This week, something a little different: an interview with journalist Tom Breihan, author of one of my favourite pop cultural columns, Stereogum’s The Number Ones.
Back in 2018, Tom landed on the ambitious/foolhardy idea of reviewing every single Billboard No 1 single in chronological order, and assigning each one a score out of 10. Tom’s early columns, taking in late 50s hits like Mack the Knife (grade: 9/10) and, err, The Chipmunk Song (grade 2/10: “As a parlor trick and a feat of engineering, it’s just staggering. As a piece of music, it sucks shit”) are pithy and direct, focusing more on delivering a verdict than anything else.
Yet as the column has edged into the 1960s and beyond, and the pop music that it is appraising has become more daring and kaleidoscopic, Tom’s columns have become more ambitious too, serving more as a detailed history of pop music itself and ever-changing American culture. Read one of them and you’re likely to learn something, whether about the racial politics behind US radio’s reluctance to let rap on to the airwaves or the bizarre circumstances that led to the Macarena (grade: 6/10) reaching the top of the charts. At the time of writing he’s just reached 1998 with a review of Janet Jackson’s Together Again (grade: 10/10 – it is a stone-cold classic, to be fair).
I’ve always thought The Number Ones would make for a good book, and fittingly Tom is releasing one later this year. It will dig into 20 number ones that served as “game changers or fulcrum points” in the history of American music, from Chubby Checker’s The Twist to Dynamite by BTS. Ahead of the book’s release I spoke to Tom about his never-ending column, what it has taught him about what makes a hit and his least favourite number one ever (it’s a real stinker) …
What possessed you to review every US No 1 ever?! How did you come up with the idea?
I’m ripping off a guy from your side of the pond, Tom Ewing, who has been writing this blog called Popular for well over a decade. He does the same thing [for the UK Top 40], where he gives the songs rankings out of 10, but his are more personal and less history-minded. I asked his permission and he very graciously granted it. I remember sitting around bored waiting for my kids to finish a swimming lesson and clicking through a bunch of Popular [entries] and realising that there’s probably a Wikipedia page where they have all the American No 1s. I went back to the earliest ones, and was like “The Battle of New Orleans (grade: 2/10), what is this?” It wasn’t all Elvis, Buddy Holly – it was a lot of weird novelty stuff. And when I started looking through this stuff, and listening to the songs, I thought ‘I want to write about these.’ My boss was very nice about letting it happen, and since then it has taken on this life of its own that I couldn’t have predicted.
Your turnover rate is pretty extraordinary – two or three of these extensive deep dives a week. You’re not growing weary of digging into, say, another Janet Jackson single?
That’s my favourite part of my job! This column has given me a big picture appreciation for a lot of things in music that I wouldn’t have had otherwise. When I started writing it, it was shortly after Cardi B had gone to No 1 in America for the first time. Just the fact that she was a lady from a reality show who had knocked Taylor Swift off the top of the charts was so interesting. When somebody conquers like that, it gets the gears turning: how do you come out of nowhere and become the biggest thing? What are the processes at work? It’s interesting to see these characters rise up, and then fall off, and somebody else replace them.
Our UK Top 40 is maybe not as important as it used to be, but is still a huge thing, particularly around the Christmas No 1. Does the Billboard chart have the same level of reverence in the US?
I lived in London for a year when I was nine, and that was my pop awakening. I loved Top of the Pops. This was 1988-89, so a great time for British music. And the way that Top of the Pops framed it, with the lip-syncing performances and the dry ice and the countdown, it got the public involved with the spectator sport aspect to it. That culture has not really existed in America in the same way, [even though] America has as many obsessive chart watchers as y’all have over there. But, but there’s certainly a romance around the idea of a No 1, the most popular song from coast to coast in America right now, the song you’re most likely to hear playing out of somebody’s car window.
Having reviewed five decades worth of No 1s so far, do you feel like you have an understanding of what makes a song a hit? Or are there some songs whose popularity still mystifies you?
It always mystifies me, and getting to the bottom of that mystification is one of the fun things I get to do. I’ll give you an example: the song Convoy (grade: 6/10) by CW McCall was a number one hit in the 70s. That song took off on [the back of] the CB Radio craze, this weird thing when American popular culture fell in love with truck drivers for several years. It had to do with truck driver protests against speed limits and against gas prices. So there’s this long-tail thing where because the 55 mile an hour speed limit was instituted, and because there was an oil crisis and gas prices were going crazy, and because all these truck drivers were mad, then somehow you get this song where this former advertising executive is singing through a crackling CB radio about driving a shipment from someplace to another, and that song becomes the most popular song in the country. It’s so random, and it’s so tied to timing, and cultural context. These things have their own logic, and you can only tease it out after it’s already happened.
What is your least favourite of the No 1s you’ve encountered on your journey?
My least favourite No 1 is called The Ballad of the Green Berets (grade: 1/10, obviously) by Staff Sergeant Barry Sadler. This guy had been a Green Beret in Vietnam, and seen a little bit of action. Eventually he murdered somebody and got off for it and then became an Iran Contra guy and may have shot himself to death by accident. This guy lived a squalid, gross life and right in the middle of it, in the full bloom of the late 60s, he came out with this dumb march about how the greatest honour is serving your country with the Green Berets and how even if you die, your kid should be proud to become a Green Beret, too. As a piece of music. I don’t like it. And as a piece of culture, I don’t like it and I consider it to be an artefact of a reactionary trend within culture, which you don’t often see in the pop charts.
And your favourite?
My stock answer is I Heard It Through the Grapevine (grade: 10/10) by Marvin Gaye. I think that’s just a perfect song. But there have been a lot of perfect songs. I think Funkytown (by Lipps Inc – grade: 10/10) is a perfect song. I also think Lean Back by Terror Squad is a perfect song, [though] I would take the hard homophobic epithets out of that one if I could. The best thing that pop music can do is really ambush you and take you by surprise, like when a song comes on the radio and changes your whole day. I feel like if you pick a favourite, you’re kind of trying to plan that and you can’t. The best No 1 is whichever one is stuck in your head right now.
The Numbers Ones: Twenty Chart-Topping Hits That Reveal the History of Pop Music by Tom Breihan will be released later this year
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