Even when she was in the deepest depths of her personal problems, Britney held pop music in her thrall. When Britney returned to the top of the Billboard Hot 100 for the first time since her epoch-defining 1999 smash “ Baby One More Time,” she was already operating as a human ATM machine for the people who’d assumed total legal control of her life.Īnd yet Britney Spears never stopped making hits. Britney Spears, Miss American Dream since she was 17, was idolized, demonized, and broken by the celebrity-industrial complex when that whole machine was operating at its dehumanizing peak.
Britney’s whole saga is a wild, twisty, depressing ordeal that indicts all of Bush-era American culture. The word “comeback” is simply insufficient to describe what was happening with Britney Spears in 2008.
The first song in the book is Chubby Checker’s “The Twist.” The last is BTS’ “Dynamite.” If you like the column, I’m hoping you’ll like the book, too.In The Number Ones, I’m reviewing every single #1 single in the history of the Billboard Hot 100, starting with the chart’s beginning, in 1958, and working my way up into the present.ĭon’t call it a comeback. The charts were different after all of these songs reached #1, and all of them helped show where things were going. The songs in the book aren’t all great, canonical works, but they all mark turning points. Even though the project is ongoing, the book is a kind of culmination of the work. I’ve been writing about these #1 hits for a few years now, and I’ve written hundreds of columns. You will probably disagree with at least a few of the songs that I picked. I wrote entire chapters on George McCrae’s “Rock Your Baby” and Vanilla Ice’s “Ice Ice Baby” because I’ve identified them as, respectively, the first disco and rap songs to reach #1. Sometimes, the songs themselves are great leaps forward I’ve got chapters, for instance, on the Beach Boys’ “Good Vibrations” and Prince’s “When Doves Cry.” Sometimes, though, the songs simply stand in as indicators of a changing world. I’ve chosen 20 songs that were historically important as #1 hits. The basic idea behind the book is to use the Billboard singles charts, and the #1 spot specifically, as a way to look at the history of pop music in America. None of my columns are reprinted in the book it’s a wholly original work. The book is a sort of extension of the column, but it’s also a whole different thing.
The book is called The Number Ones: Twenty Chart-Topping Hits That Reveal The History Of Pop Music, and I’ve been working on it for a long time. If you’ve been reading the Number Ones, the column where I review every #1 hit in the history of the Billboard Hot 100, then you might’ve already seen a few references to this thing, but I’ve now got the green light to officially announce it.
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