I spent about three hours between 1am and 4am last night going down this rabbit hole.
To me, popular music culture largely ended when Top Of The Pops ceased to exist. The charts were a bible of musical and popular culture. And part of the deal was that they were littered with shite that needed to not just be ignored but to be actively railed against and despised. I looked through the list of every UK number one from 1980 to the present last night. You’d be doing well to find stretches where there were three good number ones back to back. Look for stretches where you had, say, five good number ones in a row, and you’d be looking for a long time.
I was trying to think to myself what makes a classic number one single.
i) An objectively good or great song
ii) Shock value, not merely shock value in terms of scandalising a nation, though this helps, but the shock of something genuinely new and exciting and confrontational or challenging.
iii) A sound that defined a time, but still feels fresh and still stands up.
iv) Inescapability, ubiquity.
v) It helps if the artist isn’t that well known for much else, if their popularity was ephemeral. This is not a hard and fast rule.
I find it hard to think of a lot of classic songs which reached number one before I was born as “number ones” because I wasn’t around. I can pretty much only conceive of a lot of great number one singles from the 1950s to about 1979/80 as part of the canon of great popular music. I know that “I Heard It Through The Grapevine” by Marvin Gaye reached number one, but I don’t think of it as a number one single, rather as a sort of musical equivalent of one the classics on a school English literature curriculum. Yet I do think of She Loves You by The Beatles not only as one of the greatest pop songs ever recorded, but as a classic number one single.
The era of classic number one singles to me runs from about 1979/80 to some nebulous point in the late 1990s. But all this is largely because of when I was born. But it’s not completely exclusive to that era, and overlap to later and earlier eras exists in my mind.
The greatest number one single according the above article is West End Girls by The Pet Shop Boys. An utterly sublime song, but for my money not within shouting distance of being the greatest number one single ever when you consider everything in the round.
Call Me Maybe by Carly Rae Jepsen is in my view the greatest number one single of the 21st century.
It is enduring brilliance dressed as bubble gum throwaway fluff and has pretty much all the elements bar the Top Of The Pops appearance.
A hook which at first sounds deeply irritating and then grows and grows and grows into utter addictiveness.
It came out of nowhere, nobody had heard of her, and nobody has heard that much from her since.
A silly but quietly subversive and memorable video.
Ubiquity, inescapability. It dominated 2012 in the way no other song dominated any other year of the 21st century, well maybe Get Lucky by Daft Punk in 2013 (check it out, the sound of the summer). But Call Me Maybe is a better song, a much better song. To achieve this ubiquity and enduring memory was an outstanding achievement in the era of post-Top Of The Pops, internet era cultural fragmentation.
Crazy In Love by Beyonce has a central hook that you had already heard 20 times by the time you had realised you knew of its existence. Every successive time you heard it after that it grew more annoying.
Who Let The Dogs Out didn’t reach number one so is not eligible.
However, I find it quite interesting that some widely derided singles of this era have stood the test of time. Who Let the Dogs out is a classic of that genre.
