Jesus of Cool: The Worst Number One Songs of the ’00s
Monday, May 19th, 2008 by Jon Cummings
The difference between journalism and history is, of course, time and perspective – as I’ve been reminded over the last few months, as I’ve presumptuously taken it upon myself to identify the Worst Number One Songs of the Rock Era. I’ve had to attack songs from the ’50s and ’60s that I wasn’t around to hear in heavy rotation on Top 40 radio, and therefore can only judge through a historical prism. I’ve been forced to balance my childhood/teenage perspective on the music of the ’70s and ’80s with my current, more jaundiced view – a view that dominated my thoughts on ’90s music.
But now that’s all out the window, as I wade into the (at times kinda filthy) waters of Noughties pop with a firm realization that I am definitively Out Of The Demographic. Though it fluctuates around the edges, the traditional target demo of Top 40 radio is ages 12 to 35; well, I hit my 35th birthday in December 2000 – the Number One song that week appears on this list – and right around that time my (practically) lifelong obsession with pop radio and the Hot 100 was confronted by a simple, yet overpowering question: “What is this crap?”
And just like that, I found myself perilously close to this:
Oh, I’ve done my best to fight it – that whole “Why do kids listen to this type of music?” thing. I’ve tried to keep up, and in fact, in researching this column I was pleasantly surprised to find relatively few songs that I had never heard even once. (Of course, in many cases I had only heard them because I had seen a fresh issue of Billboard, thought “What the heck is that?” and made a quick visit to iTunes or YouTube.) Of course, music fans of all ages, races and tastes are likely to find similar gaps in their knowledge of this decade’s chart-topping songs. As I detailed last week in this space, huge changes at radio and in the marketplace have turned the Hot 100 into something of a warehouse for the biggest hits in various (and often mutually exclusive) radio sub-formats, rather than a distillation of the once-hegemonic Top 40 beast.
Simply put, the Hot 100 no longer reflects the listening experiences of many pop-radio-listening Americans. It leans a bit too heavily on R&B tracks, because the “Rhythmic Top 40” stations on the Hot 100 radio panel tend to give more daily spins to their top tracks than do “Top 40 Mainstream” stations. It leans way too heavily on rap singles, even though many of those singles receive scant airplay on the majority of pop stations, because rap accounts for a disproportionate percentage of the CD singles still being sold. In fact, the Hot 100 has changed so much, and generated so many complaints in recent years, that Billboard saw fit three years ago to create a “Pop 100” chart (and a complementary “Pop 100 Airplay” list) to track activity on what’s left of “mainstream” Top 40.
But you know what? Screw it. If the Hot 100 is still good enough for Fred Bronson and his Billboard Book of Number One Hits, it’s good enough for me – even if it means I had to give multiple spins to a batch of derivative, middling rap hits that likely wouldn’t have come anywhere near the Number One slot if not for their utter prurience. So let’s get on with it, and I’ll try to get through without too many Quincy moments. (more…)



Bleah. Of course, the recording industry in the ’90s had its own share of rivalries – Mariah vs. Whitney, Hammer vs. Vanilla Ice, Garth vs. Billy Ray, Biggie vs. 2Pac, Puff Daddy vs. P. Diddy, Britney vs. Xtina, Backstreet vs. N’Sync, Kurt vs. the shotg… sorry. Too soon? (Speaking of “too soon,” it’s worthwhile to note that while ’80s nostalgia was already rampant by the mid-’90s, no such yearning for the halcyon days of Showgirls and 90210 has yet emerged nearly a decade post-millennium.)
At retail, panicky record labels responded to a sales slowdown by ending the production of singles for many of their biggest rock-oriented acts. Because Billboard was slow to change its Hot 100 eligibility policies to include radio hits that hadn’t been released as commercial singles, the charts of the 1990s failed to properly recognize some of the era’s biggest hits – including the two biggest pop-radio hits of the rock era, the Goo Goo Dolls’ “Iris” and No Doubt’s “Don’t Speak.” Joel Whitburn’s Top Pop Singles books, in their most recent vintages, list those and other radio-only chart-toppers of the ’90s as Number Ones; Fred Bronson’s Billboard Book of Number One Hits, on the other hand, continues to focus solely on the Hot 100. Contradicting my own policy, established in my column on the
The thrills of the Rock Yearbooks were manyfold: the Acts of the Year and Quotes of the Year reviews, the Best and Worst Album Covers, the “Thanks…but No Thanks” section (from 1985: “thanks” to the Who “for finally calling it a day,” and “no thanks” to Everything But the Girl – “Why did they always have to look so miserable?”).
My point is, you’ll have to excuse the fact that while it was difficult at times to come up with 10 chart-topping hits that I truly hated from the
Rock Over London didn’t offer up the Human League, Soft Cell and Flock of Seagulls hits that had already assaulted the U.S. charts that year; it played new hits by acts you knew, plus it introduced American audiences to artists who had launched in England, but who didn’t yet have contracts to release their music over here. Of course, those acts sometimes included one-hit wonders or Brit novelties like Hayzee Fantayzee, Marilyn or Toyah Willcox (little-known fact: Toyah, who’s also Mrs. Robert Fripp, provided voices for the Teletubbies); however, as bizarre one-offs from England are almost always more interesting than their equivalents from the U.S., I didn’t mind the intrusion.
Four months later we were dying to get the hell out of there. Our landlords were pure evil, hovering over us to make sure we didn’t ding their precious furniture; my wife was having trouble adjusting to the ways of business in the U.K.; our son was chafing at his city surroundings and making life miserable for the Czech teenager we’d hired as an au pair; and the coldest, wettest London autumn in a generation had left us drenched, drained, and feeling awfully alone.
There’s even an article on CNN.com titled
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