This whole endeavor has shown me how chaotic popular taste can be, and how utterly random. It’s fascinating to me that “Smells Like Teen Spirit” only got to number six, and it’s fascinating to me that it got as high as number six. Both seem unlikely.
There are also lots of stories in here about power struggles: between artists and managers or labels, between band members, between Black and white genres, between radio stations, between labels competing for success. Is a power struggle inherent in any story about a No. 1 song?
There are plenty of stories about songs that were clearly intended to get to No. 1. They got the grand rollout, the label put all the energy behind them, and it happened. Probably at least 10 of the 19 Mariah Carey No. 1s are like that. Those stories can be interesting, but the more interesting ones—and the ones that, I think, make up most of the No. 1s in the book—are where that struggle becomes inextricable from the songs themselves, and informs them on some cellular level.
What’s a story like that that sticks out to you?
One of the chapters in the book is about a disco song called “Rock Your Baby” by George McCrae, which hit No. 1 in July 1974. It’s not the most famous disco song, but it’s kind of the first intentional disco hit. The disco hits before “Rock Your Baby” were all accidents—some DJs would pick an uptempo song from the B-side of an R&B album and start playing it, the song would start getting noticed, and maybe the label would put it out as a single and it would start to chart. Disco was still this new phenomenon, and it wasn’t codified yet.
And these two white kids from Florida, working for a hilariously named label called TK Records, were watching all these fluke hits and said, “OK, let’s make a club record.” It was the two main guys from KC and the Sunshine Band, Henry Wayne Casey and Richard Finch, when they were both really young. They wrote “Rock Your Baby” and found a singer who was near retirement to sing it. George McCrae only ended up on this song because he was stopping by the studio to pick up his wife. And it goes all the way to No. 1. It’s almost like a tech-startup story where some scrappy nobodies discover a market inefficiency and exploit it.
How about Soulja Boy’s “Crank That?” That’s another chapter in your book, and it strikes me as another pop insurgency story.
I was a working music critic at the time, and it seemed like a strange, game-changing thing to me that a 16-year-old kid making a super-basic, rudimentary dance-rap song on his laptop could suddenly command the charts. There was a lot of talk about how it wasn’t real hip-hop, and Soulja Boy got into a lot of scrapes with older rappers about it. But to me, what made Soulja Boy interesting and revolutionary in the grand arc of pop music was that he came along at a moment when you could harness the forces of the internet to completely capture the pop charts. Lots of people would do it afterwards, and if he hadn’t done it someone else would have, but he was the first. He’s said this in interviews: I showed you how you could be a star on your computer. Whether it’s Lil Nas X, or Migos, or Steve Lacy, or anything that got big off of a meme, we’re still living in the aftershocks.
One of the things you see over and over in your book and column is the aftershocks an event like a No. 1 song has in the life of an artist. There are people whose lives seemed essentially ruined by their brush with fame, and there are people whom it enriched immeasurably, and people for whom the success is nearly a trivia question. What have you observed about the effect going to No. 1 has on a human being?
A journey to No. 1 is always rocky, and attention is always a double-edged sword. For a lot of artists, hitting No. 1 is the best and worst moment in their lives. The record business is not necessarily a great place to be for a lot of people, and even once they find this…
Read More: Tom Breihan’s The Number Ones Tells the Secret History of the Pop Charts