The Week in Number Ones: David Kushner, Bad Bunny, and ABBA
Welcome back to The Week in Number Ones, where all the biggest chart movers from the US and UK charts get condensed into one article. Last week, I was sick as a dog and therefore did not write one of these columns. I’ll save you the gross details, but if I had tried to force myself onto my computer, it likely would have gotten redecorated with some… unseemly stomach contents. Yeah, let’s just move on.
The big news as I’m writing this is that the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame Class of 2023 is now official. I’m not going to use this space to write a grand diatribe about how pathetic the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame is as an institution, because I already wrote one. Instead, we’re just going to focus on the facts: who is the biggest pop chart winner among the new class?
That would be George Michael, who scored eight solo number ones in the US and even in the UK. That doesn’t even include the five additional UK number ones and two US number ones with Wham! It’s not really much of a competition either: Kate Bush has two number ones in the UK (‘Wuthering Heights’ and ‘Running Up That Hill’), and The Spinners have one in the US (‘Then Came You’) and one in the UK (‘Working My Way Back To You’). Rage Against the Machine and Sheryl Crow don’t have any. Missy Elliott was featured on Melanie B’s UK number one ‘I Want You Back’, while Willie Nelson provided vocals for the US number one ‘We Are the World’.
This week, we dive into Britain’s newest hitmaker, American singer-songwriter David Kushner and revel in the almighty dominance that Bad Bunny has over the charts. Then, we take a time machine back to the 1974 Eurovision Song Contest to catch ABBA right before they become one of the most successful pop groups of all time. All that and more as we round up the best chart news of the modern-day and recent past.
Current UK Number One: ‘Miracle’ – Calvin Harris & Ellie Goulding
If you had asked me who David Kushner was before today, I would have told you that he was the guy who wrote all of Steven Spielberg’s movies. Or maybe he was that guy who played Todd Packer in The Office and can’t seem to stop getting DUIs? As it turns out, neither of those guys is David Kushner, the American singer-songwriter who currently has the number two song in the UK.
How did Kushner storm the charts? Everybody say it with me now: TikTok. Kushner’s rise isn’t particularly different from those of his peers like Libianca, who sits two spots down from Kushner this week. It’s just about exploiting the proper medium. A song takes off TikTok, gets reworked and adapted, and suddenly the original song appears on the charts. Call it voodoo or magic or just business, but it’s happening every day.
If you prefer your music to be of a sad boi emo-folk bent, then I’ve got great news for you, ‘Daylight’ is available to listen to and stream now. Kushner’s gravelly baritone is certainly something different from the standard crop of TikTok upstarts. That being said, you’ll get shades of Hozier or even Imagine Dragons before you know it. ‘Daylight’ is impossibly inoffensive, and that’s the best thing you can say about it.
Will it threaten Calvin Harris for a number one run? I would guess not, but if you asked me where in the top ten ‘Daylight’ would have been just based on hearing it, I certainly wouldn’t have said number two. That means that a ton of people are connecting with this song, so perhaps leaping up a single spot isn’t impossible.
UK Singles Top Ten (Week of May 3rd, 2023):
- ‘Miracle’ – Calvin Harris & Ellie Goulding
- ‘Daylight’ – David Kushner
- ‘Wish You The Best’ – Lewis Capaldi
- ‘People’ – Libianca
- ‘Calm Down’ – Rema
- ‘Eyes Closed’ – Ed Sheeran
- ‘As It Was’ – Harry Styles
- ‘React’ – Switch Disco & Ella Henderson
- ‘Forget Me’ – Lewis Capaldi
- ‘Flowers’ – Miley Cyrus
Current US Number One: ‘Last Night’ – Morgan Wallen
Do you guys know how popular Spanish-language music is in America? If you don’t, just take a look at the top five this week. After the redneck trash of Morgan Wallen and the solid pop numbers from SZA and Miley Cyrus, there are two different Spanish-language songs sitting at the top of the charts. We already covered the regional Mexican hit ‘Ella Baila Sola’, and now we’ve got the corridos tumbados hit ‘Un x100to’.
Grupo Frontera is also a regional Mexican group, but Bad Bunny certainly isn’t. The Puerto Rican singer might be the most popular artist in the world, and he slips in and out of genres like reggeaton, hip hop, and rock all the time. If you don’t know how popular Bad Bunny is, let me enlighten you.
Bad Bunny already has eight top ten hits, including a feature on Cardi B’s number one song ‘I Like It’. His past two albums, El Último Tour del Mundo and Un Verano Sin Ti, both landed at number one on the Billboard 200. In 2022, Spotify estimated that Bad Bunny was the most listened-to artist on the entire platform. This has all come with relatively little pandering to the English language market.
Crossovers from traditionally Spanish-language artists to English-speaking audiences have a diverse lineage in American pop music, from Gloria Estefan to Selena to Los Lobos. Bad Bunny isn’t as much a part of that lineage as he is completely singular: a Spanish-speaking artist who has caused English-language audiences to take notice of him without dumbing things down to their level.
Billboard Hot 100 Top Ten (Week of May 6th, 2023):
- ‘Last Night’ – Morgan Wallen
- ‘Kill Bill’ – SZA
- ‘Flowers’ – Miley Cyrus
- ‘Ella Baila Sola’ – Eslabon Armando X Peso Pluma
- ‘Un x100to’ – Grupo Frontera X Bad Bunny
- ‘Calm Down’ – Rema & Selena Gomez
- ‘Creepin’ – Metro Boomin, The Weeknd & 21 Savage
- ‘Die For You’ – The Weeknd & Ariana Grande
- ‘Boy’s a Liar, Pt. 2’ – PinkPanthress & Ice Spice
- ‘Anti-Hero’ – Taylor Swift
This Week in Number Ones: ‘Waterloo’ – ABBA (#1 on the UK Singles Chart, May 4th, 1974)
I’m not surprised that ABBA won the 1974 Eurovision Song Contest with ‘Waterloo’. You can try and resist the insistent pop hooks, but I won’t believe you if you do. There’s something so incredibly energetic and exciting and charmingly goofy about ‘Waterloo’ that it was perfect for Eurovision. These four Swedish musicians, all decked out in ridiculous costumes, were perfect for Eurovision. To most, that’s where it would probably start and end. But ABBA was different: they were on track to be legitimate pop titans.
The Eurovision Song Contest exists on a strange parallel track to Western pop music. It’s not that there haven’t been hits that came from the contest or that the participants haven’t either become or already been famous. Sandie Shaw’s ‘Puppet on a String’ was a number one hit, and Lulu was already a pop music star when she won the contest for Britain in 1969. But after ABBA, no artist or song could quite match the fame and staying power that the Swedes unleashed with ‘Waterloo’.
As it happened, ‘Waterloo’ was ABBA’s coming out party. Benny Anderson and Björn Ulvaeus were both survivors of the Swedish rock scene when they began a songwriting partnership at the end of the 1960s. At first, Anderson and Ulvaeus attempted to become a duo, but soon, they decided to bring in their respective partners, Anni-Frid ‘Frida’ Lyngstad and Agnetha Fältskog, as singers. They first recorded as Björn and Banny with Agnetha and Anni-Frid, but when that became unwieldy, it was shorted to ABBA just in time for Eurovision.
It was a quiet revelation that Sweden had entered an English-language song for Eurovision. The contest was heavily associated with native pride, but ABBA saw something different: the ability to make it outside of Sweden. Anderson and Ulvaeus’ second language comprehension of English would become a hallmark of ABBA’s material in ways both charming and comical. ‘Waterloo’ is a great example: the song’s titular metaphor for love isn’t quite on point, but it makes perfect sense when you turn off your brain and let the music do the thinking.
ABBA were always a strange proposition for English-language audiences. The group weren’t necessarily pop, glam rock, or disco, but an amalgam of all three, plus whatever else they felt like trying on at the time. They were a well-oiled machine, completely self-sustaining in terms of songwriting, singing, and even costume design, which were designed and made by Lyngstad in order to take advantage of tax breaks for stage outfits. That made ABBA a bright and shiny group of foreigners everywhere they went. They were constantly at risk of coming off as a novelty act.
In the end, it would be the band’s songwriting that saved them. Lyngstad and Fältskog’s vocal interplay was nearly identical, singing both in unison and in harmony as if it were coming from one person. But the songs that Anderson and Ulvaeus wrote were packed with some of the most potent pop hooks ever written. Even if you thought ABBA was silly and lame, earworms like ‘Mamma Mia’, ‘Dancing Queen’, ‘SOS’, and ‘Super Trooper’ were impossible to ignore.
That’s exactly what the world stumbled on when ‘Waterloo’ became a surprise cross-continental hit. For an unknown group to hit the top ten in America with a Eurovision song was unprecedented, and for the next few years, ABBA tried to prove that they were more than just their biggest hit. The only way to beat a big hit was with even bigger hits, and that’s exactly what ABBA did. But everything that the group did could be traced back to ‘Waterloo’, the moment that ABBA became ABBA.
UK Singles Top Ten (Week of May 4th, 1974):
- ‘Waterloo’ – ABBA
- ‘The Cat Crept In’ – Mud
- ‘Seasons in the Sun’ – Terry Jacks
- ‘Remember You’re a Womble’ – The Wombles
- ‘Homely Girl’ – The Chi-Lites
- ‘A Walkin’ Miracle’ – Limmie and the Family Cookin’
- ‘Doctor’s Orders’ – Sunny
- ‘You Are Everything’ – Diana Ross and Marvin Gaye
- ‘Rock and Roll Winter’ – Wizzard
- ‘Angel Face’ – The Glitter Band
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