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November 17, 2022
Tom Breihan's Playlist for His Book "The Number Ones"
In the Book Notes series, authors create and discuss a music playlist that relates in some way to their recently published book.
Previous contributors include Jesmyn Ward, Lauren Groff, Bret Easton Ellis, Celeste Ng, T.C. Boyle, Dana Spiotta, Amy Bloom, Aimee Bender, Roxane Gay, and many others.
For years I have enjoyed Tom Breihan's Stereogum column The Number Ones, where he is writing about every #1 song on Billboard's Hot 100 chart from its inception in 1958 to the present. In his book of the same name, Breihan chooses 20 #1 hits and through them charts the history of pop music in his uniquely compelling and entertaining prose.
Kirkus wrote of the book:
"Trying to capture the last seven decades of popular music through 20 songs sounds daunting, but this breezy history is gripping and entertaining...he attacks his subject with an engaging mix of clever facts and savvy observations.... For those looking for more conventional commentary, Breihan offers plenty of interesting insights into hits from the Beatles, Fleetwood Mac, Prince, and Mariah Carey, but the surprises are where he shines brightest. A fun, buzzy history that effectively uses context and criticism to explain the effervescence of pop music."
In his own words, here is Tom Breihan's Book Notes music playlist for his book The Number Ones:
My book The Number Ones is a story of 20 songs that reached the top of the Billboard Hot 100 and effectively changed the course of pop music history. Some of those songs are canonical classics, and some are… not. The thing that connects them is that they're all game-changers in one way or another. As soon as these songs came along, things were different. The book is an extension of the Stereogum column where I'm reviewing every #1 hit in Hot 100 history, using this peculiar lens to watch pop history slowly taking shape.
For this playlist, I thought I'd include 10 songs that aren't in the book but that were game-changers for me, personally. I'm sticking with #1 hits on the Hot 100 because I think that's a fascinating keyhole to use when you're looking at pop history. This time, though, the songs are the ones that captured my imagination at crucial points. They're not my favorite #1 hits, necessarily, but they're the ones that hit me in the moment.
1. Ray Parker, Jr. - "Ghostbusters"
I was born in 1979, which means I was four years old during the great Ghostbusters summer of 1984. I'm pretty sure the movie was the first VHS tape that my parents ever rented; I ran out of the room when the library goast reared and up roared. The bouncy, irresistible "Ghostbusters" theme song – a whole lot better, for my money, than the Huey Lewis song that it ripped off – was my first favorite song. I had a tape with Halloween novelty songs on one side and spooky sound effects on the other, and I just kept rewinding "Ghostbusters" again and again. I didn't have any concept of pop music yet at the time, but I knew that I liked this.
2. Michael Jackson - "Bad"
Bad was the first album that I ever bought for myself. In 1988, my family temporarily moved from Baltimore to London, and I had my big pop-music awakening. I don't know why that didn't happen in Baltimore, but pop somehow seemed more present and accessible in the UK. Top of the Pops made it easy to follow, like it was baseball. (I couldn't watch baseball over there.) I would walk into the Wooworth near my house, and they'd have a whole wall of Bad on vinyl and CD and tape, and I thought Michael Jackson looked impossibly cool. "Bad" sounded the way that the album looked. I had some idea who MJ was before that, but it took a move across the world for me to realize that this music was something I wanted to have in my life.
3. Guns N' Roses - "Sweet Child O' Mine"
Guns N' Roses were my first favorite band. As a kid, I thought all pop music existed on the same plane. Bobby Brown and Poison and Neneh Cherry and Fine Young Cannibals were just the people who made the songs that I liked. Guns N' Roses were in that mix, too. After a year, though, my family moved back to Baltimore, and I started listening to the radio, where rock and rap and dance and centrist pop were all presented as different things. Guns N' Roses had some extra sense of mystery and romance and darkness about them, and they suddenly seemed more compelling than anyone else. They were my first show – opening night of the GN'R/Metallica/Faith No More tour in July '92. I begged my dad to take me, and he seemed to detest every moment with his entire soul. We left after half an hour of GN'R because he said it was getting too late.
4. EMF - "Unbelievable"
This delirious bit of nonsense seemed like it was created just for me. I knew about acid house because it was just part of the pop landscape in late-'80s London, but I didn't know it was different from everything else. When this sloppy British rock band showed up with the rave aesthetics and the rap breakbeats and the Andrew Dice Clay sample, I was all-in. I knew all their other songs were crap. Didn't matter. "Unbelievable" was charged with a dizzy mad-for-it energy that I'd spend years chasing.
5. Destiny's Child - "Bills, Bills, Bills"
Funny thing: After "Unbelievable," no early-'90s alt-rock songs made it to #1 on the Hot 100. "Smells Like Teen Spirit" topped out at #6. The closest thing to a #1 alt-rock hit was Lisa Loeb's "Stay (I Missed You)." In that alt-rock era, which coincided with my middle-school and high-school years, my tastes diverged from the pop charts. But when R&B started getting weird and futuristic in the late '90s, I came back around to pop music in a big way. Destiny's Child's "Bills, Bills, Bills" and "Say My Name" were strange, jagged swirls of voices and bleeps and skittery drum patterns, and they suddenly sounded a whole lot more revolutionary and sophisticated than the punk rock that I'd used to define my identity.
6. Usher - "Yeah!"
After college, I moved back to Baltimore, got a shitty office job, went out to clubs all the time, and met my wife. Somewhere in there, I started writing for Pitchfork. I'd written about music before, but this was my first time that I had any kind of national audience reading my stuff. I made it my mission to point out that populist rap music was weirder and more cathartic and more exciting than most of the indie rock that still dominated the online conversation. Atlanta crunk, in particular, was just the most fun in the world. When Usher jumped on that Lil Jon synth-stomp sound on "Yeah!," he made that point a lot better than I ever could.
7. Lil Wayne - "Lollipop"
In 2005, I moved to New York, got a job at the Village Voice, and wrote about music every single day. I got to be right there, front and center, for Lil Wayne's dazzling mid-'00s mixtape run, and Wayne became my great cause. I haven't been right about everything in my career, but I was right about Wayne. When Wayne used the momentum from those mixtapes to seize his grand pop-takeover moment in 2008, I felt like I'd been a witness to history.
8. Katy Perry - "Teenage Dream"
By 2010, I'd gotten married and become a father, and I was living in Chicago, working full-time on the Pitchfork news desk. Maybe I was getting a little bit burned out. But I have this beautiful memory of the moment that "Teenage Dream" came out, of everyone in the Pitchfork office freaking out. It's so good to be with a group of people when you all realize that you're hearing a straight-up new pop classic at the same time. A moment like that will carry you through a lot.
9. Fun. - "We Are Young"
"We Are Young" was all over the radio in the spring of 2012, and I must've heard it a million times. I liked it OK. One day, though, the song came on in the car, and it sounded a little different. One of the voices was a whole lot higher and a whole lot more excited. I looked in the rearview mirror, and my daughter, three years old at the time, was belting along with it at the top of her lungs. (She really was young.) Suddenly, I loved the song. My kids have developed their own tastes over the years, and it's been a blast to watch that happen, to try to hear what they're hearing. "We Are Young" remains a road-trip singalong staple for us.
10. Cardi B - "Bodak Yellow"
The story of "Bodak Yellow" completely fascinated me. Here was this brassy and charismatic woman who'd recorded this great battle-rap track that was just supposed to be a mixtape freestyle. She wasn't even properly famous yet; she was a stripper who'd become an Instagram celebrity and then a reality-TV character. But the song was a juggernaut, and it seemed to scale the charts on its own momentum, finally eventually knocking Taylor Swift out of the #1 spot. When that happened, I started thinking more seriously about what it meant to have a #1 hit – what kinds of stories the songs could have. A few months later, I started writing my Number Ones column. Now, it's a book. Momentum can build up in funny ways.
Tom Breihan is the senior editor at the music website Stereogum, where he writes "The Number Ones," a column where he reviews every #1 hit in the history of the Billboard Hot 100. He's written for Pitchfork, the Village Voice, the AV Club, GQ, and the Ringer, among others. He lives in Charlottesville, Virginia, with his wife and kids. He is seven feet tall.
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