Review: ‘The Number Ones’ examines backstories behind pop’s biggest hits

In February 1964, Paul McCartney boarded a airplane for his first transatlantic journey to New York. Issues undoubtedly seemed to be on the upswing. He and his Beatles bandmates have been booked to play the favored “Ed Sullivan Present” and two units at famed Carnegie Corridor. Lower than per week earlier, “I Wish to Maintain Your Hand,” the exuberant sing-along that he had co-written with John Lennon, hit No. 1 on the Billboard Scorching 100.

Nonetheless, the younger McCartney frightened. Capitol, the band’s American label, thought so little of the Beatles that it had refused to launch any of their earlier singles. As a substitute, Chicago label Vee-Jay put out “Please Please Me” and “From Me to You,” whereas Swan Data, a Philadelphia-based imprint co-founded by Dick Clark of TV’s “American Bandstand,” launched “She Loves You.” Not one of many songs charted.

On that long-ago Pan Am flight to the Large Apple, McCartney sat subsequent to Phil Spector, the architect of the Wall of Sound and future producer of “Let It Be.”

“Since America has at all times had every little thing, why ought to we be over there earning profits?” McCartney requested Spector. “They’ve received their very own teams. What are we going to offer them that they don’t have already got?”

Nothing greater than a musical and cultural revolution, in keeping with Tom Breihan, creator of the participating, illuminating and exhilarating “The Quantity Ones: Twenty Chart-Topping Hits That Reveal the Historical past of Pop Music.” The Beatles, Breihan notes, paved the way in which for the British Invasion, went on to have a report 20 No.1 singles and reworked widespread music.

“When it comes to pop-music influence, the Beatles’ arrival was a comet hanging the earth,” Breihan writes. “If ‘I Wish to Maintain Your Hand’ merely introduced the band’s American arrival, it might be probably the most necessary hit singles of all time. However ‘I Wish to Maintain Your Hand’ did greater than that. It opened the floodgates.”

In “The Quantity Ones,” Breihan brings a laser-like focus and fan’s sensibility to stone-cold basic No. 1 hits comparable to The Supremes’ “The place Did Our Love Go” and Prince’s “When Doves Cry” in addition to to fluff like Britney Spears’ “…Child One Extra Time” and BTS’ 2020 Okay-pop smash “Dynamite.” Breihan selects six No. 1s from the Sixties, 4 from the Nineteen Eighties, 4 from the Nineties and 4 from the 2000s. Curiously, he options solely two songs from the seminal music of the Nineteen Seventies, together with the forgettable 1974 hit “Rock Your Child” by George McCrae, “the primary disco hitmaker,” in Breihan’s phrases.

Breihan concedes that his selections aren’t essentially the most effective Scorching 100 chart-toppers of all time. As a substitute, they “marked new moments in pop-music evolution— those that instantly made the earlier weeks’ hits sound like relics.”

That’s debatable. In truth, one of many nice joys of “The Quantity Ones” is second-guessing the creator.

Was 1990’s “Ice Ice Child” actually the primary rap track to prime the charts? What about Blondie’s “Rapture,” which reached #1 9 years earlier and options an prolonged rap and even references hip-hop pioneer Fab 5 Freddy? The place’s “Satisfaction,” the Rolling Stones’ iconic 1965 chart-topper that launched a thousand storage bands and impressed raunchy, blues-based rock for many years to come back? What about landmark No. 1s by Stevie Marvel, U2, Drake, Beyoncé and different defining artists?

Maybe no one writing about music right this moment is healthier geared up to grapple with these questions than Breihan. A senior editor on the music information website Stereogum, he has spent the previous 5 years writing about each No. 1 within the historical past of the Billboard Scorching 100, starting with Ricky Nelson’s “Poor Little Idiot” in 1958. Thus far, he has made it to 2005.

Whether or not in his column or “The Quantity Ones,” Breihan reveals fascinating nuggets about even essentially the most pedestrian songs. Like a Russian nesting doll, his writings comprise multitudes.

Take “Ice Ice Child,” the ridiculously catchy trifle that rode a hook from Queen and David Bowie’s “Beneath Stress” to the highest of the charts. As Breihan recounts, Suge Knight, a former NFL prospect and future convicted felon, threatened to throw Vanilla Ice off his resort balcony except he agreed to signal over a number of the royalties from the smash hit. Mario “Chocolate” Johnson, a Dallas rapper and considered one of Knight’s shoppers, claimed he had written “Ice Ice Child” and different Ice songs however by no means received paid.

A terrified Vanilla Ice shortly acceded to Knight’s calls for. The entrepreneurial Knight leveraged his monetary windfall to co-found Dying Row Data, launch Dr. Dre’s solo profession with the blockbuster “The Power” and make superstars of Snoop Dogg and 2Pac. In essence, Vanilla Ice’s success helped lay the groundwork for the gangsta rap that killed his profession.

By T-Ache’s “Purchase U a Drank (Shawty Snappin’),” which hit No. 1 for one week in Might 2007, Breihan chronicles the event of the voice-warping Auto-Tune expertise that the artist took to the intense and popularized. Then the backlash started, with Usher allegedly telling T-Ache that he had ruined music. Different musicians groused that Auto-Tune diminished the significance of actual singing. Though rappers to today proceed to prime the charts by emulating T-Ache’s Auto-Tune type, the person himself has at instances moved in a distinct path. In 2014, he confirmed off his gorgeous vocal chops by showing with out filters on NPR’s “Tiny Desk Live performance” video. 5 years later, T-Ache received the primary season of Fox’s “The Masked Singer” TV present. Fascinating stuff.

That doesn’t imply that Breihan at all times strikes the fitting chord. In his zeal to cowl as a lot floor as potential, he generally sacrifices nuance to overgeneralization. In a chapter about “Good Vibrations” by the Seashore Boys, as an illustration, Breihan rightly notes that the group largely stopped producing huge hits after its 1966 psychedelia- tinged No. 1. Nonetheless, the Seashore Boys most definitely didn’t “lose their relevance as a pop act.” Within the early Nineteen Seventies, they did a few of their strongest work, together with 1970’s “Sunflower,” which critics rightfully hailed as a artistic rebirth. Equally, the Human League didn’t immediately fade away and discover themselves relegated to the oldies circuit after their ’80s business heyday. The synth-pop group, whose MTV-fueled “Don’t You Need Me” topped the charts in 1982, reached the Billboard High 40 with “Inform Me When” 13 years later in 1995.

These are minor quibbles. With “The Quantity Ones,” Breihan has penned a piece that resembles a number of the indelible hits he spotlights: memorable, timeless and value revisiting time and again.

Marc Ballon, a former L.A. Occasions reporter, teaches a complicated writing class at USC. He lives in Fullerton.