Back in 1997, when I was a critic for CMJ, I led off my review of a new album by vintage Britpoppers the Sundays with the following sideswipe at another band:
“In the five years since their last album, [the Sundays] watched the Cranberries swipe their sound and turn it into three obscenely popular and dreck-filled albums.”
I can’t front: I had a soft spot for the Cranberries’ light-as-air Top 10 smash “Linger.” But I could never get past the fact that the Sundays, a better band with one major alternative hit to their name (the downy, warm-blanket 1990 Modern Rock chart-topper “Here’s Where the Story Ends”), had failed to cross over to the U.S. Top 40 while Dolores O’Riordan rampaged across my radio dial. The ’Berries weren’t awful, just… a little undeserving, and massively benefiting from someone else’s sound.
This week—unless he’s too busy counting his Twilight soundtrack money or canoodling with the missus—Ben Gibbard is probably feeling something similar. It’s got to be a bit galling that Owl City’s “Fireflies,” the new No. 1 song on Billboard’s Hot 100, is a candied replica of a sound he and Jimmy Tamborello codified six years ago.
Again, I can’t front: on a Top 40 radio dial awash in Black Eyed Peas’ faux-hop and Miley Cyrus’s shrill Autotunage, “Fireflies” is a nice contrast. But it’s basically The Postal Service for Dummies, and it’s mystifying how easily it shot to No. 1 during the same decade when “Such Great Heights,” which some of us consider one of the best-written pop songs of the ’00s, didn’t even grace the Hot 100.
But you don’t have to be a Gibbard fan to still find Owl City’s feat bizarre. Because even if you’ve never heard of the Postal Service, “Fireflies” represents a head-scratching rarity: a No. 1 hit by a solo white guy with no other radio format to call home. MORE »
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Such Great Hoots? Owl City Is A Rare Boy-Pop Chart-Topper
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Boy Least Likely: Jay Sean Sinks Black Eyed Peas’ Titanic Run
Remember Lost in Space? What a timeless film: William Hurt, Mimi Rogers, Heather Graham, and TV greats Lacey Chabert and Matt LeBlanc. Back in 1998, there was such excitement for this cinematic recreation of the classic ’60s CBS series.
What’s that? You say you don’t remember this bit of Clinton-era movie magic? Or…you do, vaguely — but you seem to recall that it kind of blew chunks?
Well, how could that be? After all, Lost in Space was the movie that evicted Titanic, the highest-grossing and Oscar-winningest movie of all time, from the top of the U.S. box office after a record-setting, still unbeaten run.
This bit of throwaway trivia (regarding a movie that, all kidding aside, was a serious flop) leaps to mind as I consider the song that finally terminates the Black Eyed Peas’ half-year run atop the Billboard Hot 100.
Jay Sean’s “Down,” to be fair, isn’t half as bad a song as Lost in Space was a movie. It’s a pleasant little ditty, a Chris Brown‒like midtempo jam with a not-embarrassing supporting rap from prodigal chart hero Lil Wayne. London native Sean — born Kamaljit Singh Jhooti — also earns the happy status as one of the few people of South Asian descent to top our singles chart, after a successful half-decade career hitting charts in the United Kingdom and India.
Still, there’s no question that the Hot 100 win by “Down,” over a very competitive field of songs-in-waiting, has less to do with love for the track than with the Peas at last letting go. Jay Sean should enjoy the victory he’s eked out, because it will likely be short-lived. MORE »
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Which Song Has The Best Chance To End The Black Eyed Peas’ Reign Of Hot 100 Terror?
Now that the summer has ended, and the Black Eyed Peas have reached the half-year mark at the No. 1 spot on Billboard’s Hot 100, it’s time to start thinking about who could knock them off. While looking for insight on which artists could achieve this heretofore-impossible feat, I ran across a Newsweek blog post that was seemingly written by someone who hasn’t really looked at a copy of Billboard in months—i.e., a dude who really thinks that Mariah Carey’s D.O.A. cover of Foreigner’s “I Want To Know What Love Is” is going to burn up the charts, despite it sounding not so much “radio ready” as it is “ready for a time-travel trip to a 20th-century dentist’s office.” To clear things up a bit, Idolator’s resident chart expert Chris Molanphy and I took some IM time and tried to figure out which artists realistically had a chance of knocking off the Peas. Lady GaGa? Jason DeRulo? Britney? Nobody??? Our thoughts, after the jump. MORE »
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Letting Her Finish: Taylor Swift Completes Country’s Pop-Chart Comeback
In his 1990s heyday, Garth Brooks refused to release even his biggest songs, from “Friends in Low Places” to “Shameless,” as singles. Sure, it pumped up his album sales. And mostly, he was following the Nashville convention at the time, wherein country hits were generally released only as noncommercial 45’s for jukeboxes.
But Brooks was no ordinary country act; he was the bestselling ’90s act of any genre, period. If anyone could have sold truckloads of singles like a pop act, it would have been him. No, Brooks eschewed them, in part, to prove a point: in interviews, he acknowledged that singles would have made him eligible for Billboard’s Hot 100, and Brooks was proud that the bulk of his blockbuster sales came from the country radio audience alone.
Brooks’s chip-on-shoulder attitude was emblematic of most ’90s Nashville stars, who nursed still-fresh memories of the Urban Cowboy fad of the late ’70s and early ’80s. That’s when Kenny Rogers, Dolly Parton, Eddie Rabbitt and Juice Newton scored huge crossover Top 40 hits — before the pop audience abruptly fled in droves (blame MTV and Michael Jackson). For the rest of the ’80s, country stars like Alabama and the Judds sold albums on the strength of county radio alone.
A proud country star, Brooks danced with the audience that brung him. (Well, except for that Chris Gaines thing, but that’s a topic for another day.) But as the ’90s veered toward the ’00s, bit by bit, country acts were seduced to the pop side of the dial again.
So think of this week’s charts as the culmination of a two-decade pendulum swing. For the first time since probably “Islands in the Stream,” the most-played song on American radio is a country tune — sung by America’s new sweetheart, who, usurping rappers aside, just put her first MTV Video Music Award on the mantle. MORE »
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Belting Like It’s 1989: Mariah And Whitney Enjoy (Fleeting) Chart Redemption
We complain often around here about the mainstream media’s tendency to oversimplify music stories in their quest for an easy headline. This week, Billboard’s Hot 100 and Billboard 200 suggest splashy headlines that practically write themselves: Return of the Big-Voiced Divas!
Topping the album chart is Whitney Houston’s much-dissected comeback effort I Look to You, her first No. 1 disc in more than 16 years. And breaking into the Top 10 on the songs chart is her onetime rival and duet partner, Mariah Carey, with the beleaguered pre-album track “Obsessed” — the single that might bring her one step closer to tying the Beatles’ all-time record for Hot 100 chart-toppers.
So: mission accomplished, right? We can pretend pegged jeans and Bill Clinton are back in style, because Diva Era Redux is on? (Why not: Melrose Place is on the tube again!)
Sure, let’s let the two aging pop queens enjoy their week of glory; in Houston’s case especially, it’s earned (and all the intense press Carey’s been getting lately almost makes me feel for her). But a close look at the numbers that brought them back to the winners’ circle suggests that we might not be talking much about these two come Christmas. MORE »
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Seasonal Allergies: Black Eyed Peas Dominate Hot 100 All Summer Long
As we approach the end of a summer in which some (including including our esteemed editor) claim that there was no one Song of Summer thanks to Michael Jackson looming large in the afterlife, we are a few weeks away from a rare act of chart dominance: Total Hot 100 ownership by a single act for every week of a calendar season.
The Black Eyed Peas have held the top spot on Billboard’s flagship chart for 21 weeks, so long that they’ve already set a new record for consecutive dominance by a single act (beating Usher). Billboard has celebrated that feat with copious coverage.
But for cultural critics who care less about raw chart statistics and more about how said numbers reflect the Zeitgeist, owning an entire summer lock, stock and barrel is a more interesting accomplishment. Depending on whether you define “summer” as going from Memorial Day to Labor Day or from June 21 to Sept. 22, the Peas either have this feat locked up or are just a few weeks away from it.
If they actually make it all the way to mid-September, the Peas will be the first credited artist (not just writer or featured act) to dominate for a full American summer. But several other acts have come pretty close. MORE »
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What About Their Friends: Top 10 Debutantes Have Famous Pals to Thank
The charts are in a bit of a Dog Days slumber, so let’s try a little trivia: What’s the most oft-recurring word on Billboard’s Hot 100 over the last decade? I’m thinking of a word that appeared virtually never prior to, say, 1990 and eventually became ubiquitous. “Remix”? “Tha”/“Da”? “Dre”? “T-Pain”?
No, the most common word on the chart, pretty much every week, is “Featuring.”
This week, for example, 16 songs with “featuring” credits are on the Hot 100—17 if you count a “duet with” credit on Keyshia Cole’s latest single with Monica. (But then it goes back down to 16 if you exclude the craven Pussycat Dolls single “featuring” existing lead singer Nicole Scherzinger, a la Diana Ross in ’67 or George Michael in ’85.)
A dozen of these tracks, unsurprisingly, come from the worlds of R&B and hip-hop – genres where the team-up is standard operating procedure for both emerging acts (Drake, Kid Cudi) and veterans (T.I., Mary J. Blige). On this week’s Hot R&B/Hip-Hop Songs chart, “featuring” appears no less than 37 times.
Back on the Hot 100, three of this week’s “featurers” are in the Top 10, and two are brand-new to the winners’ circle. Examining just these three tracks, you get a sense of the power of the featured-artist credit. Simply put, in pop music, there are friends, and there are friends. All three of these singles benefit to some degree from the name(s) to the right of the magic word. MORE »
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Brake The Drake? “Degrassi” Alum Scales Chart Despite Online Stumbling Blocks
When the music story of 2009 is written, the year’s debutante queen and king will be Lady GaGa and Drake, who have treated Billboard’s Hot 100 as their playground lately. Each is a lock for a Best New Artist Grammy nomination next winter, because each is exactly the sort of not-too-innovative, chart-friendly act the Recording Academy routinely rewards.
For both acts, however, the path to the Top 10 has been a bit of a slog. GaGa’s on a roll now, but she spent most of 2008 watching her debut “Just Dance” creep up the Hot 100 before its January 2009 triumph; each of her chart-toppers needed an abnormally long time to scale the list. Her latest, “LoveGame,” has had the easiest rise of all, even as it peaked below the top slot.
Drake is poised to join GaGa as a debutante chart-topper with “Best I Ever Had” (No. 2), if he can get past the Black Eyed Peas. Compared with the Lady, the former Degrassi: The Next Generation cast member has had an easier time, exploding into the Top 10 with “Best” and the Lil Wayne-backed Young Money single “Every Girl.”
But even Drake has had bumps along the way—in particular, a week in which “Best” took a one-week, Estelle-like swoon thanks to a dispute over who was allowed to release his songs on iTunes. He’s more than recovered, but the mix-up and the song’s temporary plummet show how critical digital sales are to the Hot 100.
I don’t normally talk here about technology or digital rights, but in the wake of Amazon’s disastrous recall of two George Orwell e-books last week, it’s worth exploring what happened to Drake’s hit and what it means for chart tabulation and the songs we buy. MORE »
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The Invisible Glove: Jackson Presides Over Parallel-Universe Charts
What’s stronger and more impregnable than the news judgment of network television, the fiscal wisdom of Los Angeles City Hall, or a celebrity’s last will and testament?
Answer: Billboard’s chart rules.
Even as the early summer of 2009 has seen TV newscasters ignore global unrest in favor of Michael Jackson death coverage; L.A. spend millions amid a state budget crisis to police a Jackson memorial; and Jackson’s heirs treat his final documented wishes as mere suggestions, Billboard has not budged.
Since the early ’90s, the magazine has ruled that songs and albums more than a couple of years old will not appear on its flagship lists, the Hot 100 or the Billboard 200, respectively. That goes even if an old disc is outselling every current title, or if an old song is booming out of car radios from coast to coast.
I don’t blame Billboard for standing firm on its rules amid all the Jackson hoopla, but it has made the last couple of weeks surreal for chart-watchers like me. The two big lists have looked placid on the surface, but everybody knows the real action is elsewhere: Jackson has had the top-selling album(s) for two weeks now (and possibly a third soon), and his songs have earned Top 10-level sales and airplay — none of which is reflected on these flagship charts.
But nothing’s stopping us from imagining what these lists would look like if Jackson were allowed to appear on them. If he’d been allowed on last week’s Hot 100, for example, Jackson would have beaten a 45-year-old record by the Fab Four. Let’s explore what both of the big charts would have looked like in this parallel universe. MORE »
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Chartwalker: Why Billboard Geeks Remain Fond of Michael Jackson
I’ll probably always remember where I was when I heard the news of Michael Jackson’s death, if only for the specificity of the circumstances: I was on a plane back from Los Angeles on Thursday afternoon when the news broke on my seatback TV. I’d boarded the plane planning to spend the bulk of my time writing this chart column, and I was all set to focus on the usual Billboard happenings. But that quickly went out the window.
Within minutes of turning on the news on my seatback monitor, an MSNBC newscaster began rattling off a list of Jackson’s many awards and achievements, some (“Best-Selling Album Worldwide”) more impressive than others (“Grammy for Shortform Video of the Year, 1988”).
This is a natural and understandable biographical thread for Jackson encomia to pursue: after the sordid details of his personal life are burned off, Jackson’s music-business achievements are enormous. That said, as you head into this weekend, you’re going to hear and read a lot of superlatives about Jackson’s body of work, and the sheer length of the list might obscure which sales statistics and career kudos really matter.
But let me be clear: I come to praise Jacko, not bury him. The fact is, even a quarter-century after Thriller’s last hit fell off the Hot 100, the Gloved One’s industry achievements are stunning. More important, Jackson is one of very few acts for whom chart achievements serve as a fairly accurate barometer for artistic and cultural impact. This is one case where the commentators’ assessments are correct: We won’t see his like again. MORE »
