Over at Stereogum, music critic Tom Breihan has a popular blog in which he critiques every #1 hit on the Billboard Hot 100 chart – from 1958 to the present. (As of this writing, he’s currently up to 2013.) There are many other great websites, blogs, and essays that seek to chronicle the best and worst of hit music through the years, like Pop Goes the Year and Troy L. Smith’s rankings on Cleveland.com. And Rate Your Music democratizes the sharing of ratings and reviews of records, shedding more light on which hit songs endure as classics and which have been rightfully forgotten.
This blog is going to be a little different. I’m going to discuss and analyze the “worst” #1 hits of all time, but I’m not going to choose the songs that I personally despise. My focus is the records that had a brief moment of chart glory before being cast aside with scorn by the critics and by the American public. There’s something fascinating about this kind of trajectory. Why do some songs age so badly? And if these records were really so terrible, why were they even hits in the first place?
This is intended to be a humorous meta-analysis, rather than a place for me to settle scores with songs and musical acts that have annoyed me over the years. Nonetheless, I will offer my opinions and will talk about how these “bad” #1 hits have personally impacted my life for better or worse. In many cases I will actually defend these songs from all of the hate that has been sent their way. It should be a fun experience!
I will proceed through the #1 hits chronologically, resisting the urge to jump ahead to the songs I am most familiar with. I expect that I will average one “bad” #1 hit per year, starting in 1960, though some years will have none and others may have four or five. You can think of this as a museum – or even a Hall of Fame – for these songs that are unlikely to achieve any other type of positive recognition. There’s no regular schedule for posting, but I’d like to write at least one new entry each week until I am caught up with the #1 hits of the present day.
I’m not trying to sell anything with this blog, but if you like my writing you are invited to check out my main author website, Books by Dennis Brown. I have a few music-related observations there, including a look at bad 1980s #1 hits that serves as something of a prototype for this project. Mostly, though, I use that other site to talk about things like sleazy robocallers and presidential libraries and my failed run for the papacy. You’ll be glad to know that I’ll mostly be avoiding those topics here.
Hope you enjoy this trip back through time to the music that we’re still trying to forget!