Charting the peaks of pop history with ‘The Number Ones’

An interview with writer Tom Breihan about his new book

View this email online Nov. 26, 2022 by Marissa Lorusso This week, we’re sharing an interview with Tom Breihan, senior editor at Stereogum and author of the new book The Number Ones. Courtesy of Hachette Books In early 2018, Tom Breihan, senior editor at Stereogum, started counting down. Specifically, he was tracking hits: In a column called “The Number Ones,” he set out to write about every single song that had ever been a No. 1 hit on Billboard’s Hot 100 chart, in chronological order.  The Hot 100 was created in 1958, and since then, more than 1,000 songs have hit No. 1. After four years of writing about hit after hit, multiple times every week, Breihan hasn’t quite caught up to the present; this week his column covered songs (by Twista and Outkast) that topped the chart in February, 2004. But in the meantime, he’s written a book, which came out last week. Also called The Number Ones, it pares down the column’s sprawling focus to track the history of the chart in just 20 pivotal No. 1 hits — from Chubby Checker’s “The Twist” to BTS’ “Dynamite,” with chapters on girl groups, The Beatles, Prince, Britney Spears, T-Pain and more along the way.  “The Hot 100 has never been a perfect barometer for measuring the musical moment,” Breihan writes in the book. Still, he says, there’s “something romantic” about the idea of a No. 1 hit — “about the idea that, at any given moment, there’s one song that’s playing more than any other on our car radios, dancing through our brains, and shaping our memories.”  My colleagues and I are in the midst of thinking, talking and arguing (politely) about the songs and albums that topped the charts of our collective hearts as we ready our package on the best music of the year, so I decided to turn this Thanksgiving weekend edition of the newsletter over to a conversation with Breihan about the process of covering all these hits and how his book came together. Newsletter continues after sponsor message Marissa Lorusso: In your Stereogum column, you’re chronicling every single song to ever hit No. 1 on the Billboard Hot 100. For this book, you scaled down, selecting 20 songs to cover in-depth. What made you choose this set of 20? Tom Breihan: I wanted to look at the moments where pop history changed, so I picked 20 songs that represent different moments of evolution. Sometimes, the songs themselves changed everything. Sometimes, the songs merely reflect big changes that were already happening. Usually, it's a little of both. With something like the Beatles' "I Want To Hold Your Hand," it must've been pretty clear that popular culture changed overnight. But a song like Soulja Boy's "Crank That (Soulja Boy)" shows a different kind of change. It reflected a new reality where a teenage kid making music on a laptop could suddenly become a pop star if the stars aligned. With both songs, though, the conditions had to be exactly right for these big leaps, and I wanted the book to tell the story of those conditions, as well as the stories of the songs themselves. Were there any notable surprises for you in the process of writing about these 20 songs? Did your research about any of them challenge your perception about a particular artist or scene, or change your understanding of the impact that one song could have on popular culture? I've learned all kinds of things while researching these songs! More than 1,000 songs have hit No. 1 since Billboard started tallying up the Hot 100, and all of those songs have fascinating and often unlikely stories. Digging into T-Pain and Auto-Tune, for instance, took me down a whole rabbit hole of all the different ways that people have used technology to warp and distend the human voice. Auto-Tune was supposed to be this invisible thing, this slight electronic tweak that would imperceptibly help singers remain in tune. But the product hadn't even been out for a year before singers and producers started using it to make those voices sound intentionally unnatural, using that strobing robot-voice effect from Cher's "Believe." Now, the pop charts are totally dominated by singers who use Auto-Tune the supposedly wrong way. I love that. I imagine this process made you really consider what it can mean for a song to hit No. 1 – what it means for that song’s place in popular culture, and for an artist’s career and their legacy. But you also mention that there’s likely an entire book to be written about tracks that didn’t quite reach the top of the charts. With that in mind: Are there any songs you wish were No. 1 hits, but never made it? There are so many! There's probably a whole book just in the songs that made it to No. 2 but didn't quite go all the way: "Shop Around," "Like a Rolling Stone," "What's Going On," "Dancing in the Dark," "Nuthin' But a 'G' Thang," "Since U Been Gone." Popular tastes can be truly strange and arbitrary, and that's one of the reasons that they're so fascinating. For a song to reach No. 1, it has to come along at exactly the right time. Plenty of legends never made it to No. 1, and plenty of forgotten oddities made it to the top. That's one of the reasons I love writing about this stuff — figuring out what was going on in the weeks when those forgotten oddities reached No. 1 and why those classics didn't quite go all the way. I’m sure you spent a lot of time listening to these 20 songs while you were writing the book. Outside of that, though, we always like to ask: What soundtracked your writing process? When I'm writing about music, I try to listen to music that's at least someone connected to what I'm talking about. When I'm not working, I tend to gravitate to more visceral, elemental stuff like hardcore and Memphis rap. But if I'm writing about Chubby Checker, I feel like I need to fully immerse myself in early-'60s dance-craze hits, just to fully get lost in that context. Finally, what do you hope readers take away from this book? I guess the main point of the book is that pop music is a strange beast, one that's constantly evolving while remaining rooted in a few basic ideas and impulses. The conditions of the world change, but people still want to hear songs about falling in love and breaking up and dancing. Those expressions can take radically different forms over the years, but big, bright pop songs all exist within the same continuum. The first song in this book is Chubby Checker's "The Twist," and the last is BTS's "Dynamite." Those songs are separated by 60 years, by all sorts of advancements in technology and communications and global politics. But both songs aim to do the exact same thing. And when both songs hit No. 1, they both entered into the same long cultural conversation. Listen to your local NPR station. Visit NPR.org to hear live radio from WUFT 89.1 (edit station). Need a new playlist? Follow NPR Music on Spotify and Apple Music What do you think of today's email? 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