Ranking the 10 best-selling rock singles ever
Art and chart might only be a ‘ch’ apart, but there are a million miles between them. The weird ways of rock have both typified this and defiled it. It started as a genre for the people, but it has also often wavered away from tenet, prompting Frank Zappa to once bemoan: “Art is moving closer to commercialism, and never the twain shall meet.”
Today, I must sadly join him, for I’m afraid to inform you that the list of songs that make up the best-selling rock singles ever is a sorry vision of the past. But that shouldn’t stand as an indictment against the genre or its current state. The records on the all-time global best-sellers list are inherent oddities. They are artefacts that have surpassed usual levels of popularity and entered a weird phase of becoming a cultural phenomenon.
More so than reflecting tastes, they seem to me to reflect a mental anomaly that commercial strategists, psychologists and anthropologists alike should study in-depth. They prove that timing is everything and that catchiness certainly helps, too.
The list below is by no means a collection of the greatest records of all time, far from it, in fact. It neither reflects defining singles, ground-breaking cultural changes or zeniths that we all cherish, but it does represent the moments when the masses were eager to flutter their cash to be part of something. That is interesting enough in itself, and when you dive into the singles, the commercial history of rock only gets more curious.
Thus, we’ve delved into them and separated the worthy greats from the lucky lotto winners using data from the BPI and RIAA to pick out the biggest rock singles around and pit them against each other. Enjoy…
Ranking the 10 best-selling rock singles ever:
10. ‘Radioactive’ – Imagine Dragons
The overblown production of ‘Radioactive’ is enough to put you off Monster Energy for life. The blasted distortion of the bass drum on display here is not just radioactive, it is positively Chernobyl-ed. This booming migraine might have seemed innovative when blaring out of the first generation of fake Beats in 2012, but not all innovations pan out as beneficial; just ask Thomas Midgley, Jr, the man who tried to fix the mess he had caused with the dreadful innovation of leaded petrol by making refrigeration more efficient through the power of Ozone destroying CFCs.
However, while Imagine Dragons might have an air of the Midgleys about them to many a retrospective ear, it is clear from the fact that they presently remain the most streamed rock band on the planet that a huge swathe of over-caffeinated folks out there still lap up the band’s odd blend of dainty pop and monolithic production. But that’s not the biggest crime of this commercial colostomy. No, that would be the line: “This is it, the apocalypse, woah.”
9. ‘(Everything I Do) I Do It For You’ – Bryan Adams
Bryan Adams once perpetrated the worst crime of all—he shut a pub down! Apparently, when the so-called rock ‘n’ roll star bought a house in Chelsea a good few years back, he was displeased by the noisy patrons of a beloved boozer a few doors down, so he bought that too. But rather than soundproofing the gaff and letting the good times roll, he simply shut it down and lived a morbid life of sober, peace and quiet. He has been vilified by surrounding denizens for his wicked ways ever since… and shutting the alehouse down probably annoyed them, too.
While this pub patter might seem like a wild aside unbecoming of objective analysis, if rock is truly about communion, joy and a middle finger to the mechanical grind of modern life, then shutting a pub down out of pure selfishness is indicative of an artist who embodies the very antithesis of that which he purports to uphold. I cannot abide by such duplicity, and neither should you—especially when it sickeningly croons the maudlin bloody sludge of ‘(Everything I Do) I Do It For You’; a song so insincere it could have been written by Frank Abagnale during a period posing as a wanky pop star.
8. ‘Sail’ – Awolnation
‘Sail’ is a track not far away from conjuring: ‘see ‘Radioactive’ for appraisal’. However, there is a touch more layering and nuance to the collision of rock, pop, and dub on this occasion. Nevertheless, it is still a marvel that a song that communicates so little can still manage to include a gospel choir, a synth bass on steroids, and pinging delays despite not having a chorus beyond the repeated wail of a single noted ‘Sail’, the only discernible lyric in the entire growled song.
The engineering has been sweated over to the nth degree here, and there is an array of impressive feats in the production, as well as an arsenal of notable hooks in the song’s melody. But in terms of artistry, it is about as deep as a Saharan puddle and perfectly repetitious enough to become as annoying as a neighbour’s pneumatic drill on a hungover Sunday. I challenge anyone to recite anything about the song five minutes after listening to it beyond the utterly meaningless word “sail”. Ironically, this song was genuinely produced by an energy drink’s record label. You couldn’t make it up. We are at a strange societal juncture whereby carbonated caffeine is crux of global culture.
7. ‘Don’t Stop Believin” – Journey
Four simple chords and being easy to sing on X-Factor is all it took for this song to sneak into the best-selling rock singles of all time list. ‘Don’t Stop Believin” is a song that encapsulates that signature Bruce Springsteen feeling of running through streets of reverie until your legs give out… provided that Bruce Springsteen had been lobotomised by an evil surgeon who removed his capacity for refinement and artistic guile.
You can’t begrudge the karaoke quality of the Journey classic from 1981, though. In fact, at the right moment in time, the track is a worthy classic, but on a Monday morning, its ugly flaws come to the fore, and suddenly, like eyeing up a puppy’s dirty protest on your Italian couch, you can’t believe that you once thought the song was a good idea. In an instant, what was once euphoric sounds like the soupiest guitar tone around and references to “cheap perfume” turn from working-class poetry to crummy cliches.
6. ‘Winds of Change’ – Scorpion
They say that this song may have been penned by the CIA as Cold War propaganda. This mightn’t be all that far-fetched, either. After all, it is proven that The Congress for Cultural Freedom was an anti-communist advocacy group founded in 1950 that channelled CIA funds into the modern art market to form a cultural counterpoint to the USSR. So, with ‘Winds of Change’ being a giant success in Eastern Europe, heralding the power of change and peace, maybe Scorpions did have a help in hand when it comes to the 15million units this song has apparently shifted worldwide.
The best evidence of all, of course, is that, as we all know, the CIA is an organisation that has welcomed more well-manicured arseholes than every one of Hugh Hefner’s pool parties combined, and this definitely sounds like the type of thing those dastardly Barry Homeowners would cook-up. The only curveball is the level of musical competence on display—it certainly passes muster when it comes to the level of cheese, but when you get beyond that, this really is close to pop perfection. It’s like the Big Mac of rock. You know there’s not much meaningful nutrition, countless near-identical replicas exist, and there’s a pang of greasy guilt in the welter of the experience, but every now and again, it’ll hit you as the best thing on sliced bread.
5. ‘Bohemian Rhapdsody’ – Queen
‘Bohemian Rhapsody’ is a song that has always seemed to be the equivalent of a conveyor belt sushi restaurant where you can’t actually remove any of the plates to savour them; you have to jab at the food with your chopsticks and hope you get an enjoyable morsel as the tasty dishes whizz by in a maddening blur. Obviously, it is a rock opera, so this whirlwind is the intention, but rock operas are shit.
It is this sort of pomp, pageantry and half-baked ideas that resulted in the facile ways of hair rock, and Queen need to be held accountable for their contribution to that beleaguered genre with this so-called iconic anthem. There are great snippets in this song, like the invigorating solo or Freddie Mercury’s dramatic intro, but ice cream and gravy are great, too, and I wouldn’t serve them together either. Moreover, the mishmash fails to tie the narrative together, leaving you craving meaning unsatisfactorily. But above all, it has been mercilessly overplayed, and you can’t help but think that the band have leaned into that a little, maxing out on the commerciality of a song that could never quite decide what it wanted to say.
4. ‘I Want to Hold Your Hand’ – The Beatles
It’s a sign of the odious nature of this list that even The Beatles’ inclusion comes from one of their least convincing songs. On this occasion, the Fab Four were dishing out the platitudes they had been brought up on. While you can re-contextualise the pithiness of this song with extra profundity given its place amid the growing sexual liberation movement of the era if you’re being kind to the boys, it is, in truth, just a very simple pop song.
Alas, it does have an idiosyncratic energy and charm to it; you read the title, and you can instantly picture the band in their suited and booted days, swaying their heads and smiling at the mania unfurling before them. However, if you remove everything else, you’re left with a perfectly nice pop song that deals in plenty of platitudes and just a little bit of added grit. It’s fine and dandy but had The Beatles’ utopia truly taken hold of the mainstream, then perhaps its place in this list would’ve been usurped by ‘A Day in the Life’, ‘Penny Lane’, ‘Something’ or other alternative alumni of that advanced ilk in their epic catalogue.
3. ‘I’m a Believer’ – The Monkees
It’s hard to imagine the 1960s without ‘I’m a Believer’. Written by Neil Diamond, this anthemic effort from The Monkees seems to epitomise the ‘something is happening here’ feel of the zeitgeist. However, as a mark of its continued transcendence, it now stands as one of the most covered songs in history, with even Vic & Bob securing a number-three hit with it.
There is something so seamless about the track that instantly pleases. It is as though it was never written at all but simply fished from the ether of the era and transcribed. This easy feeling instantly captured people’s tapping toes and sent them down to record shops, with the track occupying the top spot in the charts for seven weeks of sunny happiness.
2. ‘My Sweet Lord’ – George Harrison
It seems apt that the track that almost sits at the pinnacle of this commercial list was reprimanded for plagiarism. After all, that’s what pop is all about. As Nick Cave wrote on his Red Hand Files forum: “The great beauty of contemporary music, and what gives it its edge and vitality, is its devil-may-care attitude toward appropriation — everybody is grabbing stuff from everybody else, all the time. It’s a feeding frenzy of borrowed ideas that goes toward the advancement of rock music — the great artistic experiment of our era.”
Every word of that rings true when it comes to George Harrison‘s solo classic. The song bumbles along on ebullience, skipping from one sliding note to the next like a bee hopping about for nectar. It takes simple pop and welcomes in a new array of instrumentation to separate it from the source (although legally it remained too close to ‘He’s So Fine’ by the Chiffons), and a dose of spiritualism to let you know that everything is going to be alright, even though it isn’t, but at least there are some sweet songs pretending so.
1. ‘(We’re Gonna) Rock Around The Clock’ – Bill Haley & His Comets
Of all the tracks in this list, none are more fitting for the top spot than the Bill Haley & His Comets classic ‘(We’re Gonna) Rock Around The Clock’. This is the song that started commercial rock ‘n’ roll in the first place, so while it, therefore, has to be held accountable for some of the more questionable tracks listed above, we also have this harmless little ditty to thank for myriad masterpieces that have brightened up out humdrum days with colour and at least a modicum of liberation.
As David Gilmour once proclaimed, “It’s very hard to tell what made me first decide to play the guitar. ‘Rock Around the Clock’ by Bill Haley came out when I was ten, and that probably had something to do with it.” His account is the same as millions of other would-be musicians. The song’s simple bop had an inherent appeal that we are still positively reeling from. It’s a simple jive that asks you to flood the floor, calling for union and camaraderie, conjuring a dancing spirit of liberation. It’s easy, but it’s true.
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