their barriers, racking up tens of millions of views and making the charts. But in 2013 the gates were smashed completely when many of the year’s top hits were in that category, and the besieged pundit class lashed out.

It wasn’t just music, of course. Internet-fueled activism had toppled governments across the Middle East in the Arab Spring, and here at home, tipped the scales for same-sex marriage before many even realized it was a serious debate.

Social media was driving so many headlines that when an attack by Islamic terrorists on the anniversary of 9/11 in Benghazi, Libya killed four Americans including the U.S. ambassador, President Obama’s Secretary of State and U.N. Ambassador (Hillary Clinton and Susan Rice, respectively) blamed a YouTube video, and the legacy media ran with it. Despite GOP challenger Mitt Romney’s best efforts to call that out in a debate, instead of Benghazi costing President Obama his re-election, he won his second term just weeks later.

Then after the 2016 election when Donald Trump upset Obama’s endorsed successor Hillary Clinton, Obama again singled out social media as the culprit. At first, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg called that “pretty crazy,” but once Obama got the ball rolling behind the scenes, Silicon Valley bowed to enormous government pressure to aggressively moderate political discourse in tandem with the feds, and even after Trump was sworn in as President, new phrases no one had ever heard before like “algorithmic filtering,” “shadow banning” and “cancel culture” trended.

Now, music critics and other cultural gatekeepers of course didn’t have direct access to the feds’ legal and regulatory carrots and sticks, but they could study algorithms, master analytics, court influencers and ride favored political currents to amplify their voices, and entertainment media got a lot more political in the Trump years, along with everything else. But in 2013, when top-down manipulation and suppression on the internet was still unthinkable and it was a huge story when something, let alone someone, got censored or scrubbed, or for government officials to make their ideological preferences known via a back channel, there was less noise between artists and fans than at most other times in Pop history.

#10 P!nk featuring Nate Ruess – Just Give Me a Reason

And one surefire way to get lots of fans to pony up 99 cents for a download was for two name acts to join forces on a single, and our #10 song was the top charting example of that in 2013: #1 on the iTunes chart for six weeks before hitting #1 on the Hot100. It’s P!nk, teaming up with Nate Ruess, front man of one of 2012’s top chart debuts, the New York Indie Pop band fun. “Just Give Me a Reason.”

Billboard’s Woman of the Year for 2013, P!nk with fun.’s Nate Reuss, “Just Give Me a Reason, ” #10 on our Chartcrush Countdown of 2013’s top ten hits. P!nk first hit the charts all the way back in 2000, but being a little edgier and a year later than Britney Spears and Christina Aguilera, her evolving brand of defiant, scrappy female Pop-Rock had to wait for hitmaking producers Max Martin and Dr. Luke, who made Kelly Clarkson’s multi-platinum Breakaway album mid-decade.

P!nk’s ’07 Funhouse album had her first #1 hit, the Martin/Luke-produced “So What“, and from there she was unstoppable: a string of five consecutive top tens from 2010 to ’13. “Just Give Me a Reason” was the last of those.

#9 Justin Timberlake – Mirrors

At #9 a major musical comeback for another late ’90s Teen Pop alum who in ’06 and ’07 scored six top tens including three straight #1s, but slipped on the charts the next couple years and pivoted to acting: films like The Social Network, Bad Teacher, Friends with Benefits and the Coen Brothers’ Inside Llewyn Davis.

RCA’s marketing campaign for his highly-anticipated return to music rated a full feature story in the business section of Billboard, and to gin up pre-orders, music’s top retailer in 2013, Apple, streamed his new album The 20/20 Experience free in it’s iTunes mp3 download store the week before it was released, and it was Apple’s fastest-selling album ever the year after downloads eclipsed CDs as music’s top revenue source.

Oh, and he was a guest on NBC’s Late Night with Jimmy Fallon for an entire week promoting it! The advance single was a collab with Rapper Jay-Z, “Suit & Tie,” which shot to #4 in its second week, but the follow-up was even bigger. It clocks in at over eight minutes on the album, but here’s the radio edit of Justin Timberlake’s “Mirrors.”

Justin Timberlake’s “Mirrors,” #9 on our Chartcrush Countdown of 2013’s top ten hits: a song he wrote with his longtime producer and co-writer Timbaland in 2009 just before switching to acting fulltime. But it was a paean to his then-girlfriend, 7th Heaven actress Jessica Biel, too personal to put on someone else’s album, so he held it back, and by the time he returned to it, he and Biel were engaged.

Their October 2012 wedding was a huge story, and when “Mirrors” came out in early ’13: big boost from all that hoopla. And no hard feelings with Timbaland; he produced the finished version along with the rest of Justin’s 20/20 Experience album.

#8 Katy Perry – Roar

Our next act debuted the same year P!nk scored her first #1, 2008, and had the same Producers, Max Martin and his protégé Dr. Luke. And both continued scoring hits with Martin behind the glass into the ’10s. But as successful as P!nk was, this Singer was even bigger: eight consecutive top tens, including five #1s, since 2010.

And just as a marriage can fuel a big hit, so can a divorce! She’d only been with English activist-comedian Russell Brand 18 months when Brand dumped her via text message! And she channeled all those emotions into her fourth album, Prism, which dropped in October of 2013. At #8 is the advance lead single from that album, Katy Perry’s “Roar.”

Katy Perry’s “Roar” shot from #85 to #2 its second week on the Hot100, spent two weeks at #1 in September and is the #8 song of 2013 here on our Chartcrush 2013 countdown: the latest in a long string of early ’10s girl-power anthems, and it reminded enough people of another one that’d just been on the charts, Sara Bareilles’s “Brave,” that a mash-up vid of the two songs went viral. That is, until producer Dr. Luke took to Twitter to point out that “Roar” was already in the can when “Brave” came out.

But that wasn’t the end of Perry’s plagiarism woes. Her next big hit off her divorce-fueled Prism album, “Dark Horse” with Rapper Juicy J, helped introduce the world to the Trap style that defined Hip-Hop in the second half of the ’10s and was the #3 song of 2014 by our Chartcrush ranking, but it sounded an awful lot like the beat in a 2008 track by a Christian Rap act, and that lawsuit ground through the legal system for years: a lower court’s $3 million judgement against Perry overturned on appeal in 2022.

Katy Perry’s next album Witness in 2017 got mixed reviews and only yielded one top ten hit, but she landed as a judge on ABC’s reboot of American Idol in 2018.

#7 The Lumineers – Ho Hey

But in the Spring of 2012, still on the Fox network, Idol crowned its season 11 champ Phillip Phillips, and his coronation single “Home,” unlike Idol coronation singles up until then that typically debuted in the top ten from the initial burst from the show but vanished quickly, “Home” stayed on the chart 40 weeks and sparked a mini Folk revival with other Indie Folk hits following in its wake, notably Mumford & Sons’ “I Will Wait” and Of Monsters and Men’s “Little Talks.”

But none were as big as our #7 hit, whose run in the top ten from December ’12 to February ’13 was also when those other songs peaked. The group got their name when an emcee at a Jersey City club mistakenly introduced them as the act that was slated to play there the following week, so they kept the name, true story! It’s The Lumineers’ “Ho Hey.”

Before moving out to Colorado, The Lumineers were based in Brooklyn, New York, and front man Wesley Schultz says, the “ho’s” and “hey’s” in “Ho Hey” were to wake up jaded scenesters in their local Brooklyn audiences. For the title, “Hey Ho” wouldn’t do (for obvious reasons), so it’s “Ho Hey,” and on top of its 62-week run on the Hot100, which makes it the #7 song on our 2013 Chartcrush top ten we’re counting down this hour, the song also topped the Rock, Alternative, Adult Pop and Adult Album Alternative or “Triple A” charts.

The Lumineers never cracked the Top 40 on the Hot100 again, but stayed big on those other formats and kept packing arenas, even opening for U2 on their Joshua Tree 30th anniversary stadium tour, the highest grossing tour of 2017.

As for the mini-Folk boom they headlined, it reverberated with Avicii’s EDM-Folk hybrids “Wake Me Up” and “Hey Brother” later in ’13, then Hozier’s “Take Me to Church,” George Ezra’s “Budapest,” X-Ambassadors’ “Renegades” and others mid-decade.

#6 Macklemore and Ryan Lewis featuring Ray Dalton – Can’t Hold Us

At #6 we have the follow-up hit by a Duo whose chart breakthrough earlier in 2013 threw the music world for a loop and was considered by many to be a Novelty song. We’ll hear that one in a few minutes, but as deep as RCA’s pockets were hyping Justin Timberlake’s comeback, the one-two punch from this Act right at the same time turned out to be the most successful launch in 2013.

Which is amazing because other than a distribution deal with Warner Music’s Alternative Distribution Alliance, they didn’t have a label! The follow-up dropped just as that first left-field hit started slipping, and it’s a straight down-the-middle EDM-Hip-Hop Club Banger that dispelled once and for all the notion they were just a couple of goofballs poking fun at Rap culture, with a headline in Spin declaring “This Guy’s Not Going Anywhere” after their Saturday Night Live appearance that week.

The follow-up made them the first Duo in Hot100 history to top the chart with their first two singles. At #6 it’s Seattle Rapper Macklemore and his Producer/Partner Ryan Lewis, featuring Singer Ray Dalton, “Can’t Hold Us.”

“Can’t Hold Us” at #6 on our Chartcrush Top Ten Countdown for 2013, Seattle Hip-Hop Duo Macklemore and Ryan Lewis featuring Ray Dalton, the second single and second #1 hit off their debut album The Heist, but an older song.

Lewis had made the beat in the late ’00s and they’d sat on it because Macklemore thought it sounded like a Soccer Anthem. And sure enough, once its initial release came out in 2011, the all-sports cable channel ESPN snapped it up for College GameDay promos. No airplay or chart action though, ’til after their big breakthrough in 2013, which we’ll be hearing in a few minutes.

#5 Bruno Mars – Locked Out of Heaven

But first, at #5 is Billboard’s Hot100 Artist of the Year, on the cover of the 2013 Year in Music issue: his fourth #1 hit since debuting on the charts in 2010 as the Featured Singer on Rapper-Producer B.o.B.’s #1 hit “Nothin’ on You.” And then his first single as a Headliner, “Just the Way You Are,” was #1 for four weeks and our #3 song of 2011.

And his next after that also topped the chart, “Grenade.” So coming into ’13, expectations were high for his Unorthodox Jukebox album (his Dad was Jewish), and it didn’t disappoint: another pair of #1’s, and then he headlined the Super Bowl halftime show! This was his biggest 2013 hit, on top for six weeks. It’s Bruno Mars’ “Locked Out of Heaven.”

Bruno Mars, “Locked Out of Heaven,” #5 here on our Chartcrush Top Ten Countdown for 2013. When his next single, “When I Was Your Man,” hit #1 for a week in April ’13, Mars became the fastest Male Artist to score five #1’s since Elvis Presley in the 1950s.

He was the Singer on 2015’s biggest hit, British Producer Mark Ronson’s “Uptown Funk,” and after his next set, 24K Magic, finally came out after a four-year wait at the end of 2016, he won all six of the Grammys he was nominated for, after losing all six in 2012 to Adele.

#4 Macklemore and Ryan Lewis featuring Wanz – Thrift Shop

OK, at #4, as promised, the breakthrough hit by the Duo whose Club Banger follow-up “Can’t Hold Us” we just heard at #6. It’d been #1 for four weeks when Billboard added YouTube plays to its Hot100 formula February 23. And the very next week, March 2, an even bigger YouTube hit, Baauer’s “Harlem Shake,” debuted at #1 thanks to tens of thousands of homemade vids of folks doing the dance and sampling the track.

Yeah, all those views counted too on Billboard’s charts! So our #4 song sat at #2 for all of March but reclaimed the top spot for another two weeks in April.

Rappers Drake and Kendrick Lamar had groundbreaking Hip-Hop tracks on the charts, but right from jump: a little kid introducing the Rapper: well that was something completely different, so it was the two White guys without a record deal blithely mocking 20 years of Hip-Hop cliches—poppin’ tags instead of bottles—who won the year in Hip-Hop. Only the second independently released #1 hit in history, at #4 it’s Macklemore and Ryan Lewis: “Thrift Shop.”

Macklemore and Ryan Lewis’s breakthrough hit, “Thrift Shop,” Billboard’s #1 song of 2013, but #4 on our Chartcrush ranking that factors full chart runs instead of only weeks within the chart year as Billboard does.

No one quite knew what to make of that song. Two White guys from Seattle and their 51-year-old Software Test Engineer bud upending 20 years of Hip-Hop luxury consumption cliches and making the case for secondhand shops. Was it a joke? If so, bloggers in the shriller corners of the blogosphere (Spin, Vulture, Salon et cetera) didn’t see the humor. Not in a year when Hip-Hop was in transition and Black Headliners weren’t scoring #1 hits. None did in calendar 2013; just features like Wanz with the “I’m gonna pop some tags” and “this is frikkin’ awesome” lines on “Thrift Shop.”

After the Grammys, Macklemore validated his critics’ grumblings about race and Hip-Hop culture when he publicly apologized to Black Rapper Kendrick Lamar for winning all the Hip-Hop awards. Lamar demurred and Drake famously dissed Macklemore’s apology. But then in 2014 the top Rapper wasn’t just White, she was Female, and Australian! Iggy Azalea! Uh oh!

By 2015, though, Iggy had followed Macklemore & Ryan Lewis into Pop’s nascent cancel bin as the blogosphere effectively neutralized the hordes of irksome YouTubers who, with their millions of clicks and views, had surfaced all these “incorrect” artists and songs in the early ’10s.

#3 Lorde – Royals

But not before our #3 song with a similarly subversive message topped the Hot100 for nine weeks in the Fall of 2013. It was a minimalist Indie song by another unknown, and critics and pundits still seething about “Thrift Shop’s” success took aim at her callouts of Hip-Hop cliches like gold teeth, diamond watches, private jets and expensive liquor brands as “the kind of luxe” that “ain’t for us.”

One Blogger labeled the song “deeply racist,” and that got amplified by no less than CNN and Time magazine. But there was pushback. The Singer was barely out of diapers during Hip-Hop’s bling era in the early ’00s, and while the tropes may’ve originated in Rap, by 2013 they’d become so widespread that no one could really claim exclusive ownership.

One Black Writer flipped the script: “Perhaps the notion that Maybachs, Cristal and gold teeth automatically equate to Rappers and ‘Black folks,'” she wrote, “is the real ‘deeply racist’ thing here.” And a journalist in the Singer’s native New Zealand called viewing everything through the lens of American racial politics “ignorant” and “imperialistic.”

The Singer’s response to all of this? It’s in the song: “We don’t care, we crave a different kind of buzz.” At #3, it’s Lorde’s breakthrough and biggest hit, “Royals.”

Lorde’s “Royals,” #1 for nine weeks, October to December and the #3 song of the year here on our Chartcrush Top Ten Countdown for 2013. It wasn’t the first Alt-ish leftfield chart topper in the ’10s. Fun’s “We Are Young” and Gotye and Kimbra’s “Somebody That I Used to Know” hit in the Spring of 2012. But Lorde was the first Gen-Zer.

With YouTube now factoring into the Hot100, all a kid needed to impact the charts was access to mom and dad’s computer. But “Royals” was popular with older folks too. It was #1 on the Adult Top 40 chart for three weeks. And remixes by The Weeknd and Rick Ross even had it on urban radio.

Lorde’s next album Melodrama didn’t arrive ’til 2017, but debuted at #1 on the album chart despite it’s biggest single “Green Light” only getting to #19.

#2 Imagine Dragons – Radioactive

Well, just two more hits to go, and at #2, the song with the longest run on the Hot100, not just of 2013, but of all-time up ’til then, 87 weeks. And it held that record ’til The Weeknd’s “Blinding Lights” notched 90 weeks in 2021. Really long chart runs, another feature of a Hot100 driven by on-demand video plays and streaming.

About half of those 87 weeks were before it peaked, as it sputtered along behind the Group’s first charting single, “It’s Time.” That got to #15, but this one continued its slow, four-month climb to its peak of #3: a slow-burning, bottom-up sleeper smash at the dawn of the streaming era. Out of Brigham Young University, relocated to Vegas, baby! It’s Imagine Dragons’ “Radioactive.”

Three different “Radioactive’s” charted before Imagine Dragons’ in 2012 and ’13. Kiss’s Gene Simmons in 1979, supergroup The Firm in ’85, and Alternative band Kings of Leon just two years earlier in 2010. But Imagine Dragons were unanimously hailed as the year’s top Rock debut on the strength of their “Radioactive” and other 2013 hits.

Their next single, “Demons” also took its sweet time climbing the charts, debuting in January; peaking at #6 in December! “In Time,” “Radioactive” and “Demons,” all off their 2012 EP, Continued Silence, then ported over to their first full-length album, Night Visions.

#1 Robin Thicke featuring Pharrell – Blurred Lines

Well, we’ve chronicled in some detail how many of pop culture’s gatekeepers in the blogosphere in 2013 weren’t happy with where legions of YouTube and on-demand streaming clickers—a.k.a. “the public”—were steering music, and that went for the year’s top hit too. “Thrift Shop” and “Royals” got the lion’s share of the shade in 2013 for their perceived disses of Hip-Hop culture, but this one found itself on the receiving end too, for promoting “rape culture.” What do you think? #1 on our Chartcrush Top Ten Countdown for 2013, it’s Robin Thicke with Pharrell Williams: “Blurred Lines.”

The #1 song of 2013 here on the Chartcrush Top Ten Countdown Show, Robin Thicke with Pharrell Williams, “Blurred Lines.” The album version has an R-rated Rap verse from veteran Rapper T.I. that some radio stations played a heavily censored version of, but most went with the Rapless one we just heard.

So are the “Blurred Lines” between consent and non-consent as many angry Bloggers asserted? Pharrell, the main Songwriter, maintained that the song is about rejection. But the soft-core video banned by YouTube gave credence to the “rape culture” allegations, and to make matters worse, one of the models in it sued Robin Thicke for assault.

OK, but were all songs by Men about romantic frustrations now off limits? It sure seemed that way. Even the holiday song “Baby, It’s Cold Outside!” Miley Cyrus, for one, must not’ve gotten that memo though, twerking all over Robin Thicke during his performance of “Blurred Lines” at the MTV Video Music Awards in August, while the song was #1.

By the way, Billboard had “Blurred Lines” at #2 on the year behind its #1 song, “Thrift Shop.” “Blurred Lines” still had 17 weeks left on the chart though after the end of Billboard’s chart year, so factoring songs’ full chart runs as we do at Chartcrush, it’s #1 by a pretty comfortable margin.

Bonus

And there were some other shake-ups as well comparing our Chartcrush Top Ten to Billboard’s. Of the songs we heard this hour, three didn’t make Billboard’s year-end top ten, again, because they only count weeks within their discrete “chart year.” They had Bruno Mars’s “Locked Out of Heaven” at #11, The Lumineers “Ho Hey” at #12 and Lorde’s “Royals” at #15. So those three coming into our top ten bumps three of Billboard’s top ten on the year. What are those?

#19 Florida Georgia Line feat. Nelly – Cruise (remix)

Well, at #9 Billboard had the year’s biggest Country crossover hit: the song that defined the sub-genre Bro-Country.

The original Country version of Florida Georgia Line’s “Cruise” got all the way to #16 on the Hot100 in 2012, so for ’13, they did a remix with Rapper Nelly, and that was in the top ten on the Hot100 for 14 weeks peaking at #4. Our ranking puts the “Cruise” remix at #19 on the year.

#14 Bruno Mars – When I Was Your Man

Although “Locked Out of Heaven” missed Billboard’s year-end top ten at #11, Bruno Mars’ other #1 hit in 2013, which we have at #14, was #8 on Billboard.

For four of the five weeks that “Harlem Shake” was #1 with “Thrift Shop” at #2, “When I Was Your Man” was #3. After “Thrift Shop” resumed the top spot for two weeks and dropped back to #2 on April 20, it moved up and got its one week at #1.

#28 Baauer – Harlem Shake

And speaking of Baauer’s “Harlem Shake”…

“Harlem Shake” only “shakes” out at #28 on our Chartcrush ranking, but Billboard has it at #4 on the year, most likely from the humongous click volume on all those viral vids that sampled the song the five weeks it was #1. That’s just a guess though; since the early ’90s for its year-end charts Billboard has summed the underlying data it uses for its weekly rankings, and that data isn’t public.

Our rankings are based only on Billboard’s published weekly chart positions, and despite debuting at #1 and staying for five, “Harlem Shake” faded fast, only racking up 20 total weeks on the chart, well below the average of 36 weeks for songs that hit #1 in 2013.

An important hit though, for the viral dance craze, yeah, but also for breaking the ice on Hip-Hop’s next big thing on the Pop charts, Trap. Katy Perry’s Trap-influenced “Dark Horse” followed in 2014, then Fetty Wap’s “Trap Queen” in 2015: both among the top ten hits their respective years.

Well that’s it for our 2013 edition of the Chartcrush Top Ten Countdown Show. Did you have fun? I hope so! Thanks for listening; I’ve been your host, Christopher Verdesi. Check out our website, chartcrush.com, for written transcripts and links to stream this and other Chartcrush shows on Spotify, plus chart run line graphs and other buzzworthy extras. We count down a different year every week on this show, from the beginning of the charts in the 1940s all the way up to the present, so tune again, same station, same time, for 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 count down the top ten songs according to our exclusive recap of the weekly charts published at the time in Billboard magazine, the music industry’s top trade publication and chart authority. This week on Chartcrush, we’re counting down 1951, the year the public’s appetite for emotive, belt-it-out, leave-it-all-on-the-table Crooning became unmistakable.

Which might seem like not that big a deal, but as scholar Allison McCracken lays out in her book Real Men Don’t Sing: Crooning in American Culture, for decades leading up to the early ’50s, society just wasn’t ready for strange men intimately addressing women in their homes on radio or records. Remember, this was pre-internet, pre-TV. People had very different ideas about privacy.

So in the late 1920s when the electric microphone let singers get up close and sing softly and Crooners started showing up on the radio, it sparked a huge backlash. “Every time you kiss your girl, who is she thinking of?” asked the song in a 1932 Warner Brothers cartoon. And the response: “Crosby, Columbo and Vallée.”

Bing Crosby, Russ Columbo and Rudy Vallée, the first wave of swoon-worthy Crooners. Of those, only Crosby was able to adapt his voice and persona to masculine norms and build a durable career through the Great Depression.

In the ’40s, Frank Sinatra and Perry Como captivated a whole new generation of Teen Bobbysoxers, but they didn’t stray too far from the narrow zone of acceptability mapped out by Crosby and Male Vocalists who dutifully sang their featured “vocal refrains” on Big Band records in the ’30s. In the late ’40s, Frankie Laine and Vic Damone pushed the envelope a little further, but ’51 was the year the floodgates opened.

Dramatic singing went over better on TV, of course, as America’s affluent households got their first sets, but also, a new generation was coming up, christened in 1951 “The Silent Generation,” aged 6 to 26 in 1951, America’s most conservative generation marked by a “revolt against revolt,” as Pulitzer-winning Poet Peter Viereck put it, with a “strong but inarticulate” belief in Democracy and the American Way that included improving race relations at home and engaging globally.

Silents weren’t much into sign-carrying or street shouting, but those causes informed their taste in music, and that’s very apparent on the Pop charts through the ’50s and into the early ’60s. Silents, of course, the generation that put Rock ‘n Roll and R&B on the Pop charts, but first they got their Crooner on in the early ’50s, and it’s no coincidence that the previous generation’s smooth, low-key Singers like Crosby scored their last top10s in 1950. Even Frank Sinatra went out of style. He later made an epic comeback, of course, but in ’51, young people wanted more “oomph” from their Singers.

#10 Tony Martin – I Get Ideas

We lead off our 1951 countdown with an older Crooner who never gained much traction until “There’s No Tomorrow,” his adaptation of the Operatic Italian standard “O Sole Mio” that stayed in the top ten for 16 weeks in 1950. And his next blockbuster was another international song, this time from Argentina. At #10 it’s Tony Martin’s “I Get Ideas.”

Tony Martin repeating in the top 10 on the year with “I Get Ideas,” #10 on our 1951 Chartcrush Top Ten Countdown, the year after “There’s No Tomorrow” was 1950’s #6 hit. He starred in several big Technicolor musicals and made the top 10 four more times before his chart fortunes dried up mid-decade.

#9 Eddy Howard – (It’s No) Sin

Martin’s first solo hits in 1946 had been for then-startup Mercury Records. By ’51 he was on RCA, but Mercury out of Chicago, had become one of the top labels in the business, and at #9, the first of two hits on Mercury in our 1951 top ten countdown, by an act who’d scored major hits in the ’40s for New York’s Majestic Records, but when Majestic went belly up in ’48, Mercury snapped him up.

Which made sense because for years he’d been headlining at Chicago’s top nightclub, the Aragon Ballroom, with his shows going out live on WGN, a station so powerful that it could sometimes be heard in the U.K.! It’s singing Bandleader Eddy Howard, “(It’s No) Sin.”

Six different versions of “(It’s No) Sin” made the charts in late ’51 into ’52 and Eddy Howard’s wasn’t the first. That was by unknown Philadelphia Vocal group The Four Aces, who couldn’t get signed, so they had to self-release it on their own label. Theirs had the title as just “Sin,” which raised eyebrows and no doubt moved some inventory, and Mercury repeated the trick with their Eddy Howard version we just heard at #9 here on our 1951 countdown, but then added the “It’s No” in parentheses for later pressings.

Eddy Howard faded over the next couple years, but The Four Aces were only getting started: eight top10’s for Decca over the next four years: the top Male Vocal Quartet in an era that, it turned out, couldn’t get enough fresh-faced, clean-cut collegiate foursomes.

#8 Mario Lanza – Be My Love

So after Tony Martin’s operatic “There’s No Tomorrow” sold a million in 1950, why not an actual Opera Singer? Good looks and acting ability, a definite plus, and that helped land our actual Opera Singer at #8 his seven-year deal with the MGM movie studio after Louis B. Mayer saw him perform at the Hollywood Bowl.

Metro cast him in back-to-back Technicolor musical blockbusters as an ethnic working-class Singing Romeo opposite the refined, aristocratic Kathryn Grayson, also a trained Opera Singer. From the second of those, 1950’s The Toast of New Orleans, it’s a Duet with Grayson in the film, but the record is all Mario Lanza: what became his signature song and first chart hit, “Be My Love.”

Mario Lanza’s “Be My Love,” #8 here on our Chartcrush Countdown of 1951’s top hits. Like his roles in those first two MGM musicals, Lanza really was a rags-to-riches success story: from South Philly, son of Italian immigrants. Then Opera Singer, Movie Star and starting in ’51, Pop Star.

For his next role he got the lead in The Great Caruso, a Biopic of the great early 20th century Tenor Enrico Caruso, who was Lanza’s idol. And that movie yielded another top10 hit later in ’51, “The Loveliest Time of the Year,” but then at his peak in ’52, he was fired from his next film over creative differences with the Director, which sent him into a tailspin of seclusion, alcoholism and overeating, and he died at just 38 in 1959 while undergoing a controversial crash weight-loss program in Italy.

#7 Tony Bennett – Cold, Cold Heart

At #7 we have another new Crooner who’d just exploded on the charts with his biggest hit that we’ll be hearing later in the Countdown, but for the follow-up, Columbia’s visionary new head of A&R, Mitch Miller, did something pretty audacious. He took a twangy, heartsick Honky Tonk Ballad that’d just topped the Country charts, gave it to his new tuxedoed Italian-American Crooner from Astoria, Queens, and his just-hired Arranger-Conductor Percy Faith, and tasked them with transforming it into a Pop hit.

Now in his previous A&R role at the aforementioned Mercury Records in ’49, Miller had catapulted Jazz Singer Frankie Laine to superstardom with the Bluesy Western hits “Mule Train” and “That Lucky Old Sun.” So Miller already had been mining the uncharted nexus between Country and Pop for a couple years by ’51. But here, he wasn’t looking to turn his Crooner into a Cowboy; this was about transforming a Country song into a slicked-up, citified Pop smash. And just about the last guy anyone would’ve expected to sing a Hank Williams song, hit it out of the park. At #7 it’s Tony Bennett, with his version of Williams’s “Cold, Cold Heart.”

“Cold, Cold Heart” bought Hank Williams and his boys “quite a few beans and biscuits,” as he put it introducing the song on TV just after Tony Bennett’s version we just heard at #7 had completed its 30-week chart run. Hank’s twangy original sold a bunch too, but a #1 Pop hit was a whole ‘nother level, and no one had ever scored such a big one adapting a Honky Tonk song before: quite a coup for Columbia’s new A&R head, Mitch Miller.

Other labels got the message, but so did Nashville itself, and the Country music biz spent the rest of the decade re-tooling to crank out its own citified Pop hits with strings, choruses and lush arrangements. And it wasn’t long before others applied the same logic to R&B, mining that chart for songs that could be classed up into Pop hits. Which really took off once the Silent Generation’s fascination with Doo Wop and R&B and all Black music started showing up on the Pop charts thanks to DJs like Cleveland’s Alan Freed and L.A.’s Hunter Hancock.

Young folks eventually embraced Folk, of course, but Honky-Tonk Country remained a musical ghetto, even in Nashville, until the Outlaw movement in the ’70s with “Convoy,” CB radios, Smokey & The Bandit and The Dukes of Hazard.

#6 Rosemary Clooney – Come On-a My House

Well, we’re counting down the top ten hits of 1951 here on this week’s Chartcrush Top Ten Countdown Show, and we’re down to #6: a record that signaled a changing of the guard in Female Pop vocals.

Dinah Shore had been one of Columbia’s biggest Acts in the late ’40s, but arch-rival RCA wooed her away with a million dollar deal just as Mitch Miller was coming aboard at Columbia.

Dinah was already known for cutesy Novelty hits, and RCA had one set to go for Summer, the teasing rhyme ditty “Sweet Violets,” so Miller countered by handing an ethnic Novelty song to Columbia’s promising young Female Singer, and it was her breakthrough: #1 on all three Billboard Pop charts for five straight weeks in August, and the first of five top5 hits over the next three years for Rosemary Clooney, backing ensemble directed by Miller with harpsichord (that was something new!). “Come On-a-My House.”

“Come on-a My House,” an early songwriting win for Ross Bagdasarian, the guy who, in the late ’50s under his pseudonym David Seville introduced the world to sped-up chipmunk voices on “Witch Doctor” and Alvin and the Chipmunks. Rosemary Clooney hated the song, but Mitch Miller threatened to terminate her contract if she didn’t do it, and she later said she could hear the anger in her voice whenever she heard it.

Miller and Columbia did notch the win vs. Dinah’s Novelty “Sweet Violets” though. That debuted the same week but only got to #3 and was Dinah’s last top10 hit. Doubtful that RCA made back the million it cost to poach her from Columbia.

#5 Les Paul & Mary Ford – How High the Moon

At #5 as we continue counting down the top 10 hits of 1951 here on this week’s edition of Chartcrush, Billboard #1 Jukebox hit of the year, by music’s hottest guitarist since the late ’30s, now teaming up with his Vocalist wife and an L.A. garage full of tape and studio gear, most of which he either invented or modded during his long recovery from a serious car accident. The record, entirely produced by him in that garage with just guitar, his wife’s vocals, and a whole lot of multitracking with tape.

Studio whiz Bill Putnam had overdubbed Patti Page’s vocals for Mercury using acetate records, but this guy geeking out in his garage in L.A. wasn’t just overdubbing one or two vocal parts. This was next-level studio gimmickry with flanging, delay, phasing, varispeed: all never-before-heard effects.

Capitol Records sat on it for a whole year, but it rocketed straight to the top when it finally came out. It’s Les Paul and Mary Ford’s “How High the Moon.”

Husband-wife Act Les Paul and Mary Ford, #5 on our Chartcrush Top Ten countdown of 1951’s biggest hits, “How High the Moon.” Again, just Les on guitar, Mary on vocals, with lots of overdubbing and effects, all cooked up in Les’s garage: an incredible achievement with the technology of the time.

“How High” had become a standard since debuting on Broadway in 1940, and Paul called it “the national anthem of the jazz world,” but Les and Mary had the charts all to themselves with it in ’51: the only song in our countdown with no copycat cover versions, which must’ve felt like the music equivalent of Bobby Thompson’s famous walk-off homer that won the Giants the pennant in the Fall.

#4 Nat “King” Cole – Too Young

So if you go on the internet and look up 1951’s top hits, almost every source shows our song at #4 as year’s #1 song. So why do we have it at #4? Well, a couple reasons. Since the Hot100 debuted in 1958, Billboard’s Best-Sellers chart has become the default go-to for pre-Hot100 song rankings. OK, but most American homes in the ’50s did not have record players or stacks of records, so Retail Best-Sellers really only reflects the affluent end of Pop fandom. Well, at Chartcrush, our method for those years weighs the Jukebox and Airplay charts equally with Sales.

Secondly, Billboard’s year-end rankings, even now, do not factor chart action outside of their “chart year,” even if a song was already on the chart before the start of the year, or still on it at the end. Instead, songs like that get split between the years, which is a huge disadvantage vs. songs whose whole runs were within that timeframe. Well, our Chartcrush rankings correct that flaw by counting every song’s full chart run in whichever of the calendar year it earned most of its points.

So for this artist’s 1951 hit, it’s a demotion, but either way it’s his second top 5 showing in back-to-back years after his “Mona Lisa” was the #1 song of 1950. Black Artists had charted multiple Pop hits in the ’40s, but Nat “King” Cole set a new high watermark in the first years of the ’50s. At #4, “Too Young.”

Les Baxter gets the Conductor credit on that record but Baxter’s protégé Nelson Riddle has since been recognized as having done most of the work on “Too Young.” Riddle later pointed out that Nat “King” Cole was his own A&R man, selecting by his count 14 of 15 of the songs he scored hits with, at a time when label A&R guys like Mitch Miller ran tight ships and Singers rarely had much say.

Well “Too Young” was a savvy choice. Broadway Vets Sidney Lippman and Sylvia Dee had written it to appeal to Teens, and it was the hit that convinced the music biz that that was a winning formula.

Nat “King” Cole went on to be the first Black Entertainer to host a network TV show in 1956 and ’57, and he scored another dozen top10s in the ’50s, Nelson Riddle getting credit on most of ’em, in addition to arranging and conducting Frank Sinatra’s comeback on Capitol.

Les Baxter did well too: his trailblazing Exotica albums, not to mention his seven top10 chorus-and-strings Easy Listening versions of current Pop hits from ’51 to ’56, which proved that targeting hi-fi nuts looking to soundtrack their soirees and cocktail hours was, for a time, just as smart as targeting Teens.

#3 Perry Como – If

Now, I began the show talking about all the smooth ’40s Singers whose chart careers hit the skids as the new generation of emotive Crooners came up. At #3, the big exception, thanks to TV. His 15-minute musical variety show followed the news three nights a week on CBS, but on this song he also upped his vocal game enough to stay relevant up against the Marios and Tonys conquering the airwaves.

Still, a lot of the drama is in the arrangement, while the man later dubbed “Mr. Relaxation” remains the calm in the eye of the storm. It might not’ve won over swaths of young fans looking for vocal thrill rides, but it kept him in the top ten through the ’50s. At #3, here’s Perry Como’s big 1951 hit, a song there were eight versions of on the charts in ’51, “If.”

Bing Crosby, the sole survivor of the ’30s Crooner backlash thanks to his own masculine casualness, called Perry Como “the man who invented casual,” no doubt his humble way of passing the baton at age 48 and fading from the charts as the ’50s began.

In 1981, the Canadian sketch comedy show SCTV did a spoof commercial for a fictitious “Perry Como Is Still Alive” tour, in which Eugene Levy as Como sings recent Disco hits in various stages of repose up to and including lying in bed with head on pillow. Como had to wipe away tears of laughter after seeing that at the Emmys.

#2 Tony Bennett – Because of You

Now Mitch Miller’s biggest problem when he came on board as head of A&R at Columbia in 1950? An acute Crooner shortage. Buddy Clark had just been killed in a bizarre crash landing on Beverly Blvd. in L.A. after the plane he was on ran out of fuel. And Columbia’s most famous Crooner Frank Sinatra was a trainwreck, resented by Veterans for playing Soldiers and Sailors on the big screen despite having never served, owing back taxes, having to answer a Senate committee’s questions about alleged mob ties, and all over the gossip magazines, his torrid affair with also-married actress Ava Gardner.

He hadn’t scored a top10 hit in three years when he angrily vetoed two songs Mitch Miller had lined up to revive his career, storming out of the studio saying “I don’t sing this crap,” and the songs ended up being back-to-back top 5 hits for the unknown Miller called in as a last-minute replacement, Guy Mitchell.

Now, Frankie Laine jumped ship at Mercury to follow Miller to Columbia, and “Jezebel” was a big hit for him in ’51, but our Singer at #2 was Miller’s biggest Crooner coup of the year: the only act with two hits in our 1951 Countdown. Before he cut it, Miller warned him: “Don’t try to imitate Sinatra,” and for the next 65 years, he never did. Here again, Tony Bennett: his breakout hit, “Because of You.”

Tony Bennett’s “Because of You” was #1 for nine of the 11 weeks between late September and the beginning of December. The song that displaced it for those two weeks in the middle? Bennett’s own “Cold, Cold Heart” which we heard at #7, and that was the longest stretch an Artist held both the #1 and #2 spots on the charts until The Beatles in 1964.

Success came quickly for Bennett. After the War he studied singing on the GI bill. Then in ’49 Broadway star Pearl Bailey hired him to open for her at a club gig in Greenwich Village. Bob Hope was in the audience and snapped him up for his road show. Mitch Miller needed Crooners, heard Bennett’s demo, and next thing Tony’s signed to Columbia and his very first record, “Because of You,” is #1. All in less than two years. Appropriately, his next #1 hit after ’51? “Rags to Riches.”

#1 Patti Page – The Tennessee Waltz

And we’re down to #1 on our Chartcrush Countdown of the 1951’s top hits. It’s yet another Mitch Miller production, by another Miller A&R signing. But not at Columbia; before, when he was still at Mercury Records. And it’s not a Crooner; it’s the ’50s top Female Singer. And the record we’re about to hear was her biggest hit.

But unbelievably, it first came out as the B-side of her 1950 Christmas disc. Straight away Mercury knew they had a hit though, so later pressings put it as the A-side with a different song (not “Boogie Woogie Santa“) on the flip. Theories abound as to why the record connected so immediately and universally in the Winter of ’50 and ’51, but before we get into that, let’s hear it. At #1 it’s Patti Page’s “The Tennessee Waltz.”

“The Tennessee Waltz,” Patti Page, #1 for 13 straight weeks December 1950 to March of ’51, and our #1 record of 1951. Now when we heard Nat “King” Cole’s “Too Young” back at #4 (’51’s big Summer hit), I got into how Billboard’s rankings to this day only count weeks within its chart year, and how that strongly favors songs (like “Too Young”) whose runs were all within the year, vs. a record like “The Tennessee Waltz” that went ’50 into ’51.

Well “Tennessee Waltz” was such a monumentally big hit that the article accompanying Billboard’s 1951 year-end recap had to go to great lengths to explain why “one of the top tunes and records of all time” is only #10 on their ranking! Well, counting its full chart run, as we do for every song here on Chartcrush, it gets its well-deserved trophy: a record that captured the public’s mood like few before or since, with its theme of betrayal and loss and Mitch Miller’s haunting, atmospheric production.

Writers over the years have argued that the “old friend” who steals Patti’s sweetheart represents the government getting caught up in the Cold War, NATO, the U.N., the War in Korea. Others have suggested that it’s former ally the Soviet Union. But really it can be any leftfield disruptive force, and there were plenty of those as the second half of the 20th century began, not just globalism and communist expansion, but TV, plastics, rampant consumerism, suburbia, the military-industrial complex… UFOs. Hard to single any one of those out.

Bonus

So that’s our Chartcrush Countdown of 1951’s top records, but as I’ve been pointing out throughout the show, nearly all big hits in those days had multiple versions on the charts. 1950 was the last year with two versions of any one song among the top ten records.

From ’51 on, every year’s top ten records is ten different songs. But in ’51 there were still songs that, combining all the versions, were among the year’s biggest hits, despite no one version being strong enough to make the top ten records, so let’s take a look at those in the time we have left.

#16 Del Wood – Down Yonder

First up we have a 1921 Ragtime Piano piece that had seven charting versions. The first to catch on was by a Female Secretary who moonlighted as a Honky Tonk Piano Player, and got the chance to record after filling in on some sessions for an indie label in Nashville.

A lawsuit from the song’s Publisher yanked the record off the airwaves at the height of its popularity, but together with the six properly licensed copycat versions that were on the charts by then, it’s the #10 song of the year, and the Secretary’s version notches in at #16 on our records ranking, higher than any of the others. Here’s Del Wood (real name Adelaide Hazelwood), “Down Yonder.”

“Down Yonder,” the #10 song of 1951 when you combine all seven charting versions. Lawsuits notwithstanding, Del Wood got to quit her typing job after “Down Yonder,” signing first with Decca, then RCA, then landing her dream job: full-time at the Grand Ole Opry.

#13 The Weavers and Terry Gilkyson – On Top of Old Smoky

Next in our Chartcrush Top Ten Countdown bonus segment of 1951 songs that were top hits combining all of the charted versions, a traditional song collected by Folklorists visiting the Appalachians in the 1910s, re-worked by Pete Seeger and cut with his group The Weavers along with deep-voiced Folkie Terry Gilkyson.

Versions by Vaughn Monroe and Percy Faith with Burl Ives appeared and all of them together make it 1951’s #6 top tune. The Weavers’ was by far the biggest, #13 on our records ranking: “On Top of Old Smoky.”

Pete Seeger calling out verses on The Weavers’ “On Top of Old Smokey.” They were huge stars after their record of Lead Belly’s “Goodnight Irene” was a #1 hit in 1950, but word spread about their leftist political activities pre-stardom, and with the Korean War raging, Mao in China, Soviets testing nukes, and Americans on trial for handing them the technology, the country wasn’t taking any chances with homegrown communists.

So before the year was out, The Weavers found themselves without a recording contract, frozen out of stores, unable to book gigs or appear on radio or TV, and under FBI surveillance. Things eventually loosened up, but the surprise Folk craze they sparked in ’50 and ’51 had to wait for The Kingston Trio, Peter, Paul & Mary, Joan Baez and Bob Dylan.

#12 Les Paul and Mary Ford – Mockin’ Bird Hill

Now in all this competition with different versions of songs, sometimes there were some sharp elbows, like when Les Paul and Mary Ford’s cover of “The Tennessee Waltz” came out on Capitol a few weeks after Patti Page’s hit #1. Les and Mary didn’t just use the vocal overdubbing that’d become Page’s trademark, the harmonies themselves were the same. So when Les and Mary’s next record came out, Mercury rushed Page into the studio, and the two versions of that song duked it out in the top 10 for 14 weeks.

Les and Mary’s was the bigger hit (#12 on our ranking), but just barely. Page’s is #17. Those plus the original Country version and one other that charted combined, it’s the #5 song of the year: “Mockin’ Bird Hill.”

“Mockin’ Bird Hill” was Les Paul and Mary Ford’s second biggest hit of ’51 after the one we heard earlier at #5, “How High the Moon.” And it was also Patti Page’s second biggest, after “The Tennessee Waltz.”

#14 Guy Mitchell – My Heart Cries for You

Finally, remember Frank Sinatra’s tantrum about the songs Mitch Miller wanted him to record? Well one of those wound up with eight versions on the chart. The biggest was by Miller last-minute replacement for Sinatra, Guy Mitchell. It narrowly misses our top ten at #12, but all eight versions together make it the #2 song of the year: “My Heart Cries for You.”

The “B” side of “My Heart Cries for You” was the other song Sinatra swatted away, “The Roving Kind,” also recorded that day by Guy Mitchell. It was a #5 hit and #24 on our 1951 ranking.

And that’s gonna have to be a wrap for our 1951 edition of The Chartcrush Top Ten Countdown Show. I’ve been your host, Christopher Verdesi. Check out our website, chartcrush.com, for written transcripts and streaming links for this and other Chartcrush Countdowns, plus chart run line graphs and other ginchy extras. Also, check out our Chartcrush Minute vids on TikTok, @Chartcrush.

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 in again next week, same station and time, for another edition of Chartcrush.

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::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 music history, and count down the top ten according to our recap of the weekly charts published at the time in the music industry’s leading trade publication, Billboard magazine.

This week on Chartcrush, we’re counting down 2004, a year in which there were 12 #1 songs on the Hot100, and virtually every one of them was by a Black artist. But that’s not all. From the end of July 2003 to the beginning of April 2005, six or more of the top ten hits on the Hot100, a majority of the top ten every week in that period, by Black artists.

Now, the race, age, education and income demographics of internet access had a lot to do with what genres of music were legally purchased in the ’00s, as opposed to tracks and entire albums downloaded from legally-dubious mp3 file-sharing sites, which flew completely below Billboard’s radar. So what was happening on the charts in 2004 may have more to do with how widespread music piracy had become by the mid ’00s, than what was most popular.

For perspective, a study in 2006 estimated four billion (with a “b”) mp3s downloaded from peer-to-peer networks in the U.S. that year, translating to 800 million lost paid downloads. For comparison, the #1 song in our 2004 countdown was certified Gold in the Fall of ’04 for sales, including paid downloads, of 500 thousand.

But there’ve been blind spots like that on the charts throughout Pop history. The Hot100 completely missed Album Rock in the early ’70s for example, and songs not out as physical singles in the late ’90s like The Rembrandt’s theme from Friends, “I’ll Be There for You” or No Doubt’s “Don’t Speak” and many others, couldn’t chart.

And in Black music itself, mixtapes, a term that encompasses everything from simple home-recorded compilations to elaborately sampled, sequenced, beatmatched, and/or even voice-over’d DJ/MC performances. Of course, they became mix-CDs once blanks and burners replaced cassettes and dubbing decks, but were still called “mixtapes” in Hip-Hop because they’d been that integral to the development of the genre, especially after lawsuits in the ’90s all but outlawed sampling.

Hip-Hop without sampling: almost as unimaginable as Rock without electric guitars! You could still do it, but only if you had permission from the copyright holder of the original record you were sampling. Or, you could just put it on a mixtape and sell it out of small shops, tables on the street or right out of the trunk of your car. But like online filesharing, mixtapes: totally under the chart’s radar.

Anyway, just a couple of grains of salt to keep in mind as we count down the top ten for ’04. No sooner had Billboard fixed the flaw with excluding album-only songs from the Hot100 for its 1999 chart year, here came Napster and an explosion of Hip-Hop mixtapes on the streets to muck things up again!

Now you might expect in a year when every #1 song was by a Black artist, that our top ten for 2004 would be all Hip-Hop and R&B, and those genres definitely do dominate, but another way songs can make cumulative rankings like this is longevity. If a song stays on the chart long enough, it can rack up enough points to beat out even songs that got to #1 without ever topping the chart itself. And that’s the case with four of the hits in our countdown, which all spent 40 or more weeks on the Hot100. The average for songs that made the top 10 in ’04, about 27 weeks.

#10 Maroon 5 – She Will Be Loved

Our first two at #s 10 and 9 spent 41 and 43 weeks, respectively, and neither got higher than #5 in any of those weeks. Both are by the same group, back-to-back in our ranking, and both are from their album Songs About Jane that came out in 2002. Over two years later, this song made the charts and they were on their way to their Grammy win for Best New Artist. Huh? How can that be when their album is over two years old? Anyway, at #10, it’s Maroon 5 “She Will Be Loved.”

“She Will Be Loved” was L.A. Pop group Maroon 5’s second top ten hit and third charting hit. “Harder to Breathe,” the lead single from Songs About Jane scraped the top 20 in ’03, just one year after the album came out, peaking at #18 on the strength of radio airplay and constant touring.

#9 Maroon 5 – This Love

But their big breakthrough in ’04 was our next song at #9 in our Maroon 5 two-fer here on our 2004 edition of Chartcrush. It first entered the chart in February after the ultra-steamy video which one British writer described as “Porno-Pop” debuted on MTV’s Total Request Live and the band played it on Saturday Night Live.

Once the song made the top ten at the beginning of April, the Maroon 5 train had left the station and it stayed all the way to July: 14 weeks, and didn’t leave the chart ’til December. Part of its success was a remix version by famed New York House DJ Junior Vasquez that went to #1 on Billboard Dance Club Play chart, but at #9, here’s the album and radio version of “This Love.”

Maroon 5’s breakthrough hit “This Love” at #9 here on the Chartcrush Top Ten Countdown Show. Their album Songs About Jane really was a collection of songs about front man Adam Levine’s ex-crush/girlfriend, Jane, and the band’s original name, Kara’s Flowers, was an homage to another girl, name of (you guessed it!) Kara, that everyone in the band had a crush on.

“This Love” was also Billboard’s top paid digital download for 2004, the last year before downloads (legit, paid ones anyway) were added to the calculus for the Hot100.

The steamy video helped propel it up the charts, but also made front man singer Adam Levine a superstar sex symbol and the lead single from their sophomore album in ’07, five years after Songs About Jane, bolted to #1 in just a few weeks.

By the way, one of the nominated acts that Maroon 5 beat out for their Best New Artist Grammy? Kanye West, whose debut album The College Dropout album yielded three top 20 hits, plus the #1 hit “Slow Jamz” if you count the track that Kanye wrote and produced but gave Chicago speed-rapper Twista top billing so Twista’s label would pay for the video! At least Billboard recognized Kanye West as the year’s top Rapper and top R&B/Hip-Hop Producer.

#8 3 Doors Down – Here Without You

Now both of those Maroon 5 songs are in our countdown despite neither making it higher than #5 on the charts, thanks to chart longevity. But the award for the longest chart run of the year goes to our #8 hit: 51 weeks, August ’03 to August ’04, also peaking at #5.

It’s a Rock song: the second single from the band’s hotly-anticipated 2002 sophomore album Away from the Sun, after the lead single, “When I’m Gone” had racked up 45 weeks on the Hot100 to become the #10 song of 2003. By the start of ’04, their debut album from 2000, The Better Life, was at 6X platinum and Away from the Sun was about to hit 3X. One of the top charting Rock bands on the early ’00s, here’s 3 Doors Down at #8: “Here Without You.”

Rockers ranking high on year-end Hot100 tallies thanks to chart longevity rather than peak chart positions: a pattern in the early ’00s. 3 Doors Down’s “Here Without You” only peaked at #5 but it’s our #8 song because it had the longest chart run of the year (51 weeks). Of all the Rock songs in our Chartcrush top tens ’01 to ’04, only Nickelback’s “How You Remind Me” in ’02 got to #1 on the weekly chart. Lifehouse’s “Hanging by a Moment,” Train’s “Drops of Jupiter,” StainD’s “It’s Been Awhile,” The Calling’s “Wherever You Will Go,” and Matchbox 20’s “If You’re Gone” and “Unwell:” none of those were #1’s, but they averaged 49 weeks on the chart.

3 Doors Down continued charting Hot100 hits into the ’10 s and their next two albums in ’05 and ’08 both topped the Billboard album chart. In 2017, they were one of the few name acts to play President Trump’s Inaugural, which prompted almost as much partisan snark and backlash as Kanye West donning a MAGA hat.

#7 Usher & Alicia Keys – My Boo

OK, from here on out, all of the songs in our Chartcrush Top Ten Countdown for 2004 are by Black artists. And all but one were #1 hits. At #7, the first of three by the same artist: a rare feat. Billboard writer Fred Bronson opined that the artist’s name was the only word you needed to sum up the year in Pop, and with the three in our countdown, plus one other single hitting #1 during the year for a combined 27 weeks, a new record, it’s hard to argue with that.

He was #1 for 22 of the 23 weeks from the end of February to the end of July. And then this one topped the chart for six weeks in late Fall. It’s Billboard’s #1 Artist of 2004 teaming with Billboard’s #2 Artist of 2004. Usher and Alicia Keys, “My Boo.”

Usher and Alicia Keys’ “My Boo,” #7 on our Chartcrush Top Ten Countdown for 2004: six weeks at #1 from Halloween to the beginning of December, and then eight more weeks in the top ten after that. The song not on the initial track list of Usher’s ’04 album Confessions, but it was added to an Expanded Edition released with great fanfare in October, after “My Boo” had entered the top ten.

#6 Alicia Keys – If I Ain’t Got You

And speaking of Alicia Keys (again, named Billboard’s #2 artist of 2004), she’s at #6: a song inspired by two sudden, tragic events in the Summer of 2001: the death of R&B singer Aaliyah in a plane crash, and then just two and a half weeks later, 9/11. Keys said that one-two punch “just made everything crystal clear…what matters, and what doesn’t.” Usher sang on a U.K. remix of it later in the year, but at #6 the original that was in the top ten for 20 weeks, April to September: “If I Ain’t Got You.”

Alicia Keys, “If I Ain’t Got You” at #6 as we count down the top ten hits of 2004 here on this week’s edition of Chartcrush: yet another song that makes our countdown due to its longevity on the charts: 40 weeks with 20 in the top ten, peaking at #4 for a week. The Kanye West-produced lead single from Keys’ ’04 album The Diary of Alicia Keys, “You Don’t Know My Name,” actually peaked higher, but was only on the chart half as long.

Keys, already a star since her debut single “Fallin'” was #1 for six weeks in ’01. Her music and persona updated a classy, sophisticated R&B and Soul tradition for the 21st century and Billboard named her the top R&B artist of the 2000s decade.

#5 Outkast featuring Sleepy Brown – The Way You Move

At #5 we have the first of two hits in our countdown by a veteran Atlanta Hip-Hop duo, and the lead singles, plural, both came out on the same day. They debuted on the charts within three weeks of each other, and then they held down the #1 and #2 spots for eight straight weeks.

Now, why wouldn’t they stagger the releases? Well, because the duo’s double album in ’04 was actually two solo records bundled together. It even had a split-frame album cover. Speakerboxxx was Big Boi; The Love Below was André 3000. Releasing it as hyphenated double album leveraged the name ID of their duo moniker Outkast. At #5, from Speakerboxxx, here’s the one that made the charts first: Big Boi rapping with featured singer Sleepy Brown on the chorus: “The Way You Move.”

Outkast’s hyphenated double solo album, Speakerboxxx/The Love Below was the bestselling Hip-Hop album of all-time out of Atlanta and Billboard’s #2 album of the year. That was Big Boi’s “The Way You Move” from Speakerboxxx, which was #2 behind Andre 3000’s lead single for eight weeks, finally getting one week on top after Andre’s song slipped to #3 in February.

Sleepy Brown with that Earth, Wind and Fire-worthy falsetto chorus on “The Way You Move.” Brown went way back with Outkast: part of the Atlanta production team Organized Noize that discovered them and helped get them their record deal. Outkast was ten years into their chart career by ’04, having scored their first Hot100 hits in 1994 and their first #1, “Ms. Jackson,” with its Beatle-esque oooh’s off their fourth album Stankonia in 2000.

#4 Ciara featuring Petey Pablo – Goodies

Well we’re getting down to the small numbers here on our 2004 edition of the Chartcrush Top Ten Countdown Show. At #4, an answer song to bad boy Rapper Petey Pablo’s misogynistic “Freek-a-Leek.” And when it hit the airwaves, “Freek-a-Leek” was still in the top ten! Now such a rapid response would be amazing but for the fact that it was all an inside job. Petey Pablo even guests on the record, rebutting every verse sung by the innocent, breathy-voiced singer named after a Revlon perfume.

But the biggest common thread between “Freek-a-Leek” and our #4 song was Lil Jon, the Rapper/Producer who pioneered the Hip-Hop subgenre Crunk, which is either an invented past participle form of the verb “to crank” or a portmanteau of “crazy and drunk,” depending on which source for word origins you consult. But either way, Lil Jon pioneered and popularized it DJing in the ’90s at Atlanta’s Club 559, and then on records.

As it turned out, as a Hip-Hop style, Crunk was about to jump the shark, but not before Jon merged it with R&B to create the sub-sub-genre “Crunk ‘n B,” on our #4 song. Also from Atlanta, it’s Ciara, featuring raps by Petey Pablo, “Goodies.”

Ciara’s “Goodies,” #4 on our Chartcrush countdown on 2004’s top ten hits, seven weeks at #1, the longest for a debut single by a female artist since the late ’70s. That oscillating whistle gimmick, lifted from Missy Elliott’s 2002 hit “Work It,” and Ciara repaid the favor featuring on Elliott’s “Lose Control” in ’05, one of the six more top tens Ciara scored in ’05 and ’06.

After Janet Jackson’s “nipplegate” halftime fiasco at the ’04 Superbowl, plus Beyonce’s lackluster Destiny’s Child reunion and being eclipsed by Jennifer Hudson on the big screen in Dreamgirls, for a minute it seemed like Ciara was R&B’s new “it” girl, but Crunk ‘n B’s moment passed, along came Rihanna, and then Beyonce was back big with her long-delayed second album B’Day, so it wasn’t to be.

#3 Usher – Burn

Now besides L.A. in 1967, no one city has dominated the top ten on a year like Atlanta dominated 2004: six of the 10 songs in our countdown by Atlanta artists, and the guy who first put The Big Peach on the map? Producer Jermaine Dupri, who, at 19 in the early ’90s, son of a Columbia Records exec, plucked two kids out of Atlanta’s Greenbriar Mall and just months later unleashed Kris Kross on the world.

Well Kris Kross was long gone by ’04, but Dupri’s crowning achievement since, was producing (and co-writing) practically all of our #3 act’s hits. His first #1 (for two weeks in ’98) was the sensuous ballad “Nice & Slow,” a hit Dupri was so happy with that on each of the artist’s two subsequent albums, he set out to re-create it: “U Got It Bad” on 2001’s 8701 was #1 for six weeks, and then this one on ’04’s Confessions was #1 for eight. We heard his duet with Alicia Keys at #7, “My Boo.” Here again at #3, it’s Usher, “Burn.”

MySpace, Friendster and LinkedIn launched in ’03 and Facebook in ’04, quenching (along with Reality TV) the Millennial generation’s profound thirst for deeper, realer, more frequent connections, to other people, to brands, to celebrities, and, yes, to Pop stars. Usher and his collaborators weren’t the first or only music figures to pick up on that, but Confessions going platinum in its first week and its first two singles locking down the #1 spot on the Hot100 for a record 19 straight weeks definitely helped announce its arrival.

The label wanted a club banger out first and got their wish, but “Burn” was the album’s mission statement and intended lead single. Usher was ready to “Confess” his own personal struggles and experiences. He’d just gotten dumped by his girlfriend, TLC’s Rozanda “Chili” Thomas for cheating. When a relationship flames out, he said, you just gotta let it “Burn.”

By the way, “Burn’s” run would’ve been nine weeks but for Fantasia’s single “I Believe” debuting at #1 the week she won season 3 of American Idol.

#2 Outkast – Hey Ya!

Well we’re down to #2 here on our 2004 edition of the Chartcrush Top Ten Countdown Show. For the first two months of ’04 until Usher’s spectacular 19-week run at #1, there was every reason to believe that ’04 was going to be the year of Outkast, whose two lead singles from their double solo album Speakerboxxx/The Love Below held down the #1 and #2 spots on the Hot100 from just before Christmas ’03 to the middle of February.

At #5 we heard the one that was #2 all those weeks, Big Boi’s “The Way You Move;” here’s Andre 3000’s that was #1: a hit in every radio format except maybe Jazz and Classical it seemed. Even Alt Rock stations played it. It’s Outkast’s “Hey Ya!”

OutKast’s Andre 3000, the sole songwriter and producer of the mid-’00’s cross-genre smash “Hey Ya!,” #2 on our Chartcrush Top Ten Countdown for 2004. Billboard had it at #8 on the year, behind Big Boi’s “The Way You Move” at #5, which stayed on the chart four weeks longer and outranked “Hey Ya” as both songs moved down the chart in the Spring. But with all those weeks at #1, “Hey Ya!” comes out ahead on our ranking.

Polaroid, the company whose instant pictures everyone thinks develop faster if you shake ’em: not doing well in the ’00s as digital photography took over, until sales rebounded thanks to Andre’s line “Shake it like a Polaroid picture.”

In ’06, Andre and Big Boi starred in the Depression-era period musical Idlewild, which critics panned as “more idle than wild,” and their soundtrack album they did for the film also bombed, so they put Outkast on ice and went their separate ways ’til 2014, when they reunited for a festival tour, which included headlining two nights at California’s prestigious Coachella Festival.

#1 Usher featuring Lil Jon and Ludacris – Yeah!

OK, you ready for #1? Well I hope you’ve been enjoying the show so far and your answer is… the title of the song.

Now I mentioned that our #3 hit, “Burn,” was the intended lead single from Usher’s Confessions album. But gearing up for release, the label wanted to lead with an upbeat club banger, so they brought in Crunk King Lil Jon, who you’ll recall produced our #4 song, Ciara’s “Goodies.” And a Club Banger they most certainly got. But with the album release set for March, over the Holidays, Jon leaked the track to street DJs.

Now whole albums were being shelved or canceled due to leaks in those days, but once this song hit the air, it had the highest Hot100 debut the week of January 10, and was already four weeks into its 12 week run at #1 when Confessions dropped, so crisis averted! One of the enduring anthems of the decade, it’s Usher featuring lots of shouting from Lil Jon and a Rap verse from (also outta Atlanta) Ludacris, the #1 song of 2004 is “Yeah!”

One of the things that may’ve hastened and/or caused Crunk’s fall from the its mid-’00’s heights: Dave Chapelle’s “Moment in the Life of Lil Jon” sketches on his Comedy Central show, where Chapelle answers every question with one of Jon’s shouted words: “yeah,” “okay,” “let’s go,” “watch out” and so on. But Usher’s “Yeah!,” which Jon produced and shouts a lot on, far and away the #1 song of 2004 by any measure. And #1 on Billboard’s ’04 ranking too.

Bonus

But there are differences between Billboard’s top ten and our Chartcrush Top Ten we counted down this hour. I mentioned that they ranked OutKast’s “The Way You Move” higher than “Hey Ya!” And of the other songs we heard this hour, our #10 hit, Maroon 5’s “She Will Be Loved” misses Billboard’s top ten all the way down at #35. The entire tail end of its chart run, kicked into their 2005 chart year, all 22 weeks of it.

Similarly, the first 14 weeks of 3 Doors Down’s “Here Without You,” our #8 song: in Billboard’s 2003 chart year and not counted toward their ’04 ranking. Usher and Alicia Keys’ “My Boo:” that one was #1 the last week of Billboard’s ’04 chart year, November 29, so it’s both #24 for ’04 and #54 for ’05 in Billboard. Counting its full chart run in the year it saw most of its chart action makes it #7 for ’04. So three songs in to our top ten means three songs out from Billboard’s. Let’s take a quick look at those, shall we?

#12 Terror Squad – Lean Back

At #10, Billboard had the one #1 song in calendar ’04 not, strictly speaking, by a Black artist.

Terror Squad, headed by Puerto Rican Rapper Fat Joe, paired with Black Female Rapper Remy Ma, the only Dance craze record in Pop history that’s about not dancing! The Rockaway: just “lean back,” look over your shoulder and rock your head slightly to the beat. Usher does it at the end of the “Yeah!” video. “Lean Back” notches in at #12 on our Chartcrush ranking.

#15 Mario Winans featuring P. Diddy and Enya – I Don’t Wanna Know

At #7 on the year, Billboard had this song that got stuck at #2 for eight weeks during Usher’s 12-week run on top with “Yeah” and “Burn.”

Mario Winans featuring Irish New Age Singer Enya and Rapper P. Diddy, “I Don’t Wanna Know.” That was #15 on our Chartcrush ranking.

#11 Hoobastank – The Reason

And finally, at #6 Billboard had another Rock song that spent an eternity on the Hot100.

If you did a poll of Rock fans in the mid-’00’s and asked “what’s the most original thing about that Band?” a lot of them might’ve said, their name. Like Crunk, Post-Grunge’s story arc was nearly complete by ’04, but Hoobastank’s “The Reason” racked up 38 weeks on the Hot100 with 14 in the top ten, just missing our top ten at #11. Apparently, “Hoobastank” was how one of the group members mispronounced a German street name.

And we’re gonna have to leave it there, folks, because that the hour! I hope you enjoyed our 2004 edition of the Chartcrush Top Ten Countdown Show. I’ve been your host, Christopher Verdesi. Check out our website, chartcrush.com, for written transcripts and streaming links for this and other Chartcrush shows, plus chart run line graphs and other “schway” extras. And check our Chartcrush Minute vids on TikTok, @Chartcrush. Every week on this show we count down a different year from the beginning of the charts in the ’40s all the way up to the present, so tune in again next week, same station and time, for another edition of Chartcrush.

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Welcome! This is The Chartcrush Top Ten Countdown Show and I’m your host, Christopher Verdesi. Every week on Chartcrush, we take a look back at the top 10 songs of a year in Pop music as determined by our exclusive ranking that’s based on the weekly Pop charts published at the time in the music biz’s top trade pub and chart authority, Billboard magazine. And this week we’re turning the clock back to 1989, aside from the Exxon-Valdez oil spill in Alaska in March, and the 6.9 earthquake in the Bay Area in October right before game three of the World Series, a year of remarkably few “breaking news” headlines. Which cleared newspaper column inches and broadcast minutes for ongoing human-interest stories like AIDS and homelessness and environmental concerns like acid rain and the ozone hole.

But as relatively quiet as things were here in the States, ’89 was a monumental year out in the world, as communism collapsed and Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev and the new President, George H.W. Bush, declared that the Cold War over. All year, Americans watched in disbelief as massive protests rocked the capitals of Eastern Bloc countries Poland, Hungary, Estonia, Czechoslovakia and Romania. And since the Soviets for a change weren’t sending in the tanks, the communist regimes in those countries, one after the other, dissolved.

In East Germany, the symbol of the Cold War, the Berlin Wall, was dismantled. But not before Knight Rider and Baywatch star David Hasselhoff, wearing a piano scarf and flashing leather jacket, got to sing his hit “Looking for Freedom” in front of it on New Years Eve. There was even a massive Rock concert in the Soviet Union itself, the Moscow Music Peace Festival in August. The event inspired Scorpions’ 1991 hit “Wind of Change.”

Sadly, communist China’s pro-democracy movement: nipped in the bud when the tanks rolled into Beijing’s Tiananmen Square in June and between 200 and 2,600 protesters were killed, depending on who you believe.

South Africa, not a communist country, but the new president there released activist and future president Nelson Mandela from prison and desegregated public facilities as first steps to ending apartheid.

So the ’80s, closing out with some historic changes on the world stage, and music was changing too. Eight of Billboard’s top 10 albums of 1989 were first or second releases. So, lots of fresh faces on the charts and on MTV. In April, Liz Taylor dubbed Michael Jackson the “King of Pop” at the Soul Train Heritage Awards, but as he settled into his new Neverland Ranch in California, he seemed to be going off the deep end with skin bleaching, plastic surgery, O2 sleeping chambers and trying to buy Elephant Man bones. The UK Sun dubbed him Wacko Jacko, and it kinda stuck.

Meanwhile, Queen of Pop Madonna got in trouble when the Vatican condemned her blasphemous video for “Like a Prayer” and urged a boycott that got Pepsi to pull its ad campaign with the song. With its three weeks a #1 in April, “Like a Prayer” ought to be in our 1989 countdown, but with all the controversy it was off the chart completely just nine weeks after being #1, one of the fastest drops for a #1 single in Madonna’s career. MTV and video in the ’80s had brought pop culture into America’s living rooms like never before. The Culture Wars were only getting started.

#10 Soul II Soul – Back to Life (However Do You Want Me)

Our #10 record had only just entered the top ten December 2nd, which was the last week of Billboard’s 1989 “chart year,” so it didn’t make their ’89 year-end Hot100. And since those weeks before the cutoff didn’t count toward 1990, it’s only #42 on their 1990 ranking. Now here at Chartcrush, we don’t do “chart years;” instead, we factor every song’s full chart run in the calendar year it had most of its chart action, and that puts the song at #10 for 1989.

Billboard did have it as the year’s #1 Dance hit though: a taste of the Euro-Disco wave that was about to crest on the Pop charts in the early ’90s. It’s U.K.-based “sound system” collective Soul II Soul with singer Caron Wheeler, who co-wrote, “Back to Life (However Do You Want Me).”

Soul II Soul’s residency at South London’s The Fridge nightclub: credited with setting the tone of 1988’s so-called “Second Summer of Love” in the U.K., and also in Ibiza, the Spanish island famous for its club scene. After the wall came down, East Berlin also became a Techno Mecca.

“Back to Life” had the longest chart run of any song in our countdown: 28 weeks, peaking at #4, after their Hot100 debut, “Keep on Movin’,” earlier in the year. It started out as an a cappella but they completely reworked it with new lyrics and that groovy, shuffling backing track.

House music exploded onto the charts ’89 into ’90: Belgian outfit Technotronic, just three weeks behind “Back to Life” on the Hot100 with the dancefloor anthem “Pump Up the Jam,” which got all the way to #2 in January of ’90. Then Madonna’s “Vogue” and Snap!’s “The Power” in the Spring.

#9 Paula Abdul – Cold Hearted

Next up at #9 on our Chartcrush Countdown of 1989’s biggest hits, the only act with two songs in the top ten. And since both songs’ chart runs were entirely within Billboard’s December to November “chart year,” they’re also both in Billboard’s year-end top ten: a rarity for ’89 relative to other years, comparing our Chartcrush rankings with Billboard’s. Reason being: some of the year’s top records were hits at the end of ’89 into ’90, so Billboard split their chart runs for ranking purposes between the two years.

Boy Band New Kids on the Block had six singles on the Hot100 in 1989 so they grabbed top honors on Billboard’s Hot100 artist ranking that combines all charting songs. But our newcomer at #9 was #2 overall and the top female. Her album, Forever Your Girl, was the biggest debut album in history up to ’89 with 10 weeks at #1 on the album chart. Here’s the first of two Paula Abdul hits we’ll be hearing in our countdown, the third of her three straight #1’s in ’89, “Cold Hearted.”

Paula Abdul started out in the early ’80s, a freshman in college who beat out 700 girls for a spot on the L.A. Lakers cheerleading squad (the Lakers’ ’80s dynasty years with Magic Johnson and Kareem Abdul-Jabbar), graduating to head choreographer after less than a year, and then to choreographing music videos. It was, afterall, the dawn of the MTV era! “Cold Hearted,” #9 as we count down 1989’s top ten biggest hits here on this week’s Chartcrush Show.

#8 Debbie Gibson – Lost in Your Eyes

At #8, the last top ten hit by the singer whose first hit “Only in My Dreams” in ’87 signaled the start of the late ’80s Teen Pop explosion. New Edition and The Jets had already scored R&B crossover smashes in ’85 and ’86, but this wholesome girl Singer was pure Pop. And she remained one of top acts along with Tiffany, the aforementioned New Kids on the Block, and latecomer Kylie Minogue until Teen Pop petered out circa late-1990 as its fans matured and House, Grunge, Hip-Hop, plus the overarching cultural postmodernism that paralleled the end of the Cold War in the West, surfaced edgier poses from the underground. But in ’89, Teen Pop was at its peak, and its biggest chart hit that year was our #8 song: what Record Mirror called a “big, moodsome ballad,” Debbie Gibson’s “Lost in Your Eyes.”

Fun fact: Debbie Gibson is the sole songwriter on all her top 20 hits, and that was also her playing piano on “Lost in Your Eyes,” #8 on our Chartcrush Top Ten Countdown Show for 1989. It was the lead single from her second album, Electric Youth, which didn’t do quite as well as her triple platinum debut Out of the Blue. “Only” double platinum. And after two more top 20s from Electric Youth in ’89, Debbie Gibson faded from the charts. In 2020, though, at the age of 49, she was back in the top five on the Dance chart with “Girls Night Out.”

#7 Milli Vanilli – Blame It on the Rain

Now, speaking of the postmodern taste inversion I mentioned that rendered wholesome Teen Idols like Debbie Gibson passe in the early ’90s, Glam Metal bands had been pushing the sex, drugs and Rock ‘n Roll envelope for years, but in ’89, Miami Rap group 2 Live Crew dropped the mic on Pop smut with their aptly-titled As Nasty as They Want to Be, the first album ever to be ruled obscene by a U.S. District Court. The music world rallied, the ruling was overturned on appeal, and the album went Platinum, so straight-up porn and misogyny had a green light heading into the ’90s.

But a scandal that pop culture couldn’t abide in ’89 was the revelation that Rob and Fab, in fact, are not the ones singing on our #7 song, or the other three 1989 megahits from their album Girl You Know It’s True. It was a glitchy hard drive during a live concert on MTV that did them in. The recording stopped and skipped and it was obvious that they were lip-syncing. After that, they had their Best New Artist Grammy canceled and lived in infamy. But they sure were riding high in ’89. At #7, it’s Milli Vanilli’s fourth and biggest hit of the year, “Blame It on the Rain.”

German producer Frank Farian, the actual the culprit behind the Milli Vanilli lip-syncing scandal. He liked their look (thigh-high boots, Spandex shorts and corn-row hair extensions), but not their vocals so much. So he brought in session singers but put Rob and Fab on the album cover and sent them out on the road. And Girl You Know It’s True went six-times platinum, yielded six top five hits and Milli Vanilli was Best New Artist at the Grammys before anyone was the wiser. Four of their songs, all from that album, were among the top 25 hits of 1989 according to our Chartcrush rankings. Elvis in ’56, The Beatles in ’64, The Jackson 5 in 1970 and Usher in 2004: the only other acts in Pop history who can say that. “Blame It on the Rain,” the fourth and last of those hits at #7.

#6 Richard Marx – Right Here Waiting

At #6 as we continue counting down the top hits of 1989 here on this week’s edition of Chartcrush, the only song in our countdown that’s also in the top ten on Billboard’s year-end Adult Contemporary chart. He started out as a Songwriter, writing hits for Kenny Rogers and James Ingram, but once he decided to step up to the mic himself, he was an immediate success. His self-titled debut album went triple-platinum in 1987, its lead single, the Rocker “Don’t Mean Nothing” was a #3 hit, and he became the first male artist ever to make the top five with his first seven singles. At #6 it’s Richard Marx, “Right Here Waiting.”

Even after becoming a star himself, Richard Marx continued to write songs for other artists. In fact, he wrote “Right Here Waiting” for Barbra Streisand. But she rejected it! “I’m not gonna be right here waiting for anyone,” she said. So he cut it himself for his second album, Repeat Offender, and it was the #6 song of 1989, not bad. It was #1 for three weeks in August, but it just missed Billboard’s year-end top ten at #11.

#5 Linda Ronstadt featuring Aaron Neville – Don’t Know Much

12 of the top 20 Hot100 acts in ’89, on the chart less than two years—the most since 1971 for that metric. And as you’d expect in a year like that, some of the previous generation’s stars struggled. New albums in 1989 by Boomer icons Diana Ross, Paul McCartney and a reunited Jefferson Airplane bombed relative to expectations. But others thrived. Neil Young reinvented himself for the Grunge era on his album Freedom, and The Rolling Stones mended fences within the band and had ’89’s top tour: Steel Wheels, their longest ever.

Up next on our Chartcrush Top Ten Countdown for 1989, a pairing of two Boomer legends who both burst onto the charts in 1967 with massive hits: Californian Linda Ronstadt with her Folk-Pop Hippie group The Stone Poneys on “Different Drum,” and New Orleans’ own Aaron Neville with his Soulful “Tell It like It Is.” Here they are together on the same record in 1989. At #5, “Don’t Know Much.”

Linda Ronstadt and Aaron Neville on 1989’s #5 hit, “Don’t Know Much” here on the Chartcrush Top Ten Countdown Show. The song, co-written by legendary Brill Building Songwriters Barry Mann and wife Cynthia Weil, and versions by Righteous Brother Bill Medley in ’81 and Bette Midler in ’83 didn’t have much impact. But in ’89 it was a huge comeback for both Aaron Neville and Linda Ronstadt.

#4 Billy Joel – We Didn’t Start the Fire

And at #4, another chart veteran since the early ’70s, and by our point tally, the #5 Hot100 artist of the ’80s decade behind only Hall & Oates, Prince, Madonna and Michael Jackson, in that order. It’s yet another hit that got a raw deal from Billboard’s year-splitting with their year-end charts, with its first eight weeks in their 1989 chart year (up to December 2), and the next 11 in 1990, where they have it at #35 on the year. But factoring its full chart run in the calendar year it earned the most points makes it our #4 song of 1989.

He wrote it after listening to a young Gen-Xer bellyaching about how nice it must’ve been to grow up in the ’50s when “nothing happened.” Huh? Want a list? Well here it is: exactly 118 things in chronological order, in Billy Joel’s list song, “We Didn’t Start the Fire.”

Billy Joel, obviously influenced by R.E.M.’s list song “It’s the End of the World as We Know It,” which for all its fame since the ’80s, barely scraped the Hot100 when it came out, just a few months before Billboard unveiled its Modern Rock Chart to finally start keeping track of what was on College radio.

“We Didn’t Start the Fire,” #1 for two weeks in December, and #4 on our Chartcrush Top Ten Countdown for 1989. Joel’s 11th top ten hit off his seventh straight top ten album, but only his third #1, and his last. After his final Pop album River of Dreams in ’93, he stepped away from the Pop chart game, but his Face to Face tours in ’94 and ’95 with fellow piano-man Elton John filled stadiums across America.

#3 Paula Abdul – Straight Up

At #3, the girlfriend of America’s hottest new late-night talk TV show host, whose syndicated show debuted mostly on the fledgling Fox network in ’89. Fox, only on the air a little over three years, struggling to get a ratings foothold against the big three, ABC, CBS and NBC, and Arsenio Hall went head-to-head against the undisputed king of late-night since the ’60s, Johnny Carson. He never beat Carson, but The Arsenio Hall Show‘s young, diverse audience made it the first major platform, certainly the first late-night show, that put African-American cultural sensibilities on an equal footing with mainstream America’s. Not many radio stations would play Hip-Hop in 1989, but Arsenio had the Fresh Prince, Tone Loc, MC Hammer, Young MC, even Ice-T. And his girlfriend appeared on just the seventh episode in January, right as our #3 song cracked the top 20. It was her breakthrough hit after the first two singles from her debut album Forever Your Girl went nowhere. Here again, Paula Abdul, “Straight Up,”

Paula Abdul’s chart breakthrough, “Straight Up,” took home four of the MTV Video Music Awards “moon men” trophies it was eligible for in ’89, the #3 song of 1989 here on the Chartcrush Top Ten Countdown Show. Her follow-up album Spellbound produced two more #1 hits in 1991, but her chart fortunes waned during peak Diva in the mid-to-late ’90s, only to become a household name all over again in the ’00s as one of the judges on the first eight seasons of American Idol.

#2 Janet Jackson – Miss You Much

Now as I mentioned earlier, before she was a Pop star, Paula Abdul was an in-demand choreographer of music videos, and her first client, who hired her out of the Lakers’ cheerleading squad, was our act at #2. Abdul choreographed the videos for all three of the upbeat mid-’80s hits that made her a star: “What Have You Done for Me Lately”, “Nasty” and the title song from her multi-platinum 1986 album Control. The lead single off her next album, Rhythm Nation 1814, came out in August ’89 and became the first of its seven singles to peak in the top 5 over the next three years. It’s Janet Jackson with “Miss You Much.”

“Miss You Much,” #1 for all of October 1989, four weeks, and the #2 song on our Chartcrush Top Ten Countdown. Janet’s first two albums came out in the early ’80s when she was still just in her teens and playing a young student in the TV show Fame, and most folks just thought of her as Michael Jackson’s little sister. The Bubblegummy music on those albums barely dented the charts, but in ’85, Janet parted ways with her family and her career took off, first with Control and then ’89’s socially-conscious Rhythm Nation 1814. By the end of the decade, Janet had not only stepped out of her brother’s shadow, she’d eclipsed him, and her run of massive Hot100 hits continued all the way ’til her wardrobe malfunction in the 2004 Superbowl halftime show got her blacklisted by Viacom President Les Moonves.

#1 Phil Collins – Another Day in Paradise

Now, in a 2014 piece, Billboard writer Kenneth Partridge argued that 1990 was the best year for music in the ’90s, despite two of the year’s biggest hits being 1989 “holdovers” by “Pop’s old guard” that left aging Boomers “feeling simultaneously guilty about their wealth and blameless for instigating the world’s problems.” The latter reference, to Billy Joel’s “We Didn’t Start the Fire,” and the former to the record we have at #1 on our Chartcrush Top Ten Countdown. Well, as I pointed out when we heard “We Didn’t Start the Fire” at #4, it really wasn’t a 1990 hit at all; it was a 1989 hit. And so was the other one.

At #1, the seventh and final chart topper by the ’80s most unlikely Pop star, having started out as the drummer in a ’70s Prog Rock band. He became the front-man of that band, Genesis, after leader Peter Gabriel quit and went solo in 1975, and remained even after his own solo career took off in the early ’80s. Record of the Year at the Grammys, it’s Phil Collins’ exhortation to think twice and count your blessings when you see a homeless person, our #1 song of 1989 is “Another Day in Paradise.”

Phil Collins’ “Another Day in Paradise,” the #1 song of 1989 according to our exclusive Chartcrush Top Ten Countdown Show ranking that factors every song’s full Hot100 chart run into whichever calendar year it had the majority of its chart action. Now, we’re only able do that, of course, with the benefit of hindsight. Billboard‘s press deadline for their year-end issue forces them to end every “chart year” weeks before the actual end of the year on the calendar. “Another Day in Paradise” was in the top ten November ’89 through January ’90. They have it at #7 on their 1990 Hot100 recap. But it might’ve ranked higher than that had Billboard continued (in 1990) what they started in ’89: factoring the full runs for songs that were moving up the first week of their chart year.

I don’t want to get too far in the weeds with this, but the change was their attempt, after over 40 years doing year-end recaps, to finally give songs whose chart runs go from one year into the next a fair shake. The trouble with rolling that out in ’89, though: half the songs that ended up in their top ten were really 1988 hits. Even the #1 song, Chicago’s “Look Away.” So when the ranking appeared at the end of ’89, folks were like “Huh? That was #1 last Christmas!” And going down the list, Bobby Brown’s “My Prerogative” at #2 and Poison’s “Every Rose Has It’s Thorn” #3, also 1988 hits, plus two more.

So there was a whole lotta head shaking from fans. The news media even ran with the story, and for 1990, Billboard reverted back to factoring only weeks in its chart year like they’d always done, and Soul II Soul, Ronstadt & Neville and Billy Joel joined the long list of year-straddling hits that’ve fallen through the cracks over the years. Only “Another Day in Paradise” made the top ten of Billboard’s 1990 ranking, but at #7 since its first five weeks of chart action weren’t factored.

#19 Milli Vanilli – Girl You Know It’s True

Of the seven songs from Billboard’s year-end top ten that weren’t in our 1989 countdown, only two were true 1989 hits. Billboard had the title cut and breakout hit off of Milli Vanilli’s album Girl You Know It’s True at #8.

“Girl You Know It’s True” was the Milli Vanilli’s only single before their lip-syncing scandal that didn’t get to #1. It peaked at #2 and is #19 on our ranking.

#13 Bette Midler – Wind Beneath My Wings

At #7, Billboard had another big Adult Contemporary smash.

Nine years after 1980’s “The Rose,” the title song of the film she starred in, Bette Midler repeated that trick with the movie Beaches and its song, “Wind Beneath My Wings,” which lands at #13 on our 1989 ranking.

Well I hope you enjoyed our rough ‘n tumble 1989 edition of the Chartcrush Top Ten Countdown Show. That’s all the time we have. I’ve been your host, Christopher Verdesi, and I want to thank you for listening! Hey, check out our website, chartcrush.com, for written transcripts and links to stream this and all our Chartcrush countdown shows on Spotify, plus our full top 100 chart, chart run line graphs and other hella extras. Every week on this show, 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.

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::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 music and count down the top ten songs according to our recap of the weekly Pop charts published at the time in the music industry’s top trade publication and chart authority, Billboard magazine. This week on Chartcrush, we’re turning the clock back to 1960, the first year of the ’60s, but like almost every decade’s year zero, it seemed more like a continuation of the previous decade than something new.

Still, something about that “6” seemed more modern. Folks liked seeing it in print and on TV and saying “It’s the ’60s, man,” as if they’d just turned a corner and gotten their first glimpse of a New Frontier. “New Frontier,” actually the brand label for John F. Kennedy’s agenda unveiled at the Democratic convention in the Summer. And on Inauguration Day in ’61, Kennedy became the first President born in the 20th Century.

The oldest Baby Boomers turned 14 and entered High School in 1960, and no one had any idea how that tsunami was gonna break. It was America’s largest generation yet, raised up in Eisenhower’s “Affluent Society” but under the threat of nuclear annihilation. ’60s counterculture historian Theodore Roszak later called that combination “crazy-making.”

But as the decade began, hopes were high, especially now that comic books and Rock ‘n Roll, the twin scourges that got the blame for corrupting youth morals and spiking juvenile delinquency in the ’50s, had been dealt with from on high in Washington. Comic Books first: congressional hearings in ’54 that led to the Comic Magazine Association’s strict “Comics Code.”

And then in ’59, the feds’ investigation into Payola became the tip of the spear in the battle against Rock ‘n Roll. Payola: when DJs take cash or gifts to play records on the air. It was widespread, and not just with Rock ‘n Roll, but for years, the blue-chip copyright clearance organization ASCAP had been complaining to feds about the preponderance of songs handled by rival licensor BMI on radio. BMI rep’d most R&B, Country and Rock ‘n Roll songwriters because ASCAP wouldn’t. And eventually, the investigation zeroed in on Payola, with House Judiciary chairman Emmanuel Celler blaming payola for the “popularity of this cacophonous music called Rock ‘n Roll.”

Celler’s anti-Payola legislation passed in the Spring, but radio had already started cleaning house. Even one of the nation’s top DJs, Alan Freed, got the axe: the “King of the Moondoggers:” the guy who coined the phrase “Rock ‘n Roll” in the early ’50s. After that, Program Directors and playlists were the rule in radio, and many stations stopped playing Rock altogether. WINS in New York played Frank Sinatra for three days straight.

Rock, already reeling from losing Buddy Holly, Richie Valens and The Big Bopper in that plane crash in Iowa in ’59: Don McLean’s “the day the music died” from “American Pie.” Plus Elvis drafted; Chuck Berry in legal hot water; Little Richard now a preacher; and Jerry Lee Lewis, a pariah after marrying his 13 year old cousin.

And on top of all that, for the first time in 1959, albums sold more than Rock’s format, the 45 rpm single. Stereo was here and Sears-Roebuck now had affordable plug-n-play hi-fi systems in their catalog and stores. But Rock albums didn’t sell: not one among the top ten albums of 1960, but lots of Soundtracks, Jazz, Easy Listening and Rat Packers. Comedy albums were outselling Rock.

So with that in play, labels scrambled to produce more sophisticated-sounding singles: quality songs with strings and choruses. And not just Pop and Rock, but Country and R&B too: everyone looking to polish up their studio game, and New York’s “Brill Building” songwriting factory churning out Teen-targeted songs full-time, ready for the latest photogenic Teen Idol to record.

#10 Connie Francis – Everybody’s Somebody’s Fool

At #10, a record that definitely shows some of that Early ’60s “Brill Building Pop” polish, but it’s more notable for being the first by a solo female to top the Hot100, which, granted, had only existed less than two years, but still a milestone.

Her album of songs sung mostly in Italian was out and on its way to becoming her bestselling career LP, so the label, MGM, put “Jealous of You (Tango Della Gelosia),” on the A-side, and it too cracked the Top 20, but this song on the B-side went all the way to #1. Kicking off our 1960 edition of the Chartcrush Top Ten Countdown Show at #10, it’s Newark, New Jersey’s own Connie Francis, born Concetta Rosa Maria Franconero, “Everybody’s Somebody’s Fool.”

#10 on our Chartcrush Top Ten Countdown, voted #1 Female Singer by American Bandstand viewers four years running, and the #1 Hot100 Artist of the Year adding up all nine of her charting records for 1960, Connie Francis, “Everybody’s Somebody’s Fool.” It was the first of her three career #1’s, on top for two weeks, June into July, and her very next single was her second, “My Heart Has a Mind of Its Own” in September.

#9 Marty Robbins – El Paso

Now, the Kingston Trio’s “Tom Dooley” in ’58 and then the first Newport Folk Festival in ’59 crystallized Folk as its own genre, headquartered in the Northeast, San Francisco and college town coffee shops all in between, with an upscale, urban Hipster fan base.

Our Singer at #9, originally from Arizona and one of the top Country acts of all-time, had already crossed over to the Pop charts with his version of “Singing the Blues” in ’56 (recorded before Guy Mitchell’s), and then a Teen-targeted Rockabillyish number, “A White Sport Coat (And a Pink Carnation).” But in ’59 he was all about getting back to his Western roots with a labor-of-love album project entitled Gunfighter Ballads and Trail Songs.

He figured might sell 500, give-or-take, if he was lucky. But his label, Columbia, and his producer, Don Law (who was the head of Columbia’s Country division) disagreed and thought this cut from the album could be a hit. With good reason! “Tom Dooley” had started out as just an album cut but was in the top ten for 12 weeks after Capitol put it out as a single in ’58.

And then folksy story songs like Johnny Horton’s “Battle of New Orleans,” Stonewall Jackson’s “Waterloo,” The Browns’ “Three Bells” were all major hits in ’59. So Columbia followed suit, and despite our gunfighter ballad at #9 being over four and half minutes, it became the very first #1 of the ’60s. An edit omitting a verse was on the flip-side of the promo 45 for radio stations that had a problem with the length, but most didn’t and played the full version of Marty Robbins’ “El Paso.”

Marty Robbins’ “El Paso,” #9 as we count down the top ten songs of 1960 here on this week’s edition of Chartcrush. The Spanish guitar on that record, played by Nashville session man Grady Martin, who, on another Marty Robbins record later in 1960, accidentally invented fuzztone, the guitar effect made famous on the Rolling Stones’ “(I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction.” A transformer in the studio’s console malfunctioned on his solo for Robbins’ “Don’t Worry,” and when they played back the tape, they liked what they heard, so they kept it, and a couple of the studio engineers went to work inventing the effects pedal that eventually evolved into Gibson’s Maestro Fuzztone.

#8 Elvis Presley – Stuck on You

OK, so let’s say you’re the guy who personified Rock ‘n Roll for two years, but then you got drafted for the next two years, and now that you’re back, things have changed. Singles aren’t selling as well, but even worse: now there’s a mainstream consensus that Rock ‘n Roll is corrupt, subversive and artless, and measures have been taken to reign it in. Laws are being passed. People are getting fired and in some cases, even fined and prosecuted!

But still, you have 50 million fans who love you and your music, and getting you back from Uncle Sam the first good news they’ve had in a long time. Some of them stand for hours in a blizzard at an Air Force Base in New Jersey just to get a look at you. And then, from there, they mob all the stops on your train route home to Memphis.

If you’re that guy, obviously, one of the first things you do is get yourself into a recording studio, and once you’re there you cut a new Rock ‘n Roll song. Yeah, you pull your punches a bit—don’t wanna scare anyone, especially in this climate! But you deliver a solid Rock song because that’s what your fans expect. And after that you turn to Italian Opera! But that’s getting ahead of ourselves. At #8, the Rock song Elvis Presley cut his first week back in the studio after his discharge, which hit the charts in April, a month after he returned, and is the first of his two singles in our 1960 Chartcrush Top Ten countdown: “Stuck on You.”

“Stuck on You,” Elvis Presley’s first hit after returning from military service in Germany, #1 in its fourth week on the chart and our #8 song, here on our 1960 edition of the Chartcrush Top Ten Countdown Show. It was a single-only release, not on his 1960 album, which was titled, what else? Elvis Is Back. Which was the best-selling Rock ‘n Roll album of 1960, but again, Rock fans weren’t buying LPs yet in 1960, so it’s only #16 on our 1960 album ranking, and the only Rock album among the top 50 albums of the year.

#7 Chubby Checker – The Twist

Elvis’s other major 1960 hit was in the Fall. We’ll be hearing that one later but spoiler alert: it’s not a Rocker. Rock fans did get another big treat before the year was out, though, and that’s our #7 song: the record that launched a string of Teen dance crazes that continued until The Beatles and beyond.

It’s a guy who was first noticed entertaining customers while plucking chickens at a South Philly poultry shop. His big break came when R&B group Hank Ballard & The Midnighters were unable to appear on the wildly popular live after-school TV show American Bandstand to do the upbeat B-side of their weepy Ballad “Teardrops on Your Letter” that’d just made the charts and was causing a buzz. So Bandstand host Dick Clark needed a stand-in do a cover, and the local chicken plucker who’d been doing it in his nightclub act on the Jersey shore that Summer, was perfect.

Ballard had written it after seeing kids doing the unusual hip-swivel dance in Tampa, but it was Chubby Checker who got all the glory after lip-syncing to his just-issued record of it on Bandstand and on Dick Clark’s primetime Saturday night Beech Nut show on ABC. At #7, “The Twist.”

American Bandstand out of Philadelphia had been driving songs to the top of the charts since going national on the ABC network in 1957 in its 3:30 PM timeslot. Chubby Checker’s “The Twist,” just the latest in the Summer of 1960, #7 here on our 1960 edition of the Chartcrush Top Ten Countdown Show.

Dick Clark managed to survive the Payola scandal by separating himself from other music-adjacent businesses he’d been a stakeholder in, and just being deferential and respectful in the Congressional hearings, unlike the fast-talking, chain-smoking Alan Freed, who destroyed his career.

“The Twist” helped shake Rock ‘n Roll from its post-Payola doldrums in ’60, but then in late ’61 it caught on again after society pages reported on celebs and notables doing the dance in New York’s Peppermint Lounge and other niteries, whereupon it re-entered the charts after nearly a year for an even stronger run than in 1960. It’s the only record in Pop history to get to #1 a second time after dropping off the chart and re-entering.

Hank Ballard’s original of “The Twist,” which Checker copied to a “t”, did okay too, but not as well as Ballard and his Midnighters’ two other top tens in 1960: “It’s Finger Poppin’ Time” just as “The Twist” was breaking out, and then “Let’s Go, Let’s Go, Let’s Go” in the Fall.

#6 Johnny Preston – Running Bear

So at #9 we heard the first “story song” in our 1960 countdown, Marty Robbins’ “El Paso.” At #6 is the other, which was ready to go in early 1959, but the label, Mercury, held it back ’til the end of the year after the guy who wrote it, J.P. Richardson, a.k.a. “The Big Bopper” of “Chantilly Lace” fame, was killed in the same early February ’59 plane crash in Iowa as Buddy Holly and Richie Valens. And Richardson didn’t just write the song, he discovered the Singer, playing in a club in Texas with his band. #1 for three weeks in January right after “El Paso,” at #6, it’s Johnny Preston revising Romeo & Juliet on “Running Bear.”

Many of the cover versions of “Running Bear” over the years from George Jones to The Guess Who have used some version of the “ooga chaka” Indian chant from Johnny Preston’s “Running Bear,” the #6 song on our Chartcrush Top Ten Countdown. But in 1971, British Singer-Songwriter Jonathan King used it in his cover of B.J. Thomas’s hit “Hooked on a Feeling.” Why King thought that was a good idea? Unknown. But a few years later, Swedish Pop Group Blue Swede scored a #1 hit with a cover of King’s version of “Hooked on a Feeling,” complete with “ooga chaka’s.”

#5 Everly Brothers – Cathy’s Clown

At #5 is the biggest-selling single by the most successful duo in Pop history, until Daryl Hall and John Oates overtook them in the ’80s. Future Rock legends who were in their teens in the early ’60s, from Beatles John Lennon and Paul McCartney to Aerosmith’s Steven Tyler, cite the duo’s close two-part harmonies as not just an influence, but one of the reasons they got into music at all in the first place.

After their one single for Columbia Records flopped in 1956 and they were dropped, they went on to be the top act on Archie Bleyer’s indie Cadence Records with a string of eight top10s from ’57 to early ’60. This was their first record on startup Warner Brothers Records after being wooed away from Cadence with a lucrative contract. And it didn’t disappoint: the best-selling single of their career, #1 for five weeks in May and the #5 song here on our 1960 edition of the Chartcrush Top Ten Countdown Show, it’s The Everly Brothers, “Cathy’s Clown.”

#5 on our Chartcrush Top Ten Countdown of 1960’s top hits, The Everly Brothers, Phil and Don, who wrote it, “Cathy’s Clown.” The Everlys had six more top10s ’60 to ’62 but no more #1s.

In 1984, Paul McCartney repaid the favor of being one of The Beatles’ top influences in their formative years, writing “On the Wings of a Nightingale” for them and playing guitar. That record got them their first Hot100 entry since 1967, peaking at #50.

#4 Jim Reeves – He’ll Have to Go

Our #4 song was a massive Country crossover hit, but more than that, it was vindication for Nashville’s push in the late ’50s and early ’60s to make Country records that appealed broadly enough to make the Pop charts on their own, as they were recorded in Nashville by Country artists, as opposed to, for example, Columbia’s A&R head Mitch Miller giving Hank Williams’ “Cold, Cold Heart” to Tony Bennett, and scoring a #1 Pop hit with the song.

The smooth, strings-n-choruses so-called “Nashville sound” (or “Countrypolitan”) ruled the Country charts all the way into the ’70s. And “Country wearing city clothes,” as Time described it in 1960, produced many more crossover smashes. Berry Gordy, Jr., just getting Motown up and running in 1960, did the same thing with R&B. #1 on the Country chart for 14 straight weeks and in the top ten on the Hot100 for 12, here’s Countrypolitan’s “proof of concept” hit. It’s Jim Reeves’ “He’ll Have to Go.”

Now I don’t know too many men after, say, 1990—and that includes men singing Country songs—who would continue the conversation if they heard another guy while on the phone with their lady. But in 1960, Gentleman Jim Reeves, who traded cowboy outfits for suits and ties pretty early in his career, was still giving her the benefit of the doubt.

Sadly, Reeves died in a plane crash in 1964, but he left behind a ton of unreleased stuff, and RCA continued putting out Jim Reeves singles for another 20 years. His last top ten on the Country chart was in 1982!

#3 Brenda Lee – I’m Sorry

Now the late ’50s were lean years for the Ladies at the top of the charts. From Gogi Grant’s “The Wayward Wind” in mid-1956 to Connie Francis’ “Everybody’s Somebody’s Fool” we heard at #10 in mid-’60, only two songs with Female lead vocals got to #1: Debbie Reynolds’ “Tammy” in ’57 and The Teddy Bears’ “To Know Him Is to Love Him” sung by Carol Connors in ’58.

But not only was Connie Francis 1960’s top Hot100 act all charting singles combined; another Female who’d just made her chart debut in late ’59 was the year’s second biggest Act, and she was only 15, debuting on the charts after appearing regularly for a few years as a child prodigy on Steve Allen and Perry Como’s TV variety shows.

With 47 charting singles during the decade, she went on to be the #1 Hot100 Solo Female of the 1960s. Another example of the Nashville sound, produced in Nashville by one of the Sound’s pioneers, Owen Bradley, it’s Brenda Lee at #3 on our Chartcrush Top Ten Countdown, “I’m Sorry.”

Brenda Lee, the biggest of her six charting records in 1960, “I’m Sorry,” her third of nine consecutive singles in the top 10 from 1960 to ’62, a record for a Female Solo Artist that stood until Madonna in 1986.

#2 Elvis Presley – It’s Now or Never

And we’re down to #2 on our Chartcrush Top Ten Countdown Show for 1960: the only act with two songs in our countdown, the year he returned from his two years of military service overseas. After his obligatory Rock ‘n Roll single “Stuck on You” in the Spring, for his next, he decided to air out the extra octave he’d found in his vocal range while in Germany.

Bobby Darin set the template in ’59 when he abruptly switched from Teen Rock Novelties like “Splish Splash I’m Taking a Bath” to Sinatresque belting on “Mack the Knife,” which ended up being 1959’s #1 hit. It worked for Teen Idol Bobby Rydell and R&B singer Jackie Wilson too. Rydell’s “Volare” and Wilson’s “Night,” both #4 hits. And it worked for Elvis. His Operatic song based on the Italian standard “O Sole Mio” that won over even his most dug-in adult detractors, at #2, “It’s Now or Never.”

The best-selling single of Elvis Presley’s career, and that’s saying something! “It’s Now or Never,” 1960s #2 song here on the Chartcrush Top Ten Countdown Show. Also his biggest-ever international hit. His inspiration? Crooner Tony Martin’s #2 hit “There’s No Tomorrow” from 1950, also based on “O Sole Mio.”

To tease Elvis’s transformation from Teen Idol to cross-generational Superstar, manager Col. Tom Parker booked him for a primetime Welcome Home Elvis TV special on ABC hosted by Frank Sinatra. It was his first TV appearance in three years and he got $125 grand for it, which raised even Sinatra’s eyebrows!

Presley continued scoring hits, of course, but his focus in the ’60s was on Hollywood and movies, not singles and albums, even after the British Invasion and Folk Rock took the music he’d popularized to new heights.

#1 Percy Faith – Theme from ‘A Summer Place’

And that brings us to #1: an Instrumental, and the theme from a movie, although not the version from the movie. And the song remains to this day the longest run at #1 (nine weeks) for an instrumental in Hot100 history. In a year that saw the Pop charts reflecting grownup musical tastes for the first time in the Rock Era, with albums eclipsing singles, stereo eclipsing mono and hi-fi systems in the Sears catalog, is it any wonder that the #1 hit of the year is an Easy Listening record by an Orchestra leader whose last top ten was in 1953?

Well at least it was a movie for Teenagers, one of the few out that year, with Sandra Dee fresh from the first Gidget film, and Troy Donahue in his first romantic lead. Here is Percy Faith’s “Theme from ‘A Summer Place.'”

Vienna-born composer Max Steiner was an Oscar winning veteran by 1960, having done scores for everything from Gone with the Wind to King Kong to Casablanca. Steiner wrote it; Columbia Records’ in-house Orchestra Leader through the ’50s sold 10 million records of it. “Theme from ‘A Summer Place,'” The #1 record of 1960, both by our Chartcrush ranking and according to Billboard’s published year-end Hot100 chart.

Which people, including us here at Chartcrush, have tried to reverse-engineer to ascertain their ranking method for 1960, but to no avail. Billboard’s is similar, but two of the songs we heard this hour did not make the top ten on their year-end Hot100. Connie Francis’s “Everybody’s Somebody’s Fool,” our #10 song, was close, but shook out at #11 on Billboard’s published list. And Marty Robbins’ “El Paso” was only #15, since the first half of its chart run was in Billboard’s 1959 “chart year,” the set timeframe they consider for their ranking.

At Chartcrush, we don’t do “chart years.” How we do it is, we factor every song’s full chart run and rank it in whichever year it earned the most points, which makes “El Paso” the #9 song of 1960.

Now because we have two that weren’t in Billboard’s top ten, a couple from their top ten we didn’t hear, so in the time we have left, let’s have a look at those.

#17 Jimmy Jones – Handy Man

Billboard’s #8 song of 1960 was #17 on our ranking, best known for James Taylor’s cover in 1977. But the 1960 version wasn’t really the original either, even though it is by the guy who wrote the song. Confused? Stay tuned. I’ll explain after we have a listen to Jimmy Jones’ “Handy Man.”

Jimmy Jones, “Handy Man.” Jones wrote the song in the mid ’50s for his Doo Wop group The Sparks of Rhythm. But they didn’t record it ’til after Jones left the group to join a different group in 1956. But nevertheless, that version by The Sparks of Rhythm without Jimmy Jones is the first recorded version, unreleased until 1960 when the one we just heard started climbing the charts, at which point they put it out. But it’s completely different!

Producer Otis Blackwell re-wrote the music and Jones recorded the new version we just heard that was the hit. Incidentally, the flute player they hired was a no-show at the recording session for “Handy Man,” so that’s Otis Blackwell whistling throughout the song.

#15 Mark Dinning – Teen Angel

Our next bonus cut was Billboard’s #5 song of 1960: a respectable hit with 18 weeks on the chart including two at #1 in February between “Running Bear” and “Theme from ‘A Summer Place.'” We have it at #15.

It wasn’t, strictly speaking, the first “Teen Tragedy” record, but it was the first #1 Teen Tragedy record, which opened the door for many others. It was such a downer, though, that many radio stations, including Britain’s BBC, refused to play it. Which, of course, only made it sell better. It’s Mark Dinning’s “Teen Angel.”

Mark Dinning’s big Sisters Jean, Ginny and Lou were The Dinning Sisters, who charted four hits in 1947 and ’48. They’d dissolved years before, but Jean and her hubby wrote “Teen Angel.” Once they cracked the top ten, radio kind of had to play these songs but DJs put them down as “tear jerkers,” “death discs,” and “splatter platters.” The genre, though (that’s what it became after “Teen Angel” was a hit, a whole genre) had its roots in Folk Balladry. Teen Tragedy Records’ popularity followed in the wake of the Folk Revival that paralleled Rock ‘n Roll.

#24 Hollywood Argyles – Alley Oop

So those were the two songs from Billboard‘s year-end top ten that weren’t in our 1960 Chartcrush Countdown, but we’re gonna wrap up this week’s show with an also-ran by two of the most fascinating behind-the-scenes figures in Pop in the ’60s, Gary S. Paxton and Kim Fowley: two young, manic, shameless Pop opportunists careening around in the same bizarre landscape, which happened to be the soon-to-be epicenter of Pop culture, Los Angeles, California.

Two versions of the song inspired by a comic strip about a time-traveling caveman debuted on the Hot100 May 30, the same week as Brenda Lee’s “I’m Sorry,” and a third version the following week, but this was the #1 hit: Billboard’s #16 song on the year; #24 on our ranking, credited to fictional group The Hollywood Argyles, “Alley Oop.”

Gary Paxton, who sings that exaggerated vocal, was Flip in the Pop duo Skip & Flip, and under contract with a different label so he had to conceal his involvement with “Alley Oop.” The studio where it was recorded was at the intersection of the Hollywood Freeway and tiny Argyle Avenue, so Hollywood Argyles.

“Alley Oop” at first glance seems like just a silly Novelty, but there’s just something about it that makes you want to lift the lid to see what’s going on in whatever world that came out of: a harbinger of both Garage Rock and at least the more demented side of Psychedelia later epitomized by another character from Paxton and co-producer Kim Fowley’s world, Frank Zappa.

Paxton’s next triumph was the 1962 Halloween classic, Bobby “Boris” Pickett’s “The Monster Mash.”

Well, that’s gonna have to be a wrap for our 1960 edition of the Chartcrush Top Ten Countdown Show. Thanks for listening. I’ve been your host, Christopher Verdesi. If you like what you heard this hour, check out our website, chartcrush.com for written transcripts and links to stream this and other Chartcrush countdown shows on Spotify, plus chart run line graphs and other first-rate extras. We count down a different year every week on this show from the beginning of the charts in the ’40s, right on up to the present, so tune again, same station, same time, for another edition of Chartcrush.

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Welcome to the Chartcrush Top Ten Countdown Show, I’m your host, Christopher Verdesi. Each week on Chartcrush we do a deep dive into a different year in Pop music history, and count down the top ten according to our recap of the weekly charts published in the music industry’s top trade publication and chart authority, Billboard magazine. This week on Chartcrush, we’re counting down 2016, a year in which politics took center stage, even in pop culture: the epic faceoff between Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton after Barack Obama’s two terms.

More on that in a minute, but first, 2016 also marked a major shift in the music biz: on-demand streams eclipsing CDs and even paid downloads as the industry’s leading format, on its way to becoming over half of all music biz revenue in 2019. Fans for the first time ever, could access almost any song ever released by any artist on any label: the ultimate jukebox. But like with actual jukeboxes, the user doesn’t own anything, not even ones and zeros on their hard drive. It’s a rental! Fans didn’t care; most of them just wanted to listen.

And with streaming, the industry finally began to recover from the disaster of filesharing and illegal downloading in the ’00s and early ’10s. Now this had a big effect on the charts. Except for the ever-shrinking sliver of physical music sales in the streaming era, the charts: almost entirely based on plays and listens, so the average top 10 song in 2016 was staying on the charts nearly 60% longer than in 1986, as listeners continued pressing “play” long after first hearing the song.

But as music fans got their stream on, elsewhere on the internet, the 2016 election got interesting in March, when Wikileaks, the whistleblower platform started in 2006 by Australian Editor-Publisher Julian Assange, created a searchable archive of Hillary Clinton’s emails from her illegal private server when she was Secretary of State, and that and other email dumps dominated news coverage, until Donald Trump’s lewd Hollywood Access video from 2005 leaked to the Washington Post a month before the election. Politics hadn’t been this juicy since Monica Lewinsky’s blue dress in 1998.

Well after a generation of Democrats understanding that politics are downstream of culture and making common cause with showbiz from Rock the Vote in ’92, to Obama becoming the “Hip-Hop president” in ’08 while Republicans sat there aloof and confused in the bleachers, no wonder that as all it all unfolded, Pop stars in 2016 were hashtag “WithHer.” Beyonce, Jay-Z, Lady Gaga, Katy Perry, Jon Bon Jovi, Bruce Springsteen, Cher and many others didn’t just signal their support; they actually showed up and  campaigned with Hillary, while Trump couldn’t even play a record at an event without getting an angry cease-and-desist letter.

But in ’16, the GOP candidate himself was a celebrity. Trump’s reality show, The Apprentice had helped keep NBC afloat in the mid-’00s, and remained a primetime draw all the way to 2015. So the pop culture-allergic bleacher-sitting Republican Establishment was dragged kicking and screaming into the fray. As one of Vanity Fair election post-mortem pointed out, only one celebrity mattered to Trump voters, and that was Donald Trump.

#10 Twenty One Pilots – Stressed Out

Well, no wonder so many in 2016 were… the title of our #10 song as we kick off the countdown, by an act who kept their politics to themselves. But in the hyper-partisan late ’10s, even silence was suspect. Here’s the duo Twenty One Pilots, “Stressed Out.”

“Wish we could turn back time to the good old days when our mama sang us to sleep, but now we’re stressed out.” Definitely an anthem for a generation, Millennials, known for taking its sweet time growing up. Twenty One Pilots songwriter-front man Tyler Joseph, born 1988, dead center of the Millennial generation. And 2016, the beginning of the transitional decade between Millennials’ pop culture dominance, and the up-and-coming Gen-Z “Zoomers.”

Twenty One Pilots started out as a trio in 2009 at Ohio State University. In 2011 two of the members left, but on his way out, the drummer recruited his replacement, and Tyler Joseph and drummer Josh Dun continued as a Duo and built quite a following around Columbus, Ohio. Two years later in ’13, their third album Vessel got them to #20 on the Album chart and made them darlings of Alternative radio, but 2015’s Blurryface was their mainstream breakthrough, the #1 Rock album of the year, and “Stressed Out,” not its first, second or even third, but fourth single!

#9 Twenty One Pilots – Heathens

But their biggest hit in ’16 wasn’t on Blurryface at all. It peaked at #2 for four weeks, September into October, stayed in the top ten all the way to the end of the year, and was Twenty One Pilots’ only top10 in the U.K. A soundtrack cut from the third DC Comics Extended Universe blockbuster Suicide Squad. It’s a Twenty One Pilots twofer here on our 2016 edition of the Chartcrush Top Ten Countdown Show. At #9, “Heathens.”

“Heathens” from Suicide Squad at #9, the bigger of the two Twenty One Pilots hits in our Chartcrush Countdown of 2016’s top ten hits. Billboard called them a “Pop Duo that treats genres like a toddler treats Legos.” By the way, the second DC Extended Universe blockbuster also came out in 2016: Batman vs. Superman, which gave us the Sad Affleck meme, in which Ben Affleck, who played “Batman,” sits stoically as “Superman” Henry Cavill answers a question in a press junket. As the frame slowly zooms in on Affleck, the chatter fades and Simon & Garfunkel’s “The Sound of Silence” plays.

#8 Justin Bieber – Sorry

Next up, the first of two hits by the other Act with two songs in our 2016 countdown. But here, both records: released just a few weeks apart and in the top ten simultaneously for 18 weeks. This one got to #1 first, and when the other one topped the chart in February, it made the Singer only the twelfth Act in Hot100 history to replace him- her- or itself at #1 with a different record.

Just as Millennials had propelled their Teen Heartthrobs to the top of the charts in the late ’90s, Gen-Z made its first pop culture splash in the late ’00s and early ’10s, and as those Teen Icons matured along with their Zoomer audience, most became huge mainstream stars. Our act at #8: the poster boy of Zoomer Teen Pop, on the charts almost continuously since he was just 15 in 2009, and in 2012 he became the first artist ever to score five #1 albums by the age of 18.

It was a little touch-and-go for him on the reputation front over the next few years: vandalism, DUI, reckless driving, frequent dust-ups with paparazzi, abandoning his pet monkey in a German airport, and an old video of him telling a racist joke. Rolling Stone put him on its cover in early 2014 with the headline “Bad Boy.”

Well, he leaned in, embracing Hip-Hop fashions and the pseudonym “Bizzle,” but he was absent from the top ten from March of 2013 until the advance lead single from his 2015 album Purpose, “What Do You Mean?” debuted at #1. He ditched “Bizzle,” adopted a retro-’90s Grunge look, and Teen Vogue heralded his comeback with the headline “He’s come a long way from YouTube and purple hoodies.” At #8, the second single from Purpose, it’s Justin Bieber’s “Sorry.”

Hard to believe, but all the dozens of songs Justin Bieber charted in the early ’10s, he didn’t hit #1 ’til “What Do You Mean?” from Purpose. “Sorry,” the song we just heard at #8, his second chart topper just a few months later. And the third, which, again, replaced “Sorry” at #1, still to come here on our Chartcrush Top Ten Countdown Show of 2016’s biggest hits.

The Tropical House “moombahton” sound on “Sorry,” courtesy of red-hot EDM Producer Skrillex, who co-wrote and produced.

Despite “Sorry” being a plea for forgiveness to his former girlfriend, Pop star Selena Gomez, Biebs posted pics with his new girlfriend in the Summer, and the ensuing flame war with fans (and Gomez herself) ended with Justin deleting his Instagram account.

#7 Sia featuring Sean Paul – Cheap Thrills

Carpool Karaoke was a recurring segment on CBS’s The Late Late Show that started in 2015 when James Corden took over from Craig Ferguson as host, and continued all the way ’til Corden left in 2023: Corden picking up Pop Stars in his car so he could drive in the carpool lane, and then they’d sing the Artists’ songs to pass the time.

Justin Bieber did it twice in 2015, but moving on to our #7 song, this Singer did Carpool Karaoke in her signature half-and-half black and blonde flat bangs wig that covered most of her face. They didn’t do this song, though, maybe because Corden couldn’t pull off Featured Rapper Sean Paul’s Jamaican-accent verses. They sang her breakthrough 2014 hit instead, “Chandelier.” But this became her first #1 in August of ’16. It’s Sia, featuring Sean Paul, “Cheap Thrills.”

Australian Singer-Songwriter Sia, featuring Jamaican Rapper Sean Paul with “Cheap Thrills,” #7 on our Chartcrush Top Ten Countdown of 2016’s top Pop hits. In 2015 just as the Presidential campaign was ramping up, Donald Trump hosted SNL the week Sia was the musical guest, and in a promo he dons a Trumpian version of her signature half-and-half wig and says “I love this hair.” The love didn’t go both ways, though, apparently. Sia politely declined to snap a picture with Trump and daughter Ivanka backstage, worrying that it might offend her Latino and LGBTQ fans.

#6 Justin Bieber – Love Yourself

At #6, the second song in our countdown from Billboard’s Top Male Artist of 2016 and #2 Artist overall, released as a promo single just three weeks after “Sorry” dropped, and on February 13, it replaced “Sorry” at #1. It’s a diss track to an unnamed narcissist, and all the more devastating thanks to its low-key delivery and arrangement: just a guitar and a smattering of horns. And backing vocals courtesy of Ed Sheeran, who’d just scored his own first top10s in ’14 and ’15 and co-wrote the song. Here’s Justin Bieber again: his biggest hit of 2016, “Love Yourself.”

One sign that Justin Bieber had made the transition from Bubblegum to Mainstream Pop: all the singles from his 2015 Purpose album also lit up the Adult Contemporary chart!

Now, on Billboard’s year-end Hot100 ranking for 2016 they had “Love Yourself” and “Sorry” at numbers 1 and 2, respectively. So how are they just 6 and 8 on ours? Well, five of 2016’s top10 hits still had a ways to go at the end of Billboard’s 2016 “chart year,” the last week of November ’16. And two others besides Bieber’s were already on the chart when the “chart year” began, first week of December ’15. Here at Chartcrush, we don’t do “chart years.” Instead, our ranking method factors every song’s full chart run and then ranks it in whichever calendar year it racked up the most points.

#5 Chainsmokers featuring Daya – Don’t Let Me Down

At #5 is the year’s #1 Dance hit. They’re a New York EDM DJ and Production Duo, the title of whose first Hot100 hit in 2014 helped introduce a new word to the language after it went viral on Soundcloud, Vine and Instagram. They’d noticed women in clubs saying “Let’s take a selfie.” But 2016 was their big breakthrough, in the top ten from May to October, peaking at #3 for two weeks in July, it’s The Chainsmokers featuring Indian-American singer Daya, “Don’t Let Me Down.”

From the main stage at Miami’s Ultra Music Festival in March of ’16, Chainsmoker Andrew Taggart condensed what he called his “Kanye speech” to just one short admonition for the crowd: “Do not support Donald Trump!” Politics and music, intersecting like never before.

Chainsmokers’ finest moment was still to come. Their next big hit “Closer” featuring Halsey entered the Hot100 at the end of August 2016 and was in the top ten of Billboard’s year-end Hot100 two years in a row: their #10 song in 2016 and #7 in 2017. Again, at Chartcrush, we don’t split chart runs, so factoring its full run in the calendar year it earned the most points, “Closer” shakes out as the #3 song of 2017.

#4 Justin Timberlake – Can’t Stop the Feeling!

Next at #4, the first #1 hit in nearly a decade for the biggest star to come out of the late ’90s Boy Band craze. He’s an ‘NSYNC alum but as a solo act he scored two #1’s in ’06 and both were among the year’s top10 hits. He built an impressive movie acting resume ’08 to ’12, then turning back to music in ’13, “Suit & Tie” featuring Jay-Z, and “Mirrors” got him back into the top ten.

But now, midway through his 30s in 2016, he was back on top at #1. Here’s the other Justin in our countdown: Justin Timberlake at #4: the lead cut from the soundtrack of the DreamWorks feature Trolls, in which he voiced the main character, Branch: “Can’t Stop the Feeling!”

#4, the ’70s Disco-reminiscent “Can’t Stop the Feeling,” Justin Timberlake on our Chartcrush Top Ten Countdown of 2016’s biggest hits, nominated for Best Original Song at the Oscars, and Timberlake opened the awards with it. “Can’t Stop the Feeling,” one of the two hits in our top ten that debuted at #1.

#3 Adele – Hello

And at #3 is the other. But unlike “Can’t Stop,” which dropped to #3 its second week and never reclaimed the top spot, this one stayed on top for another nine weeks after its debut. The song was the lead single from one of the most hotly anticipated follow-up albums in Pop history. Her previous album from 2011 with its three #1s was eventually named the #1 album of the ’10s decade. Oh, and unlike Sia, she did sing her big 2016 hit on Carpool Karaoke. At #3 it’s Adele’s “Hello.”

“Hello,” Adele at #3 on our Chartcrush Top Ten Countdown for 2016, from her long-awaited third album 25.

It took a while for artists to come to terms with on-demand streaming. The revenue upside, much greater with physical sales and even paid downloads. Taylor Swift famously pulled her entire catalog off Spotify for nearly three years over its tiny per-stream artist compensation rate, and Adele didn’t allow 25 on any streaming platforms for seven months.

#2 Rihanna featuring Drake – Work

Well, we’re down to #2 on our 2016 edition of the Chartcrush Top Ten Countdown Show, from another long-anticipated album, the Singer’s eighth, expected “any day now” since the Summer of 2014, when she started teasing it on social media. When it finally came out for real in January 2016, Newsweek snarked that “this, apparently, is how big Pop albums are rolled out these days: an endlessly delayed, social media-driven ‘surprise’ release.”

Well, it actually was a surprise. Tidal, the streaming platform owned in part by the Singer, had an exclusive, and accidentally released the entire album instead of just its lead single. Whoops! Well, the song was Rihanna’s 11th #1 since 2006; 14th if you count features: the lead single from her long-delayed album Anti, A-N-T-I, “Work.”

Now back at #8 we heard Justin Bieber’s “Sorry,” produced by Skrillex, the biggest Pop hit in 2016’s hot new buzzworthy sound, Tropical House. Rihanna’s “Work,” which we just heard at #2 on our 2016 Chartcrush Top Ten Countdown, hit the chart the same week “Sorry” dropped out of the #1 spot, and when Rolling Stone Tweeted out a link calling it a “Tropical House-flavored track,” the genre police pounced: a hail of counter-Tweets reminding the world that RiRi was from Barbados, and “Work” wasn’t just some EDM flavor-of-the-month; it was a glorious return to her rich Dancehall roots.

Dancehall, basically Reggae as it adapted to Disco in late ’70s Jamaica, was in the midst of a resurgence in the mid-’00s when Jay-Z and L.A. Reid signed then-17-year-old Rihanna to Def Jam. But she’d all but abandoned the sound to pioneer the turn of the decade’s EDM-anchored Pop on her third album, 2007’s Good Girl Gone Bad. So “Work” was a real treat for Dancehall fans, who hadn’t seen a #1 hit since Sean Paul’s “Temperature” in ’06. We heard Paul earlier, guesting on Sia’s “Cheap Thrills.”

#1 Drake featuring WizKid & Kyla – One Dance

But the Male Vocalist we just heard on “Work” is our Act with the #1 hit in our 2016 countdown, and it’s also Dancehall. His #2 hit “Hotline Bling” from the Fall of 2015 was supposed to be the lead single of his fourth album Views, but when the album came out in April ’16, “Hotline” was tacked on as a bonus track and the real lead single was #1 throughout June and July, it’s Canadian Rapper-Singer Drake’s very first #1 hit, featuring Nigerian Singer WizKid and British Singer Kyla, “One Dance.”

Before all was said and done, Drake’s album Views had racked up 13 weeks at #1 on the Album chart, the most of any Hip-Hop album since the early ’90s, and its lead single “One Dance,” our #1 song of 2016 here on the Chartcrush Top Ten Countdown Show.

None of the other songs on Views cracked the top ten, and critics didn’t much like it, but one exception hailed it as “compelling evidence that [Drake] is the defining Pop artist of the moment.”

Well, as such, in the heat of the Presidential race, he was under a lot of pressure to take sides and jump aboard the Trump-bashing train. Well, he didn’t take sides, even after the election as the entire music world but for Ted Nugent, Charlie Daniels and Rappers Kanye West and Azalea Banks were loudly, angrily and publicly mourning Trump’s victory. The week after the election, Drake’s Twitter feed was quiet except a plug for Drake Night at the Air Canada Centre: his hometown NBA team the Toronto Raptors hosting the Golden State Warriors.

Bonus

Well there you have ’em: our Chartcrush Top Ten Pop songs of 2016.

Now earlier I mentioned that Billboard had Justin Bieber’s two big 2016 smashes at numbers 1 and 2 on their year-end Hot100 ranking, since parts of several 2016 songs’ chart runs fell outside their “chart year” eligibility period, and counting their full chart runs reveals them to have been bigger hits. Sia’s “Cheap Thrills” for one, our #6 song, on the chart ’til the end of February ’17. Billboard only counted up to November 26, so it’s #11. Same story with our #9 song, Twenty One Pilots’ “Heathens.” It stayed on the chart 15 weeks after Billboard’s cutoff, so only #21. But adding those two songs bumps two from Billboard’s ranking out of the top ten.

What are those songs? Well as I mentioned, they had The Chainsmokers’ “Closer” at #10 and by our reckoning that one is a 2017 hit.

#11 Desiigner – Panda

The other one, though, just misses our top ten at #11. It was 2016’s big Trap hit, the year after Fetty Wap’s “Trap Queen” and the year before Migos’ “Bad and Boujee” Let’s give a listen, shall we? To Desiigner’s “Panda.”

Brooklyn Rapper Desiigner. “Panda,” because a white BMW X6 looks like a panda. Only his second song, uploaded to the audio sharing platform Soundcloud in December ’15.

The track caught Rapper Kanye West’s ear, and Kanye had already interpolated it into a cut for his upcoming Life of Pablo album, when he signed Desiigner to his Good Music label. Then “Panda” itself started scaling the charts and was #1 for two weeks in May before Desiigner had ever even appeared on TV. Well he made his TV debut at the 2016 BET Awards doing “Panda” at the end of June, and his follow-up “Tiimmy Turner” was a minor hit, but dwindling chart fortunes and legal woes rendered him a one-hit wonder.

Well that’s our 2016 edition of the Chartcrush Top Ten Countdown Show. I’ve been your host, Christopher Verdesi. Hey, be sure and visit our website, chartcrush.com, for written transcripts and streaming links for this and other Chartcrush countdown shows, plus chart run line graphs and other top-notch extras. And check us out on TikTok @Chartcrush. Every week, we count down a different year on this show, from the beginning ofthe charts in the ’40s all the way up to the present, so tune in 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. Every week on this show, we dive deep into a year in Pop music and count down the top10 songs according to our recap of the weekly Pop charts published at the time in the music industry’s leading trade publication, Billboard magazine. Ahead this hour on Chartcrush we’re gonna count down the top10 songs of 1947, a pretty happy year in America.

And why wouldn’t it be? The War was over. Fascism in the rear-view. No one else had an atomic bomb yet. And you still hadda kinda read some tea leaves to see what was coming next in the Cold War over the next 40 years. No one even knew what a “Cold War” was until Bernard Baruch coined the phrase in ’47, selling President Harry S. Truman’s “Truman Doctrine” that committed the U.S. to opposing the spread of communism and Soviet expansionism.

Despite a nasty three-day riot over an integrated veterans housing project in Chicago, there were some big early Civil Rights victories in ’47. Jackie Robinson, #42, became the first Black player in the majors for the Brooklyn Dodgers and won Rookie of the Year. Congressional press galleries were opened up to Black reporters, and Truman’s Committee on Civil Rights issued its landmark To Secure These Rights report.

Film noir was at a creative and commercial peak in the last year before TV: over 50 “melodramas” (as critics mostly called them at the time), in theaters: classics like Brute Force, The Kiss of Death, Dead Reckoning and Out of the Past featuring world-weary, cynical characters navigating desperate situations. Noir was so ubiquitous that there was even a parody, Bob Hope in My Favorite Brunette. And a real-life noir-ish story out of Hollywood had newspapers buzzing all year: murder victim Elizabeth Short posthumously nicknamed the “Black Dahlia” after the title of a 1946 noir flick, Raymond Chandler’s The Blue Dahlia, starring Alan Ladd and Veronica Lake.

Chuck Yeager broke the sound barrier in the experimental Bell XS-1 rocket plane in ’47, but that wasn’t the most mind-blowing thing happening in the skies. Pilot Kenneth Arnold’s highly-publicized UFO sighting in Washington State, then just a few weeks later, the Roswell, New Mexico UFO incident sparked the flying saucer craze.

Against that backdrop, the U.S. economy boomed in 1947. 12 million returning G.I.s. had found jobs; wartime bureaucracies, price controls and regulations, dismantled and ended; government spending down 75%; taxes cut; factories back to making cars and appliances instead of fighter planes and bombs. And they couldn’t crank out those durable goods fast enough for a public finally emerging from a generation of deprivation and sacrifice.

From the end of the War to 1950, housing starts increased 20-fold, and all those new homes needed appliances and furnishings. And of course families. Who, once they had those homes, tended to stay in them with their Baby Boom toddlers instead of going back to the city to dance.

That’s band historian George Simon’s main theory as to why so many Big Bands dissolved. Bandleader Bob Crosby blamed the Bands themselves for straying from Dance music and becoming “concert Bands playing in dancehalls.” And songwriter Jimmy Van Heusen blamed union scale and pension plans making it impossible for Bandleaders to turn a profit. The feds slapping a 40% cabaret tax on dancing establishments definitely contributed to the mass conversion of America’s teeming dancehalls and ballrooms to bowling alleys, supermarkets and warehouses as well.

But despite that (or rather because of it), the record biz had by far its best year ever in 1947: over $200 million in sales: a milestone not reached again until 1955. And that alone qualifies 1947 as a landmark year in Pop history.

#10 The Three Suns – Peg o’ My Heart

At #10 as we kick off our 1947 Chartcrush Top Ten Countdown, the first of two versions of the same song we’ll be hearing this hour. There are actually two of those in our countdown: songs that were so popular that more than one version of them made the top10 records of the year!

This one is major label RCA-Victor’s answer to an offbeat instrumental by an unknown act that was an unknown label’s first release earlier in the year. Yet it was a hit thanks to a new studio gimmick that no one had heard on a record before. RCA correctly identified the trick and deployed it to even more dramatic effect on their version. See if you can guess what I’m talking about, what this gimmick was, as we have a listen to our #10 song, The Three Suns’ version of “Peg o’ My Heart.”

Reverb, the studio trick employed to pretty dramatic effect there on The Three Suns’ instrumental version of “Peg o’ My Heart,” a song made famous in Broadway’s Ziegfeld Follies all the way back in 1913.

The Three Suns had had five minor chart hits on indie labels coming into 1947. Their success doing soundies in the mid-’40s got them signed to RCA-Victor. What’s a “Soundie?” Well, soundies were short films made for a kind of proto-video jukebox called a Panoram. For a dime you could watch a short film, usually a music video, rear-projected onto a 40-inch screen. No selector though, so if you wanted to see a specific video, it was gonna cost you up to eight dimes to cycle through the videos to the one you wanted. TV of course, ended Soundies in arcades, bars and Teen hangouts, but many Panorams found a new homes in adult peep shows in the ’50s!

#9 Swing and Sway with Sammy Kaye (vocal, Don Cornell) – That’s My Desire

At #9, the other song with two different versions in our countdown of 1947’s biggest Pop hits. Same story: upstart indie scores a hit with a new record of an old song, then the major labels all scramble to get their version out. Usually it was the other way around: majors with their A-list acts getting first dibs on Tin Pan Alley’s latest and greatest “plug songs,” and only after those hit the charts were indies permitted by the publishers to release their versions and maybe sweep up a few crumbs if they were lucky.

But in ’47, indie A&R guys flipped the script on that, ignoring the big-money “plug songs” and digging deep into publishers’ catalogs for offbeat B- or C-list material they could match up with one of their offbeat B- or C-list Acts. Well, once a few of those became hits, Billboard gave them a name: “material songs,” which were connecting, they said, because an increasingly “unpredictable public” was more interested in songs than Name Artists.

Here again, major label RCA-Victor’s version of a “material hit,” but this time, instead of an act people may or may not have heard of because they were in a few Soundies, it’s one of the ’40s top charting acts, on the charts almost continuously from 1945 to ’50. And unlike “Peg o’ My Heart,” this version overtook the indie label’s on the charts. Major label distribution and radio contacts, then as now, decisive.

But even though it outranked the original while they were both out, the original racked up more weeks, so when you add it all up, the original comes out at #8. So we’ll be hearing that one next, but now, at #9, here’s RCA-Victor’s version by Swing and Sway with Sammy Kaye featuring Crooner Don Cornell: “That’s My Desire.”

The ’40s’ top charting “Sweet Band” (more Pop than Jazz), Swing and Sway with Sammy Kaye. Their bandwagon-jumping version of “That’s My Desire” at #9 on our 1947 edition of the Chartcrush Top Ten Countdown Show. Don Cornell on vocals along with Kaye’s vocal group, The Kaydettes.

Cornell had been singing exclusively with Kaye’s band since the ’30s, but “That’s My Desire” was only his second appearance on a chart hit. Billy Williams and Nancy Norman, the Singers on most of Kaye’s hits up to 1947. But for the next three years it was almost all Don Cornell, until he went solo at the height of Croonerdom in the early ’50s.

#8 Frankie Laine – That’s My Desire

And as previously teased, at #8 we have the original indie label version of “That’s My Desire” that hit the charts end of March, but dropped like a rock once Kaye and Cornell’s we just heard came out six weeks later. It rebounded, though, as upstart Mercury Records, then in business only two years, promoted the heck out of it.

Later as the record was completing its 29 week chart run (the longest of the year), the Singer found himself the focus of the latest “Bobbysoxer” Crooner craze as he made his way East after nine months at Hollywood’s Club Morocco. A reported 45,000 Teen girls showed up to see him at a record shop in Detroit. Here’s the record that made Frankie Laine a star, the first and biggest hit version, thanks to its longevity on the charts, of “That’s My Desire.”

Frankie Laine’s first chart hit and breakthrough, “That’s My Desire,” after a decade of, as he put it, “scuffling” from city-to-city, gig-to-gig, trying to break through as a Singer. Even as “Desire” was riding high and America’s DJs were voting Laine Most Promising Male Vocalist of the year, critics skewered his “oversinging,” “fervent throating” and “lusty vocalizing.” And his next several records didn’t fare too well.

But 45,000 Bobbysoxers and all those DJs can’t be wrong, can they? And Mitch Miller for one, got it. Amid all the turbulence and in-fighting of Mercury Records in its early years, by ’49, Miller had risen to head of A&R, and after Pop Crooner-Bandleader Vaughn Monroe scored that year’s biggest smash with “(Ghost) Riders in the Sky,” he gave Frankie Laine Western-type songs that would showcase his emotive singing style. “That Lucky Old Sun” and “Mule Train” were both #1 hits in ’49, and Laine scored nine more top10s over the next eight years.

#7 King Cole Trio – (I Love You) For Sentimental Reasons

So ’47, a year of Civil Rights milestones, as I mentioned at the top of our 1947 Chartcrush Top Ten Countdown Show. Well March 1, 1947 marked the first time that five or more the top10 records on the Pop charts were by Black artists, and it didn’t happen again ’til the end of 1957.

Now, four of those records were the same song, “Open the Door, Richard,” but the fifth, at #6 that week, was the first top10 by a Jazz Pianist who, legend has it, started singing when a drunk guy at a piano bar demanded it. And he became one of America’s top Crooners. No fewer than six versions of this song were on the charts in ’47, but this was the first, and the biggest. At #7 it’s Nat King Cole, still releasing records as the King Cole Trio until ’49, “(I Love You) For Sentimental Reasons.”

The King Cole Trio got their own network radio show in ’46, the first hosted by a Black Musician: another sign of things to come in Civil Rights that set the stage for their breakthrough success with the song we just heard at #7 here on our Chartcrush Top Ten Countdown for 1947, “(I Love You) For Sentimental Reasons.” That and all of Nat King Cole’s records throughout his long career, on Capitol Records.

#6 Ray Noble and His Orchestra and Buddy Clark – Linda

The Singer at #6 had been Crooning for Big Bands since 1932, but in ’38, after doing the popular Your Hit Parade radio show for two years, he became one of the few Singers besides Bing Crosby to score a hit under his own name in the Swing Era, before Frank Sinatra went solo.

After his three years in the military during the War he landed a record contract with Columbia, who paired him with English Bandleader Ray Noble for this record that stayed in the top10 on all three Billboard Pop charts—Sales, Airplay and Jukeboxes—throughout the Spring, and is #6 on our 1947 edition of the Chartcrush Top Ten Countdown Show. It’s Ray Noble’s Orchestra and (double-billed, not featuring) Singer Buddy Clark, “Linda.”

Ray Noble and Buddy Clark, “Linda,” #6 on our Chartcrush Top Ten Countdown of 1947’s biggest hits.

So who’s this beguiling “Linda” Clark is singing about? Well, Songwriter Jack Lawrence wrote the song as a favor to his Attorney, who wanted a song for his baby daughter. The Attorney was Lee Eastman, and the daughter was Linda Eastman, who if you know your Beatles history in 1969 became Linda McCartney, wife of Paul McCartney, who never played that song. Wonder why?

Clark continued scoring hits, including four duets with Columbia label-mate Doris Day. But sadly, right at the peak of his fame, he suffered a fatal head injury when the chartered plane he was on ran out of fuel and attempted to land on Beverly Boulevard in Los Angeles. The other four passengers and the Pilot, also injured, but Clark was the only fatality.

After his death, his record “A Dreamer’s Holiday” became the first posthumous top 20 hit. Even Big Band icon Glenn Miller didn’t rate that after his plane went down over the English Channel in late 1944. Major Miller, en route to newly liberated Paris to set up his Army Air Forces Band. Maybe it didn’t occur to RCA to release a tribute, or considered poor taste. Both Miller and Clark, though, huge news stories when they happened, as you can imagine.

#5 Tex Williams and His Western Caravan – Smoke! Smoke! Smoke! (That Cigarette)

OK, back to the fun! At #5 we have a Western Talking Blues Novelty hit written, no, not in the ’30s like “Peg o’ My Heart” and “That’s My Desire,” but actually in 1947, after the Singer got fired for wanting equal billing with Bandleader Spade Cooley, later convicted for murdering his wife. Several players exited the Band with him, and the Singer formed his own 12-piece “Western Caravan.”

Capitol Records snapped him up, but not satisfied with the Polkas they were having him record, the Singer turned to his friend, Country star Merle Travis, for help writing a hit more suited to his style. And what they came up with topped the Country chart for 16 weeks and was the first big Country-Western/Pop crossover hit. #1 on the Best Sellers chart for six weeks in late Summer, at #5 it’s Tex Williams and His Western Caravan:  “Smoke! Smoke! Smoke! (That Cigarette).”

Tex Williams, “Smoke! Smoke! Smoke! (That Cigarette),” #5 on our Chartcrush Top Ten Countdown of the biggest hits of 1947. Williams kept charting records on the Country charts all the way to the ’70s, but never dented the Pop charts again. Western Swing Revivalists Commander Cody and the Lost Planet Airmen scored a big FM counterculture hit with their cover of “Smoke! Smoke! Smoke!” in 1973. It even made the Hot100.

#4 Swing and Sway with Sammy Kaye (vocal, Billy Williams & Choir) – The Old Lamp-Lighter

You know, the further removed you get from an era, the harder it is to spot a nostalgia wave, but when a sentimental song about pre-War street lighting charts three versions in the top10, and one of them is the #4 record of the year, well, that’s a pretty good sign that one was underway.

Actually, the signs were everywhere, not just the Pop charts, but also many of 1947’s top movies: Life with Father set in the 1880s, Green Dolphin Street, the 1840s, Mother Wore Tights, turn of the century Vaudeville; The Perils of Pauline, 1920s Silent Film Era. MGM even re-released Gone with the Wind in ’47.

But back to street lighting. During the War, the spike in natural gas prices got many cities to switch to electric outdoor lighting. But to a certain generation, nothing said “simpler, happier time” like gas streetlights. And throughout the ’50s and ’60s, so many businesses, neighborhoods and communities, mostly upscale ones, reverted back, that during the ’70s energy crisis, the Carter Administration had to specifically ban gas outdoor lighting.

At #4 is the song that, as far as we can tell, first gave voice to that particular slice of nostalgic yearning, the biggest hit version was by the Band whose version of “That’s My Desire” we heard back at #9, Swing and Sway with Sammy Kaye, but it’s not Don Cornell singing this time; it’s the Country Singer who as I mentioned had been the Male Vocalist on almost all Kaye’s hits with Male vocals since their version of “Don’t Fence Me In” in 1945, Billy Williams. The song isn’t about gas streetlights per se; it’s about the man whose job was to come around at dusk and dawn to turn them on and off, “The Old Lamp-Lighter.”

Swing and Sway with Sammy Kaye featuring Billy Williams, “The Old Lamp-Lighter,” #4 on our Chartcrush Countdown of 1947’s top hits.

By the way, our top10 is based on our exclusive ranking that combines action on Billboard’s published Sales, Airplay and Jukebox charts. From those, we derive a single unified Hot100-style weekly ranking that lets us tabulate the year using the same exact same method we do for Hot100 years post-1958.

RCA’s only competition on the charts with “The Old Lamp-Lighter” was Columbia’s top late-’40s Bandleader Kay Kyser, who had future afternoon TV talk show host Mike Douglas singing. That one comes out at #31 on our 1947 ranking.

#3 The Harmonicats – Peg o’ My Heart

At #3, it’s the original version of the instrumental oddity we heard RCA-Victor’s copycat version of by The Three Suns. I mentioned when we heard that back at #10 that reverb was the brand new secret sauce studio gimmick that got folks’ attention when they heard it, and RCA did a very good job with the effect on the Three Suns record.

But the original we’re about to hear was where it was first unleashed, by pioneering studio genius Bill Putnam: the debut release on the Vitacoustic label he co-founded in Chicago. Recording in his building’s tile bathroom was how he got the reverb effect, but it’s the mixing with non-reverberated parts that creates the illusion of space and depth that Putnam was after.

It had the charts all to itself for its first nine weeks, late April to late June until RCA’s Three Suns version hit, and then four more traditionally-recorded versions of the song with vocals on other labels. Yes, “Peg o’ My Heart” has words!

Now, a massive hit by a trio of Harmonica Players wasn’t on anyone’s Pop bingo card in 1947, but here it is: the #3 song of the year, The Harmonicats’ original version of “Peg o’ My Heart.”

Released in early Spring on Vitacoustic Records, their first release, by August, The Harmonicats’ “Peg o’ My Heart” had racked up eight weeks atop the Jukebox chart and passed the million mark for Sales: pretty incredible.

On a different record in 1947, Bill Putnam, the studio ace who produced “Peg” also invented overdubbing, so Patti Page could do her own backing vocals on her debut record on Mercury. No money in the budget to hire a second Singer. Patti Page harmonizing with herself became her signature sound.

The Vitacoustic label foundered after things soured between Putnam and his business partners, and the Harmonicats’ subsequent hits were on Putnam’s own Universal label, then on Mercury into the ’50s.

#2 Francis Craig and His Orchestra (piano, Francis Craig; vocal, Bob Lamm) – Near You

Well, halfway through the year, while the instrumental versions of “Peg o’ My Heart” were still battling it out on the charts, another odd record appeared, and on another indie label no one had ever heard of, Nashville’s Bullet Records. By the end of August it was #1 on the DJ chart, then Best-Sellers in September, finally winning Billboard’s Pop “Triple Crown” by topping the Jukebox chart October 4 and staying #1 on all three for the next 10 weeks.

Of course, major label covers by established stars followed, but Bullet Records kept up with demand, and the original version by a recently unemployed Nashville Bandleader and his blind Vocalist-Trumpeter, slapped on the record as a B-side, sold two-and-a-half million and became one of the biggest chart hits of all time, and the first-ever Pop hit recorded in Nashville. At #2,  it’s Francis Craig, who wrote the song, and what was left of His Orchestra, “Near You.”

Francis Craig had been leading a Band since the early ’20s and was pushing 50 when, in 1947, he lost his gig at Nashville’s Hermitage Hotel after 21 years, and his Sunday night NBC network radio show after 12 years, and was thinking about retiring. He was an institution in Nashville, though, so the two local guys starting up Bullet Records asked him to record one of the signature songs from his ballroom set, and for the B-side he did “Near You.”

The way it goes for a full minute with just Craig’s piano, and then the vocal comes in when you least expect it with a full Brass Band accompaniment. Riveting! And easy to see how it caught people’s attention and became a big hit once radio got a hold of it.

Craig rode the momentum for one more hit, “Beg Your Pardon” in ’48 and started up Nashville’s first pressing plant with the profits. When Comedian Milton Berle (“Mr. Television”) became the permanent host of NBC’s Texaco Star Theater, “Near You” was his theme song.

#1 Ted Weems and His Orchestra (whistling, Elmo Tanner) – Heartaches

But despite its miraculous success and being Billboard #1 Best Seller of 1947, our Chartcrush rankings factor the DJ and Jukebox charts as well, and it loses out for the #1 spot by the slimmest of margins, to an even more unlikely hit (is that possible?) that was #1 for 16 weeks, three longer than “Near You.”

But there’s an asterisk on our #1 song of 1947: two different versions on different labels, but by the same artist, and Billboard didn’t chart them separately, so the two versions combined for chart positions. Come to think of it, that’s actually how Billboard handles remix versions today, so maybe no asterisk necessary for that.

But how about an asterisk for both versions being from the 1930s? Hey, in a year of peak nostalgia with indie labels scoring hits recording old songs, why not an old record? Well, when overnight D.J. Kurt Webster on Charlotte, North Carolina’s WBT pulled a 1938 record out of a box and gave it a spin on the air, the phones lit up from up and down the East coast. WBT was 50,000 watts. And soon, everyone was playing it, so Decca re-issued it. And RCA, who had the original faster-tempo one from 1933, re-issued that.

The ’38 Decca version folks heard on WBT that night is a slightly slower-tempo Rhumba Fox Trot, and with no way to unravel which version did better from Billboard’s combined chart placements, we’re gonna go with the faster, original Samba version on RCA. It’s Ted Weems and His Orchestra, a record from 1933, the #1 song of 1947: “Heartaches.”

A-list Crooner Perry Como started out singing with Ted Weems’ Band in the ’30s and Decca owned all those records, so after “Heartaches” hit, Decca figured, why not reissue one of these old Weems-Como discs? And “I Wonder Who’s Kissing Her Now,” from 1939, made the top10 on all three Billboard charts in the Fall. RCA, of course, rushed Como into the studio to cut a 1947 version of that song, and again, Billboard combined them on the charts.

By the way, Como called “Heartaches” Ted Weems’s “intermission number,” the song he’d play when there was nothing else, a filler, and couldn’t believe it was such a big hit. Elmo Tanner’s whistling on both “Heartaches” versions, Como said, was because Weems preferred it to the song’s lyrics!

Bonus

Well there you have them, the top10 records of 1947 here on the Chartcrush Top Ten Countdown Show. Now as you’ve been hearing this hour, songs had multiple versions on the charts at the same time in the ’40s, all competing for chart slots. Given that, what if we ranked songs instead of specific records?

Well actually, Billboard’s flagship chart in the ’40s did just that. The Honor Roll of Hits was a weekly ranking that combined sales, airplay, jukebox plays and sheet music sales for all versions of songs. That’s the chart Tin Pan Alley Publishers checked every week. Well as it turns out, a few of 1947’s top songs didn’t have a dominant version that rose to the top of any of the record charts, so in the time we have left, let’s take a look at those, shall we?

#63 Count Basie and His Orchestra (vocal, Harry “Sweets” Edison & Bill Johnson) – Open the Door, Richard!

So that week I mentioned in March ’47 when five of the top10 hits were by Black artists for the first time ever. Our #7 song, the King Cole Trio’s “(I Love You) For Sentimental Reasons” was #6 that week. At numbers 2, 3, 4 and tied at #6 were four different versions of what by our reckoning was the 12th biggest song of 1947, all versions combined, “Open the Door, Richard!”

That was the Count Basie Orchestra’s version of “Open the Door, Richard!” [see note] sung by the Basie Band’s trumpeter Harry “Sweets” Edison and trombonist Bill Johnson on RCA-Victor, #63 on our ranking of the year’s top records we just got done counting down the top10 from here on our 1947 edition of Chartcrush.

[Note: Count Basie Orchestra version not available on Spotify, so podcast substitutes the earlier version by Jack McVea]

It topped both the Best Sellers and DJ charts in April ’47 and was the biggest hit, beating out versions by singing comedians The Three Flames on Columbia, and Jump Blues icon Louis Jordan on Decca. Versions also charted by the Comedian who came up with the routine on the Vaudeville circuit, Dusty Fletcher, and the Saxophonist who first turned it into a song, Jack McVea. Both of those, though, on indie labels that didn’t get much traction.

#21 Freddy Martin and His Orchestra (vocal, Stewart Wade & Ensemble) – Managua, Nicaragua

Now, before Managua, Nicaragua in Central America became a flashpoint in the Cold War in the ’80s, Contras vs. Sandinistas, it was pretty idyllic from the sound of what was 1947’s tenth biggest song, combining all versions’ chart action, not to mention fun to say, or sing.

Three versions of “Managua, Nicaragua” on the charts in ’47. Freddy Martin’s on RCA-Victor with a Band vocal and Clyde Rogers singing lead was first and the biggest, #21 on our Chartcrush record ranking, beating Decca’s Guy Lombardo & His Royal Canadians with Don Rodney, which did best on the Jukebox chart, and Kay Kyser on Columbia with Female vocals by Gloria Wood backed by The Campus Kids.

#20 Vaughn Monroe and His Orchestra (vocal, Vaughn Monroe & The Moon Maids) – I Wish I Didn’t Love You So

Singing Bandleader Vaughn Monroe was one of the most successful acts in the late ’40s and his biggest chart hit of 1947 was his version of “I Wish I Didn’t Love You So.”

Radio preferred the two Female-sung versions of “I Wish I Didn’t Love You So:” Dinah Shore’s on Columbia and Betty Hutton’s on Capitol. But singing Bandleader Vaughn Monroe with his deep baritone on RCA-Victor was the choice for record buyers and on jukeboxes: the #20 record our Chartcrush ranking but combining all those versions’ chart action together, the #8 song of the year.

#25 Art Lund – Mam’selle

Like Buddy Clark, 6-foot-4 Baseball Player-turned-singer Art Lund served in the War and got a record deal straight away after he got out. Also like Clark, his first release, “Mam’selle,” was a massive hit.

The MGM movie studio started up MGM Records in 1946 supposedly to release soundtracks of MGM’s films, but the movie “Mam’selle” first appeared in, The Razor’s Edge, was a 20th Century Fox property, and Art Lund doesn’t sing it the film anyway. Lund’s version was first on the charts though, and the biggest hit: the #25 record on our 1947 Chartcrush ranking we counted down the top10 from this hour, and when you combine the points from all the many charting versions, 1947’s #7 song.

#29 Al Jolson – Anniversary Song

And finally, no 1947 recap would be complete without talking about Pop’s most dramatic comeback that side of Tony Bennett in the ’90s and ’00s, by one of America’s most famous and best-paid entertainers of the 1920s and star of the first movie with sound, 1927’s The Jazz Singer, Al Jolson. In Columbia Pictures’ multi-Oscar-winning biopic of him, The Jolson Story which hit theaters in 1946, he dubbed his own vocals for the actor portraying him, and “Anniversary Song” was the biggest hit from the movie.

Maybe not too surprising with such a strong nostalgia current running in the late ’40s, but in 1948, Al Jolson at age 62, was voted America’s Top Male Singer in a Variety poll up against all the top Crooners: Perry Como, Bing Crosby, Frank Sinatra.

Jolson’s own version of “The Anniversary Song” was by far the Best-Seller, #1 on that chart for six weeks. But radio by a big margin preferred Dinah Shore’s Woman’s touch, and Jukebox patrons liked the Band versions by Guy Lombardo and Tex Beneke leading Glenn Miller’s Orchestra.

Well, 1947 sure was a wild year in American Pop, huh? But that’s gonna have to do it for this edition of the Chartcrush Top Ten Countdown Show. I’ve been your host, Christopher Verdesi. Hey, be sure and visit our website, chartcrush.com, for written transcripts and streaming links for this and other Chartcrush countdown shows, plus chart run line graphs and other top-notch extras. And check us out on TikTok @Chartcrush. Every week, we count down a different year on this show, from the beginning of the charts in the 1940s all the way up to the present, so tune in again, same station, same time, for 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 on Chartcrush, we dive deep into a year in Pop music and count down the top ten songs according to our exclusive recap of the weekly pop charts published at the time in the music industry’s top trade publication and chart authority, Billboard magazine. This week on Chartcrush, we’re turning the clock back to 1992, a presidential election year, and in February, George H.W. Bush, running for a second term, did a photo op at a grocer’s convention and was on video expressing what appeared to be marvel and amazement at the computerized scanning of items at the checkout. Wow!

Well, by 1992, retail barcode scanners were already common, so in a front-page story headlined “Bush Encounters the Supermarket, Amazed,” the New York Times opinion page editor, Andrew Rosenthal, wrote that Bush “emerged from 11 years in Washington’s choicest executive mansions to confront the modern supermarket.”

Well, putting aside whether President Bush was out of touch with technology, no question that the music biz was. But ’92 was the year that  Billboard caught up by revamping its charts to reflect actual point-of-sale units captured by retail barcode scans for sales, and independently-monitored airplay data for radio spins. Up ’til ’92, the charts had been based on weekly phone surveys of record sellers and radio programmers, but now, cutting out the middleman, suddenly Heavy Metal, Hardcore Rap and Country albums were in the top ten, Alternative Rock was, well, Mainstream Rock, and Nirvana, NWA, Metallica and Garth Brooks were household names.

Soundscan, a startup under the auspices of Nielsen, the TV ratings people, pioneered barcode data collection in the music biz. They negotiated exclusives with several important retail chains that prohibited them from reporting their sales data to anyone else, including Billboard’s survey system. Which forced Billboard’s hand, and Billboard and Soundscan have been joined at the hip ever since. The album chart changed first; for the Hot100, Billboard waited ’til the last week of November ’91, the beginning of its 1992 chart year.

A decade earlier, the Sony Walkman had sped up Top40’s migration from staticky, mono AM radio to hi-fi stereo FM. But switching to FM, Top40 radio went from being music’s center of gravity on 50,000 watt blowtorch stations whose coverage areas spanned multiple states, to just another music genre on FM.

MTV came along just in the nick of time to became music’s new center of gravity through the ’80s, but by the early ’90s even that wasn’t holding, and now, without Billboard’s survey panelists manning the barricades, genres flooded the charts and so-called “crossover” became the rule, not the exception. But to the extent that there was a musical center in 1992, you’re gonna hear it this hour. An act’s gotta have reach and mass appeal to score one of the top ten songs of the year, right?

#10 Color Me Badd – All 4 Love

Well the ’90s had its share of Pop superstars, but it had more than its share of one-hit wonders, especially early in the decade. Or, as is the case with our act at #10, three-hit wonders, with the hits all happening in under a year. Here is the multicultural contemporary R&B group from Oklahoma City, Color Me Badd. Their third and final top ten hit, “All 4 Love.”

The Superbowl halftime show evolved rapidly in the early ’90s, from marching bands and Up with People, to the must-watch Pop Culture showcase it later became. The first time a top Pop act headlined was New Kids on the Block in ’91, but that got pre-empted by an ABC News Special Report about the Gulf War. For ’92 it was Gloria Estefan, Olympic skaters and a marching band in a production titled “Winter Magic.”

But the upstart Fox network, only on the air for a few years in ’92, counterprogrammed a football-themed live episode of its edgy sketch comedy show In Living Color at halftime, and tens of millions of Superbowl viewers changed the channel. The act we just heard at #10 on our Chartcrush Top Ten Countdown for 1992, Color Me Badd, was the musical guest. On the show they did their better-known breakthrough hit from ’91, “I Wanna Sex You Up,” but “All 4 Love” was their new single and it had just hit #1. Color Me Badd faded after their last top 20 hit in the Fall of ’92.

#9 Jon Secada – Just Another Day

But speaking of Gloria Estefan, next up we have a Cuban-American Singer-Songwriter she discovered in Miami. Gloria sings backup on it and her husband Emilio produced. The Spanish version was #1 on the Hot Latin chart, so despite its pretty middle-of-the-road late ’80s Pop sound, it’s actually a significant Latin Pop crossover hit at a time when those were kinda rare. It only peaked at #5 on the Hot100, but stayed in the top 40 for 30 weeks. At #9 it’s Jon Secada’s “Just Another Day.”

Jon Secada’s “Just Another Day,” the #9 song on our Chartcrush Top Ten Countdown of 1992’s top hits. Gloria and Emilio Estefan were returning the favor after Secada co-wrote and sang backup on several of their solo and Miami Sound Machine tracks in the ’80s. He came pretty close with “If You Go” in ’94, but never repeated the success of “Just Another Day.” Mostly he became a darling of Adult Contemporary radio, and after that, the Broadway stage and Latin charts.

#8 Michael Jackson – Black or White

Now, our #8 song was #1 for seven weeks through the 1991 holiday season, Thanksgiving to New Years, all the way to the middle of January: the third longest stay at #1 of the year, yet it’s only the #14 song on Billboard‘s year-end Hot100. Wait, How’s that?

Well, with the switch to Soundscan’s point-of-sale barcode data and monitored airplay for ranking the songs for the weekly charts, Billboard also changed how it ranks the year. From ’92 on, Billboard’s year-end rankings have nothing to do with how the songs performed on the weekly charts through the year. Instead, they just sum the underlying sales and airplay points, which could be different, say, for the #1 song in a strong, ultra-competitive week vs. a slow week. All weeks in reality: not created equal! Just one problem: no one else could see that underlying data.

Now here at Chartcrush, whether it’s 1950 or 2010, every year is ranked exactly the same way using the published positions on Billboard’s weekly charts. We can’t match the accuracy of summing underlying sales and spins, but what we can and do offer is a consistent ranking methodology across all the years there’ve been charts. So for ’92, the song that was #1 for seven consecutive weeks in the beginning of the year is in our top ten, and without further ado, here it is: the lead single from his eighth studio album, Dangerous, it’s Michael Jackson’s biggest chart hit since “Beat It” in ’83, “Black or White.”

Michael Jackson’s “Black or White,” #8 on our Chartcrush Top Ten Countdown for 1992. The deadly L.A. Riots hadn’t happened yet when it was a hit, but the video of Black parolee Rodney King’s beating by White and Hispanic cops after a high-speed chase had been on what seemed like continuous loop in the media for months, and the officers were on trial, so the song’s racial harmony message was right on point.

And it wasn’t just the words. Michael seemed determined to find or define a new “consensus Pop sound,” not an easy task in ’92. But the fusion of Pop Rock, Dance, New Jack Swing and Hip-Hop was the fastest chart topper since The Beatles’ “Get Back” in 1969: just three weeks. No song had yet debuted at #1: that milestone was in ’95. The song? “You Are Not Alone,” by… Michael Jackson! Incidentally, the short Rap in the middle? A mystery Rapper. “LTB,” who’s not on anything else, before or since. Well a writer at Vice decided to get to the bottom of that so he did some digging, and turns out it was the producer, Bill Botrell.

#7 P.M. Dawn – I’d Die Without You

At #7 we have the song that was #51 on Billboard’s year-end Hot100 for 1992, but this time the discrepancy has nothing to do with Soundscan or the weighting of weeks. It’s a different issue that’s always been baked into Billboard’s year-end charts: songs’ chart runs getting split when they straddle two adjacent “chart years.” The song is #51 for ’92 in Billboard, and also #43 for 1993. Obviously, neither of those scream “massive hit.” And the same thing had happened with their breakthrough hit, #1 at the end of Billboard’s 1991 chart year and it wound up at a middling #44 because the ranking couldn’t factor the second half of its chart run.

Now Billboard can’t fix this problem and continue to publish their year-end rankings before New Years, but they could go back later, once all the songs have completed their chart runs, and issue revised rankings. Just sayin’. They don’t, though, so countless “year-straddling” hits over the years have fallen through the cracks. Well, here at Chartcrush, with the benefit of hindsight we can factor every song’s entire chart run and rank it in whichever year it was strongest. So not only does that breakthough hit, “Set Adrift on Memory Bliss,” get rescued from oblivion (it’s our #6 song of 1991), this one is #7 for 1992. It’s R&B/Hip-Hop duo PM Dawn, with “I’d Die Without You.”

“I’d Die Without You,” PM Dawn repeating in the top ten on the year in back-to-back years here on the Chartcrush Top Ten Countdown Show. Early in ’92, a diss war between PM Dawn and Bronx Rapper KRS-One ended with KRS and his Boogie Down Productions posse rushing the stage, violently ejecting PM Dawn and taking over the gig. The incident generated some headlines, but didn’t affect PM Dawn’s chart mojo. “I’d Die Without You,” #3 for four weeks in the Fall and our #7 song of the year.

#6 TLC – Baby-Baby-Baby

Now, the ’90s biggest Girl Group debuted in 1992! The concept was a trio with a quirky, fun, tomboyish, Hip-Hop style to contrast against what the established Girl Groups had going on. Producers and managers put them together, but their chemistry is what made them instant stars. That, plus being on R&B’s hottest label, LaFace, and label honchos L.A. Reid and Babyface producing and co-writing several of their songs, including their big breakthrough that’s our #6 hit. The second single off their first album Ooooooohhh… On the TLC Tip, it’s TLC’s “Baby-Baby-Baby.”

TLC’s “Baby-Baby-Baby” at #6 on our Chartcrush Top Ten Countdown of 1992’s biggest hits: the only song on their debut album that doesn’t have a verse by their resident Rapper Lisa “Left Eye” Lopez. “Baby-Baby-Baby” had the misfortune of peaking at for #2 for six straight weeks behind the #1 song in our Countdown that we’re gonna hear in a few minutes, so they had to wait ’til their second album in ’95 to score their first #1, “Creep.”

#5 Snap! – Rhythm Is a Dancer

Electronic Dance Music (“EDM”) has had an interesting history on the U.S. Pop charts. For a while in the early ’90s, the Rave scene in Europe and the U.K. seemed on the verge of becoming the next big thing Stateside, with House and Techno-derived dancefloor fillers like Madonna’s “Vogue,” C + C Music Factory’s “Gonna Make You Sweat;” Londonbeat’s “I’ve Been Thinking About You;” EMF’s “Unbelievable” and Marky Mark & The Funky Bunch’s “Good Vibrations” all hitting #1 on both the Dance Club Play chart and the Hot100 in ’90 and ’91.

Now a lot’s been made of Billboard’s switch to Soundscan unleashing genres that’d previously been underperforming on the charts. With EDM, the opposite happened. After the switch there wasn’t another #1 EDM hit on the Hot100 ’til “The Macarena” in 1996! Well our #5 song never got to #1, but it was on the chart 39 weeks, and 14 in the top ten. That’s longer than any of the pre-Soundscan EDM #1s I just mentioned.

Formed in ’89 by two German producers with an ever-changing lineup of American Singers and Rappers, they scored one of the first big Eurodance/EDM hits with “The Power” in the Summer of 1990, but this one was the early ’90s’ biggest Dance crossover hit and the #1 hit of the year in Europe. It’s Snap! featuring American singer Thea Austin, “Rhythm Is a Dancer.”

Snap!’s “Rhythm Is a Dancer,” our #5 song of 1992 here on the Chartcrush Top Ten Countdown Show. It got a lot easier and a lot more affordable to create Electronic Dance Music with the proliferation of synths, MIDI and sequencers. And pagers made it possible to organize impromptu Rave parties in random places. What American EDM was missing in the early ’90s was a big, culturally galvanizing event like Lollapalooza, the touring festival that put Alternative Rock and a distinct Gen-X lifestyle front and center. Or a movie like Cameron Crowe’s Singles, set in Seattle just as Grunge was breaking through.

After “Rhythm Is a Dancer,” EDM crossover hits got pretty sporadic, and Raves, Eurodisco and even Dance Clubs slipped below the mainstream radar in the U.S., with the possible exception of Saturday Night Live‘s Roxbury Guys: Will Ferrell, Chris Kattan and Jim Carrey sometimes when he was available, bobbing their heads to Haddaway’s “What Is Love” in the car, in the bar. It took ’til the late ’00s, when American EDM festivals started drawing Woodstock-sized crowds for electronic music to return to the top of the Hot100.

#4 Vanessa Williams – Save the Best for Last

Next, a vindication and comeback for the first Black Miss America: Miss America 1984, who had to give up her crown after nude photos from a few years before showed up in the men’s magazine Penthouse. Instead of spending years fighting about it in court, though, she dropped her lawsuit and turned to music. Soon she had a #1 Dance hit with the title cut from her 1988 debut album The Right Stuff.

And “Dreamin’,” the downtempo hit from the album, made the top ten on both the Hot100 and the Adult Contemporary charts. Her Outstanding New Artist win at the 1989 NAACP Image Awards set the stage for our #4 hit. #1 for five weeks March into April, it’s Vanessa Williams, “Save the Best for Last.”

Vanessa Williams, “Save the Best for Last,” #4 on our 1992 edition of The Chartcrush Top Ten Countdown Show and Billboard’s #1 Adult Contemporary song of ’92, from Williams’ second album The Comfort Zone. Her next Hot100 top ten was “Love Is” from the first Beverly Hills 90210 soundtrack album, a duet with Brian McKnight. And that was Billboard’s #1 Adult Contemporary song of 1993: two years in a row with the #1 AC song.

She scored again in ’95 with “Colors of the Wind” from Disney’s Pocahontas and stayed hot on both the Dance and AC charts into the ’00 while also winning multiple awards for her acting roles on TV: the bitchy boss on Ugly Betty in the late ’00s and Desperate Housewives in the early ’10s. And in 2016 she was appointed head judge of Miss America, complete with a public apology.

#3 Sir Mix-a-Lot – Baby Got Back

I mentioned that thanks to Soundscan, Hip-Hop songs started regularly topping the Hot100. Well our #3 hit is “exhibit A.” As far as Pop radio was concerned, it was hobbled by, number one, being a Hip-Hop song at all, but number two, it was way too raunchy for broadcast, at least during the day, so it barely even registered on the Airplay chart. But it still topped the Hot100 for the entire month of July (five weeks), and that was thanks to all the giggling Teen Gen-X-ers who went and bought the single.

Was it a Novelty hit? Or a serious comment on female body image and racial stereotyping? Well whichever side of that ongoing debate you come down on, it certainly was iconic. In a 2002 Friends episode, Ross gets his baby daughter to laugh for the first time when he sings it to her. In ’09, it was in an ad for Burger King’s SpongeBob Kids’ Meal toys. In 2014 Nicki Minaj based her entire song “Anaconda” on a line and sample from it and scored a #2 hit. And in 2020, none other than former Alaska Governor and Veep candidate Sarah Palin sang it on The Masked Singer. Our #3 song of 1992? Seattle’s Sir Mix-a-Lot: “Baby Got Back.”

Sir Mix-a-Lot (real name Anthony Ray) was against putting out “Baby Got Back” as a single, but after the track he picked instead about police harassment went nowhere, his producer, legendary Def Jam Records founder Rick Rubin, got his pick, and that was “Baby Got Back.” It moved up the Hot100 quickly but stalled at #5 and took six weeks to inch up to #1. Once on top, though, it stayed for five weeks and racked up the most weeks in the top ten since Survivor’s “Eye of the Tiger” in ’82.

After “Baby Got Back” faded, Mix-a-Lot put out a similar song, but this time instead of butts, the focus was on the other female attribute that young straight men have been known to obsess over. That song, “Put ‘Em on the Glass,” didn’t chart anywhere, and Sir Mix-a-Lot, despite “Baby Got Back’s” enduring legacy, was a one-hit wonder.

#2 Kris Kross – Jump

OK, we’re down to #2 here on our Chartcrush Top Ten Countdown of 1992’s biggest hits, and it’s the fastest that a previously unknown act’s debut single has risen to #1 since Nebraskan Folk-Rock duo Zager & Evans’ Boomer doomsday anthem “In the Year 2525” in 1969: just four weeks! Also a duo, these two kids from Atlanta, Chris Kelly and Chris Smith, a.k.a. Mac Daddy and Daddy Mac, friends since first grade and barely into their Teens, discovered in a mall by Producer Jermaine Dupri, who first put Atlanta on the map for Hip-Hop in the ’90s.

But in ’92 Dupri, at 19, was just a few years older than the two kids. Dupri later said he’d never seen anyone so focused on being cool. So he taught them some Hip-Hop chops, produced their record in a few months, and its debut single also set a new record for weeks at #1 for a Hip-Hop track, eight. At #2 it’s Kris Kross’s “Jump.”

Anyone who had a pulse in the early ’90s remembers the two kids wearing their clothes backwards who gonna make you “jump! jump!” Unlike Zager & Evans, Kris Kross did make the charts again after their big debut hit, six more times. But “Jump” was their only top ten. Its eight-week run at #1, late April to June, spanned the destructive Rodney King riots in L.A.

#1 Boyz II Men – End of the Road

Now back at #6 we heard TLC’s big hit “Baby-Baby-Baby,” which I mentioned never hit #1 because for six weeks it was stuck behind what became the #1 song of the year 1992. Well, we’re down to #1 here on our 1992 edition of the Chartcrush Top Ten Countdown Show, and after TLC dropped down to #3, this song still had another seven weeks to go on top, which broke the Hot100 record with 13 weeks at #1.

Produced and written by Kenneth “Babyface” Edmonds and Antonio “L.A.” Reid, who also wrote and produced TLC, it’s on the same soundtrack (the Eddie Murphy romantic comedy Boomerang) that also had our #7 song, PM Dawn’s “I’d Die Without You.” Here’s the #1 song of 1992, Boyz II Men’s “End of the Road.”

“End of the Road,” Boyz II Men: their first #1 after coming close in ’91 with their debut, “Motownphilly,” and their a capella smash “It’s So Hard to Say Goodbye to Yesterday.” “End of the Road,” #1 for 13 weeks, August to November and the #1 song of the year no matter how you slice or dice it. Later in the ’90s, Boyz II Men broke their own record for weeks at #1 twice, first with “I’ll Make Love to You,” 14 weeks in 1994, and then their duet with Mariah Carey, “One Sweet Day,” 16 weeks in ’95 and ’96. That record stood ’til Lil Nas X’s “Old Town Road” racked up 19 weeks on top in 2019.

Bonus

And that’s our top ten here on our 1992 edition of the Chartcrush Top Ten Countdown Show. In the little bit of time we have left, let’s shout out the three songs that made the top ten in Billboard’s year-end Hot100, but got nudged out of our top ten.

#12 Red Hot Chili Peppers – Under the Bridge

First up, our #12 song was Billboard’s #8 song of the year: an important entry because it highlighted Alt Rock’s crossover appeal after the switchover to Soundscan.

“Under the Bridge” by Lollapalooza headliners Red Hot Chili Peppers: 12 weeks in the top ten, May to July, just before the tour got underway: the biggest Alt Rock hit on the Hot100 the year Grunge arrived with Nirvana’s breakout hit “Smells like Teen Spirit” all over MTV. “Teen Spirit” only got to #6 on the Hot100 though because the fans that made Nirvana’s Nevermind, the #3 album of the year didn’t have much use for the single.

#13 En Vogue – My Lovin’ (You’re Never Gonna Get It)

At #7, Billboard had the second hit by the ’90s first R&B Girl Group, En Vogue’s “My Lovin’ (You’re Never Gonna Get It).”

“My Lovin’ (You’re Never Gonna Get It),” En Vogue’s second top ten after arriving in 1990 with “Hold On:” the first of the modern R&B Girl Groups. TLC, SWV, Xscape, 702, Allure and Destiny’s Child… they all came after. Billboard has “My Lovin'” at #7 on the year; our ranking puts it at #13.

#11 Eric Clapton – Tears in Heaven

Billboard’s #6 song had almost the exact same chart run as Vanessa Williams’ “Save the Best for Last.” The two songs debuted a week apart, and for 20 of the next 26 weeks that they were both on the chart before exiting the same week, they were just one or two positions apart, it’s Eric Clapton’s “Tears in Heaven.”.

“Tears in Heaven” was Eric Clapton’s song for his four-year-old son Conor, killed after falling out a 53rd story window in New York. It was the most successful single of his career.

Well, I hate to end the show on such a sad note, but that’s the hour. I’ve been your host, Christopher Verdesi. Thanks for listening! Be sure to visit our website at chartcrush.com, where you’ll find written transcripts and streamable Spotify versions of this and other Chartcrush Countdown Shows, plus chart run line graphs and other legit extras. Also, check us out on TikTok @Chartcrush. Every week on this show we count down a different year from the beginning of the charts in the ’40s all the way to the present, so tune again, same station, same time, for 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 on Chartcrush, we dive deep into a year in Pop music and count down the top ten songs according to our exclusive recap of the weekly Pop charts published at the time in the music industry’s top trade publication and chart authority, Billboard magazine. This week on Chartcrush it’s 1975.

Let’s just say it: a pretty crappy year. Nixon had just resigned over Watergate. Bad recession since ’73 due to the energy crisis, but in ’75, unemployment hit 9%. The dominoes fell in Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos, and here at home, far-left terror groups were bombing government buildings and other targets in D.C., New York and elsewhere. In the deadliest terror attack on U.S. soil until 9/11 (still unsolved, but probably Yugoslavians), the bombers took out a baggage area at New York’s LaGuardia airport, killing 11. Airplane hijackings were averaging 41 a year, ’68 to ’77.

And there were not one but two assassination attempts on President Gerald Ford, both in Northern California in September, and both by women, a year after newspaper heiress Patricia Hearst had helped her kidnappers rob a bank. Manson-cultist-turned-radical-environmentalist Squeaky Fromm and wannabe revolutionary Sarah Jane Moore both spent over 30 years in prison. Moore’s attempt, just four days after Hearst was found and arrested in San Francisco.

America’s largest city was a shambles. New York hit rock bottom in 1975 when the urban decline that Soft-Rock duo Cashman & West mourned in their “American City Suite” in 1972 put the city on the edge of a fiscal cliff. In June, Police and Firefighter unions facing layoffs printed up a million “Fear City Survival Guides” (with a hooded skull on the cover!) to hand out to arriving visitors. In the Fall, the famous New York Daily News’ headline “Ford to City: Drop Dead,” after officials asked for a federal bailout.

Now you’d think movies would’ve been a refuge from all of this, right? But it was just the opposite! Some of the biggest blockbusters of the early ’70s were disaster movies that made modern life seem even more terrifying! Andromeda Strain, Poseidon Adventure, Towering Inferno, Earthquake!, Airport and its sequel Airport ’75.

But if seeing how much worse things could be wasn’t your idea of sanctuary, well, you can always take a hike in the woods, right? Back to nature! Maybe a canoe trip? Eh, not if you saw Deliverance! And forget about the beach! ’75’s top-grossing movie: Jaws! Ads for the sequel in ’78 had the tagline “Just when you though it was safe to go back in the water.” Even things you couldn’t see were out to get you, as 109 million North Americans who went to see The Exorcist learned.

Now Sports delivered the goods in ’75: Steelers, Flyers, Golden State Warriors and an epic World Series between the Reds and Red Sox. All the hype over Ali-Frazier III, the “Thrilla in Manilla,” propelled the song “Black Superman” into the Top 40 over the Summer, and the fight itself helped launch HBO and cable TV. That was only way to watch the fight live in your home. Broadcast TV didn’t get it ’til January!

But what about music? Well, ’75, like ’74, was quite a grab bag. Since the start of the Hot100 in 1958, an average of about 18 songs hit #1 per year. In ’74 there were 36, the all-time record, but ’75 had 35. All Billboard writers could say at the time to sum up the year was that “the polished smooth-yet-complex production sound” they’d noticed in ’74 was still in force.

Now some have called 1975 one of the worst years in Pop music, and the yardstick in such assessments seems to be how much “schlock” there was filling the airwaves. Schmaltzy, sappy, mawkish ballads anchored to the time they were on the radio like filled fish tanks in sixth-floor walkups.

#10 Morris Albert – Feelings

Well, ’75 had its share of those for sure, and our song at #10 as we kick off our Chartcrush Top Ten Countdown for 1975 was one of them: maybe the epitome of ’70s schlock. An entire episode of TV’s spoof talent competition The Gong Show was devoted to contestants singing just this one song. The whole show, just this one song!

Comedian Carol Burnett even did a skit where her Mama’s Family character Eunice Harper Higgins goes on The Gong Show and sings the song. And it’s been the brunt of jokes in countless movies, commercials and TV shows since. But it was a million seller on the chart five more weeks than any other song in ’75, 32. Here we go: Brazilian Morris Albert: “Feelings.”

Morris Albert’s “Feelings,” #10 on our Chartcrush Top Ten Countdown of 1975’s biggest hits. In 1986, Albert was sued by French songwriter Louis Gasté for infringing his song “Pour Toi,” so on streaming services you’ll find the song as “Feelings (Pour Toi).”

#9 Neil Sedaka – Laughter in the Rain

Now the early ’70s were very good to several early ’60s Pop stars whose careers nosedived after the Beatles hit in ’64. Chuck Berry, Ray Stevens, Paul Anka, Brook Benton, Rick Nelson, Wayne Newton and Sammy Davis Jr. all scored major hits. And newer acts doing covers of early ’60s hits: lots of those. Even 1962’s “The Monster Mash” (not a remake) had another run on the charts in ’73 and got all the way to #10. Well one latecomer to that party was our Singer-Songwriter at #9, and it took the intervention of 1975’s hottest Pop star. Details after the song. At #9 it’s Neil Sedaka’s “Laughter in the Rain.”

Behind Neil Sedaka’s ’70s comeback? None other than Elton John. Sedaka needed a new label in the U.S., and as it happened, Elton, a big fan, was starting one. So after they hit it off at a party in London, Elton’s new Rocket label put out a compilation of Sedaka’s recent U.K. releases that’d never been released stateside, and on that album, our #9 song, “Laughter in the Rain.” It took three and a half months to get to #1, but year-end rankings do favor slow-burners like that, so it’s among the top ten on the year.

Sedaka’s follow-up was also a hit: the upbeat, funky “Bad Blood,” which rocketed to #1 in just a few weeks with its prominent backing vocals by none other than Elton John. By the way, Sedaka also wrote… didn’t perform but wrote… the #1 song in our countdown, straight ahead on our 1975 edition of the Chartcrush Top Ten Countdown Show.

#8 Elton John – Island Girl

How hot was Elton John in ’75? Well, Billboard wasn’t doing an Artist ranking that factored albums and singles yet, but Elton would’ve won it hands down. His first of two albums released in ’75, Captain Fantastic and the Brown Dirt Cowboy, was the first album ever to debut at #1. And then his second of the year did it too: Rock of the Westies. Oh, and his Greatest Hits set released at the end of ’74? That was ’75’s #1 album. So given all that, hardly a surprise that he has two songs in our top ten. At #8 is the lead single from that second album, Rock of the Westies, it’s “Island Girl.”

Dodger Stadium in L.A. hadn’t hosted a concert in a decade, but at the end of the year, Elton John played to over 100,000 two nights in a row there wearing his blue and white sequined Dodger uniform with ELTON over the number “1” on the back. Elton’s sound had been called “unclassifiable” because it drew from so many currents. But his fashion, attitude and showmanship, pure British Glam, tied it all together and gave him the space to switch up musical styles like he changed wardrobe and crazy sunglasses.

No one was confused. “Island Girl” hit #1 the week after Elton’s sold-out Dodger Stadium shows. Now since a good chunk of its chart run extended into Billboard’s 1976 “chart year,” don’t look for it on Billboard’s year-end Hot100 for ’75.

#7 Silver Convention – Fly, Robin, Fly

Ditto our next cut at #7. See, in order to get its year-end issue out before New Years, Billboard has to call an end to what it calls its “chart year,” usually in November. That doesn’t affect songs whose chart runs are all within the chart year, but for songs that are still on the charts, weeks after the cut-off get kicked into the following year.

Well for our Chartcrush rankings, we factor every song’s entire chart run into whichever calendar year it earned most of its points. So “Island Girl” takes its proper place at #8, and what Billboard has as its #14 song of 1976 gets rescued from its year-staddling oblivion and lands at #7 on our 1975 ranking.

Which is awesome, because it’s a key puzzle piece in how Disco evolved. Producers Kenny Gamble and Leon Huff laid down the template for Disco with their “Philly Soul” sound on hits like MFSB’s “TSOP (The Sound of Philadelphia)” and The Three Degrees’ “When Will I See You Again,” both of those top five hits in 1974.

But when Munich, Germany-based producers Sylvester (“Silver”) Levay and Michael Kunze decided to try their hand at the hot new Philly Soul sound, they filtered it through their minimalist German sensibilities, and what came out was something very different: a simplified version of Philly Soul with just a beat, a bass, a piano and some string flourishes.

But instead of being regarded as an inferior imitation, it turned out to be closer to the mark of what clubgoers wanted: the blissful hypnosis and sweaty, euphoric escape that can only come from losing yourself on the dancefloor. And for that, as it turned out, when it comes to music, less is more. Around Thanksgiving, Kunz and Lamay’s record hit #1 for three weeks. Here it is: #7, The Silver Convention, “Fly, Robin, Fly.”

The Silver Convention’s “Fly, Robin, Fly” at #7 on our Chartcrush Top Ten Countdown of 1975’s top hits. The simple, mantra-like lyrics, only six words repeated ad nauseum, suited the non-English-speaking singers the producers lined up just fine, and it became a Disco trope. At the same time, another Munich-based producer, Italian-born synthpop and EDM pioneer Giorgio Moroder, was working with soon-to-be American Disco superstar Donna Summer on her debut. “Love to Love You Baby” hit the charts in December destined for #2 despite its scandalous 23 orgasms (the BBC counted). And Silver Convention were back in the top five in the Spring of ’76 with “Get Up and Boogie.”

#6 KC and The Sunshine Band – That’s the Way (I Like It)

Now a week before “Fly, Robin, Fly” hit #1, another early Disco record beat them to the top, despite having debuted two weeks later. Its chart run also spanned ’75 into ’76, so again, don’t look for it in Billboard’s year-end top ten, but factoring its full chart run in the year it earned the majority of its ranking points, as we do with all songs here on Chartcrush, it comes out the #6 song of 1975. From Miami, not Germany, they’d already scored with their debut “Get Down Tonight,” in August but were back late in the year with an even bigger hit. It’s KC & The Sunshine Band’s “That’s the Way (I Like It).”

KC & The Sunshine Band’s “That’s The Way (I Like It)” beat “Fly, Robin, Fly” to #1, but then it rose to #1 for another week immediately after Silver Convention dropped out of the top spot. And with Donna Summer’s “Love to Love You Baby” scaling up the charts at the same time, the media didn’t quite know what to make of what Time called in print, “sex rock.” The word “disco,” not yet widely used to describe a style of music; still just a shortened form of “discotheque,” a public place where records are played.

By the way, the Bee Gees’ first Disco hit, “Jive Talkin’,” also one of 1975’s 35 #1 hits, for two weeks in August. That just misses our countdown at #12.

#5 Eagles – One of These Nights

But they were in the studio recording “Jive Talkin'” in early ’75 when our next act was making our #5 record right there in the same studio, North Miami’s Criteria Studios. On “Jive Talkin'” The Bee Gees followed the advice of their producer Arif Mardin and took things in the more funky, R&B-based direction that made them Disco superstars.

But it rubbed off a little on our act at #5, who were also in transition, looking to shake off Country and embrace Rock. That despite their very Countryish song “Best of My Love” having just become their first top five on its way to becoming their first #1 in March. Well mission accomplished shaking off Country, but there’s a little bit of Soul in our #5 hit too. And it was even bigger than “Best of My Love:” top ten from July to September and #1 for a week in August. It’s The Eagles’ “One of These Nights.”

“One of These Nights,” #5 on our 1975 edition of the Chartcrush Top Ten Countdown Show: the title track and lead single from The Eagles fourth album, and the stepping stone between the Country of “Best of My Love” in ’74 and “Hotel California” in ’77.  Their new guitarist Don Felder with that solo. And they were about to add yet another Rock guitarist to the lineup, Joe Walsh from The James Gang, after the Country purist in the band, co-founder, banjo and pedal steel player Bernie Leadon, reportedly poured a beer on bandmate Glen Frey before quitting over the group’s new direction.

#4 Freddy Fender – Before the Next Teardrop Falls

Our Singer at #4 was trying to avoid doing Country too, toiling away on a Tejano Rock/Swamp Pop album and playing clubs in Corpus Christi, Texas in ’74 after cutting records for 13 years without a hit, when New Orleans producer Huey Meaux approached him about singing over a backing track he’d produced of a song written in 1967 and already recorded and released (with little success) by over 30 artists including Charley Pride and Jerry Lee Lewis.

Meaux was an important guy in the music biz in the South, so he did it, but with a twist, and the record came out on Meaux’s Crazy Cajun Records and was a hit in Houston, so ABC-Dot picked it up nationally, and it topped first the Country chart in March, and then the Hot100 at the end of May. The twist? A verse in Spanish. The singer is Tejano. Born Baldemar Huerta, he changed his name circa 1959 to the hot new brand of guitars and amps all the cool cats in Rock ‘n Roll were playing at the time, it’s Freddy Fender at #4: “Before the Next Teardrop Falls.”

Freddy Fender at #4 on our Chartcrush Top Ten Countdown of 1975’s top Pop hits, “Before the Next Teardrop Falls.” He followed it up with an update of a song he’d written and first released when he was in his early twenties doing Rockabilly, “Wasted Days and Wasted Nights.” That got to #8 in September. He faded from the Hot100 after that, but charted nearly 20 more hits on the Country charts into the ’80s. Not bad for a guy who didn’t want to do Country!

#3 Elton John – Philadelphia Freedom

Now of course 1976 was America’s bicentennial, but the celebration (such as it was) was already underway in ’75. I say “such as it was” because with so little to celebrate about America in the here and now in the mid-’70s, kinda hard to get those patriotic juices flowing.

Still, there were bicentennial quarters, The Freedom Train, tall ships, the movie Rocky, a big parade with Johnny Cash, a new Liberty Bell donated by Queen Elizabeth II for the occasion, lots of fireworks, and for Pop fans, a big #1 single by the hottest name in music, who strenuously denies that it had anything whatsoever to do with American patriotism or the bicentennial. But fans didn’t get that memo, or didn’t care. It’s the closest thing there was to a bicentennial anthem on the U.S. Pop charts: Elton John’s “Philadelphia Freedom.”

“Philadelphia Freedom,” Elton John. Lyrics by John’s lyricist Bernie Taupin. A single-only release that besides K-Tel’s Music Express hits compilation, didn’t appear on any album until Elton’s Greatest Hits, Volume 2 set in 1977. Again, not intended as a bicentennial record, and to dispel the notion, the 45 label says “with Love to B.J.K. and the sound of Philadelphia.” Which made as much sense to fans as most of Taupin’s lyrics in the song. That’s not Bernie’s fault though. His only instruction? “Please write a song called ‘Philadelphia Freedom’ for me? Thank you, Elton.”

Well, the Philadelphia Freedoms was feminist icon Billie Jean King’s tennis team, but Taupin had no idea about that, so the lyrics have nothing to do with tennis, Billie Jean King or for that matter “The Sound of Philadelphia.” Music fans would’ve had more of a clue had Elton chosen to abbreviate that on the label instead of “B.J.K.” The Philly Soul instrumental “T.S.O.P.” had been a #1 hit for Gamble and Huff’s M.F.S.B. studio aggregation in ’74 and was the theme of Soul Train. Gosh, what a mess! But it was the bicentennial and Elton John’s new single was “Philadelphia Freedom,” so fans drew their own conclusions. “God Bless America!”

Footnote: Gamble and Huff’s M.F.S.B. aggregation was out with an album titled “Philadelphia Freedom” that had an American flag on the cover and an instrumental version of “Philadelphia Freedom,” and cracked the top 40 on the album chart heading into ’76.

#2 Glen Campbell – Rhinestone Cowboy

Well we’re down to #2 here on our 1975 edition of Chartcrush, the first record since Jimmy Dean’s “Big Bad John” in 1961 to top the Country and Pop charts at the same time. Not surprising that ’75 would be the year that drought was be broken: Country crossover was big in the mid-’70s. And not only that, Trucker culture and CB radios were all the rage, with C.W. McCall’s “Convoy” also among 1975’s 35 #1 hits (also a #1 Country Hit, but not at the same time). And the movie “White Line Fever” starring Jan-Michael Vincent as an independent long-haul trucker becoming a surprise box office hit. Smokey & The Bandit came out just a couple years later.

At #2, not a trucker song, but a surprise comeback by a guy who got hot on the charts after teaming up with songwriter Jimmy Webb in the late ’60s, who had his own TV variety show for three years and even played opposite John Wayne in True Grit. His phone hadn’t been ringing for a few years by ’75 though, so he had an idea how the protagonist in the song felt. At #2, it’s Glen Campbell’s “Rhinestone Cowboy.”

No one really saw “Rhinestone Cowboy” coming. Glen Campbell recorded it for the album he was working on, but then a programmer with L.A.’s biggest top 40 radio station, KHJ, saw him play it live on a TV charity telethon and called Capitol Records to get a copy. Until it took off on radio, no one was even planning to release it as a single!

Joining Glen Campbell in the studio to record the song was a loose group of professional L.A. session players that is today known as The Wrecking Crew. They played on thousands of records in the ’60s and early ’70s, but as studio musicians hired basically by the hour, they were never credited on any of them. Campbell himself had paid his bills as a Wrecking Crew guitarist before becoming a star in his own right. “Rhinestone Cowboy” had the most weeks in the Top 40 of any 1975 hit (18) with two weeks at #1 in September: the #2 song on our Chartcrush Top Ten Countdown of 1975’s top hits.

#1 Captain and Tennille – Love Will Keep Us Together

Now our #1 song, also recorded with Wrecking Crew musicians, but one of the last. As studios went from four to 16 tracks in the ’70s, producers no longer needed an entire ensemble playing live, so time and money-saving pre-mic’d setups like The Wrecking Crew became obsolete. But what a way to go out, huh? The #2 and #1 hits of the year!

And at #1, the debut single and the first of eight top 20 hits ’75 to ’80 by a husband-and-wife duo who scored their own prime-time network TV variety show after this song was a smash. The #1 record of 1975, both in our Chartcrush ranking and according to Billboard, it’s The Captain and Tennille’s “Love Will Keep Us Together.”

Didja hear that callout just now? Toni Tennille subbing “Sedaka’s back” for one of the “da da da’s” in the fadeout? How Hip-Hop of her! Sedaka, of course, Neil Sedaka, who wrote the song, and who’d just scored his own big comeback hit early in ’75 with his song we heard back at #9, “Laughter in the Rain.”

Notwithstanding the composition or The Wrecking Crew’s involvement though, it was Darryl Dragon (a.k.a. “The Captain’s”) pioneering synthesizer work that really made the song leap out of the speakers and get noticed in early ’75. The synth bass sound that opens the song and plays throughout: no one had ever heard anything quite like that before, especially on a Top 40 record, and the solo was pretty cutting-edge too. Stations in Alabama, Kentucky and Ohio were playing it for a few weeks before the big California stations added it, but once that happened it was everywhere.

Darryl Dragon and Toni Tennille met as keyboard virtuosos in The Beach Boys touring band before teaming up as a duo for gigs at a restaurant in Encino, California. That and a self-released record got them signed to A&M Records, the Carpenters’ label. Another superstar, Roberta Flack, had gotten her start as a Lounge act in a pub in D.C. earlier in the ’70s. Apparently, people actually paid attention to live music in restaurants in those days! When “Por Amor Viviremos,” the Spanish version of “Love Will Keep Us Together” charted, it was the first time that two versions of the same song by the same artist were on the Hot100 simultaneously.

Bonus

Well that’s our top ten countdown. Now due to the two Disco “year-straddlers” coming into our top ten, plus “Island Girl” and some differences in ranking methodology, four songs that made the top ten in Billboard’s 1975 year-end Hot100 got bumped out of ours, so let’s shout those out.

#23 John Denver – Thank God I’m a Country Boy

At #10, Billboard had a rollicking live version of a song by one of the early ’70s’ top Singer-Songwriters, #23 on our Chartcrush ranking: John Denver’s “Thank God I’m a Country Boy.”

John Denver also had a double-A-sided single on the charts late Summer into the Fall: a 45 where both sides are hits. In ’75, Billboard’s policy was to chart the side was getting more airplay. So a week after “I’m Sorry” dropped down to #2, the other side, “Calypso,” took over on the Hot100. Now if they’d been combining sides of records like that for chart positions as was their policy in other eras, one of those two songs would’ve definitely been in the top ten on the year. Oh well! Without access to Billboard’s underlying Airplay data though, nothing we can do to separate them out.

#11 David Bowie – Fame

Billboard’s #7 song of 1975 just misses our Chartcrush top ten at #11, something completely different on your radio: David Bowie’s “Fame.”

Former Beatle John Lennon was hanging with Bowie in the studio and supplied those falsetto “Fame’s” heard throughout. Bowie described “Fame” as “plastic funk … the squashed remains of ethnic music as it survives in the age of Muzak Rock, written and sung by a white Limey.”

#14 Earth, Wind & Fire – Shining Star

Well, as if to balance out Bowie’s “Plastic Funk” at #7, Billboard‘s #6 song of the year is some legit Funk, Earth, Wind & Fire’s “Shining Star.”

According to Rolling Stone, Earth, Wind & Fire redefined the sound of African-American Pop in the mid ’70s, and “Shining Star” was their biggest Hot100 hit of the ’70s, #14 on our Chartcrush ranking.

#17 Frankie Valli – My Eyes Adored You

And finally, Billboard’s #5 song (#17 on our ranking) was another major comeback by an early ’60s legend, Four Season Frankie Valli’s “My Eyes Adored You.”

Now unlike Neil Sedaka, whose last top 40 hit before “Laughter in the Rain” was all the way back in 1963, Frankie Valli didn’t hit his commercial slump ’til 1968, but a slump is a slump, and Motown wouldn’t release the record. So he bought the master and put it out on a start-up label. Well it took four months to get to #1, but after that, not only was Frankie Valli back; so was his group The Four Seasons. Their “Who Loves You,” our #40 song of 1975.

And that’s gonna have to be a wrap for our 1975 edition of the Chartcrush Top Ten Countdown Show. I’ve been your host, Christopher Verdesi. On our website, chartcrush.com, you can find written transcripts and links to stream this and other Chartcrush countdown shows on Spotify, plus chart run line graphs and other dyn-o-mite extras. Also, check us out on TikTok @Chartcrush. Every week, we count down a different year from the beginning ofthe charts in the 1940s all the way up to the present, so tune again, same station, same time, for another edition of Chartcrush.

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