The Number One Hits Blog

I’m sure there are bloggers out there who spend hours and hours on deciding what to call their blog and what clever URL should be assigned to the blog’s location. I’m not one of those people, but even so the choice of name for this blog was a perplexing one.

The purpose of this blog is to link to, listen to, and write about every popular song that has reached the #1 position on the Billboard charts in the United States. (This is the link you want.) This is a blog devoted to American music from a neophyte’s perspective. I’ve had no classes in music theory, I couldn’t tell the difference between an F-major chord and an extension cord. I know virtually nothing about music history. Like most people, my experience with popular music is limited to the stuff I heard on the radio growing up as a teenager and as a young adult.

I am not familiar at all with the stuff my parents listened to. I am barely familiar with the stuff kids listen to today. If you were to ask me to name two hits by Adele, I couldn’t answer you. I can’t even name one hit by Adele.

So this blog is a journey in self-education. Maybe there will be commenters who can fill in the empty spaces, who can explain why Artie Shaw is different from Tommy Dorsey, who can tell us whether Johnny Ray deserves to be called a rock and roll singer, who can give us some insight as to whether or not Billboard’s Hot 100 list is really the list of the best-selling songs in the United States or a list limited by genre, who can tell us how downloads play into compiling the list.

I planned on calling this blog the “Billboard Number One Hits Blog” but there were two problems with that. The first was that by calling this blog “Billboard” it would imply that this was some sort of Billboard official blog – and I didn’t want to get sued. The second was that there are multiple definitions of a “Number One” hit. If you read the entries on Wikipedia, you’ll find that the definition of “Number One” is very dependent on circumstances – you can get different answers depending on how you calculate the values.

So we’ll do our best. I’ll try to be as specific as I can. I’ll try to have a lot of links so readers can do some exploring on their own. The entries will not attempt to be exhaustive studies regarding a performer or song, and may not even be clever. But the goal of the entries is to leave the reader with a little more information than he or she possessed at the beginning. (And if the reader knows more than me, then maybe the reader will educate me.)

We’re at the beginning. Nothing is fixed, we have no format and we’ll just dive right in. I think we all enjoy good music, so let’s try to find some.