What was the first song to hold the number one spot for 10 weeks?
The arcs that appear in Ancient Greek literature are the same ones that prove pervasive in Disney stories. This oddity is not half as surprising as it initially seems. Humans like what they like. “To the brain, good stories are good stories,” scientist Paul J Zak recently wrote, and his findings proved that familiar emotive arcs cause our minds to ooze luscious oxytocin. The same is true in the world of pop.
Many of the biggest hits in music don’t reinvent the wheel. In fact, they finely straddle the line of familiarity and novel surprise. This mixture makes them catchy. The surprise element delivers a dopamine hit while the familiarity makes them knowable, comforting, and triggers an emotive response. Thereafter, the tracks effectively become logged in our minds, and then later, fixtures in our lives.
When this happens, you’ll find a song stringing up time and time again. This sense of rapid recall is linked to how our brains work. As Dr Concetta Tomaino, the executive director of the Institute for Music and Neurologic Function, explained during one of my own investigations into the science of brainworms: “You know how the images in dreams are really metaphors for something else? These songs that come to mind spontaneously usually pop up because there is either an emotional or some other significance to them.“
She continued: “They don’t just pop up for nothing. Something in your brain in the back of your mind is processing something, and it goes, ‘Boom, there’s an association with that song.’ Otherwise, it wouldn’t have a reason for popping up.” Radio stations love it when a track keeps proverbially popping up. It gives them a license to give the public a continual drip feed of the hit they crave.
What was the first song to hold the number one spot for 10 weeks?
In 1977, the hit they craved was ‘You Light Up My Life’ by Debby Boone. Amid the rise of punk and disco, this age-old ballad, initially performed by Kasey Cisyk, offered a soft escape from the changing world. So, AM radio stations played it endlessly, and the public couldn’t get enough. The song ended up holding the number one spot for ten consecutive weeks from mid-October through pretty much Christmas.
It was the first track in history to achieve this monumental feat, granting Boone and songwriter Joe Brooks a shedload of cash perhaps extending into the tens of millions, an Oscar for ‘Best Original Song’ thanks to its involvement in the equally soppy film of the same name, and a Grammy for ‘Song of the Year’. Not bad for a ballad with seven basic chords in D major.
With the track, Boone, whose father was the 1950s icon Pat Boone, appealed to such a broad spectrum that the song proved a hit on the country charts, pop stations, adult contemporary realm, and basically was lapped up by anyone who opposed new-fangled punk and disco. Sure, it might have been sickly sweet, but the most played song of the century in America turned out to be ‘You’ve Lost That Lovin’ Feeling’, so her cheesy pop was playing into a national pastime.
