The Week in Number Ones: Drake, Eslabon Armando, Tony Orlando & Dawn
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, we tallied up Calvin Harris’ multiple number ones with different artists and talked about Morgan Wallen for hopefully the last time. We also went back in time to wonder how so many great artists could crank out a song as bad as ‘We Are The World’.
The first weekend of the Coachella Music and Arts Festival is officially in the books, with the winners and losers officially being tallied. Coachella isn’t a sport: there aren’t any actual winners or losers. That being said, here’s a brief roundup of who had the highest highs and lowest lows.
I would say that it’s a two-way tie for biggest winner between Blink-182 and Boygenius. Blink wasn’t even originally announced to perform, but when they arrived, it was clear that they weren’t messing around. In the first concert from their reunited classic lineup, the pop-punk legends burned through almost all of their biggest songs, plus the new song ‘Edging’, without having lost a single step. Kicking off ‘Family Reunion’, hearing Tom DeLonge sing ‘Aliens Exist’ while wearing a shirt promoting his ‘To The Stars…’ Academy, and interloping TLC’s ‘No Scrubs’ into ‘Dammit’ were all awesome moments.
For their part, Boygenius were triumphant in simply living up to their own massive expectations. The supergroup of Phoebe Bridgers, Julien Baker, and Lucy Dacus were pretty much taking a victory lap after the success of their debut LP, The Record. Coachella was just a confirmation that BBD are the new CSN (all they need is a Y. Maybe Bridgers’ pal Taylor Swift is available). The trio even stormed MUNA’s set for a wild version of ‘Silk Chiffon’. Thumbs up all around.
It’s tempting to call Frank Ocean the loser of this weekend’s festivities, but I would say that his fans were the actual losers. To all the people who were camping out for hours on end just to see a glorified listening party, I’m sorry. To anyone trying to defend Ocean’s performance, congratulations: you’re the biggest loser. One day, I hope I’m rich and powerful enough to get Coachella to build me an ice rink and then decide not to use it the day of.
This week, we dive into Drake’s most recent hit ‘Search & Rescue’ and shine a light on regional Mexican music with Eslabon Armando’s new top ten hit, ‘Ella Baila Sola’. We’ll also harken back to the simple days of 1973 when a song as bad as ‘Tie A Yellow Ribbon Round the Ole Oak Tree’ could become a cross-continental hit. 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
The Drake train has officially passed me by. It’s actually been passing me by for roughly two decades now, but still. I wasn’t on board when he was on Degrassi, I wasn’t on board during his first wave of albums, and I sure as shit am not on board at the current moment.
Sure, I’ve been known to listen to ‘Hotline Bling’ every once in a while, but who isn’t guilty of that? Pretty much everything else Drake has done over the last 15-ish years has been way outside of my area of interest. Even as I’ve been doing The Week in Number Ones for over a year now, I still have no interest in discussing anything Drake-related.
And yet, he keeps coming back. ‘Search & Rescue’, the latest single from the Canadian rapper, is the closest that we’ll get to a shitpost from one of the biggest artists in the world. It’s kind of a Kanye West diss track but also kind of a knock at Kim Kardashian? It’s also kind of Drake laying out his ideal woman by organising an entire song around what is essentially the information in his Tinder profile.
What I’m saying is that ‘Search & Rescue’ is bad. Most of Drake’s songs are bad. But people love him for some ungodly reason that I have never understood and continue to be baffled by. Maybe I just need some education because few things baffle me in the modern day more than Drake’s impeccable ability to land top ten hits.
UK Singles Top Ten (Week of April 19th, 2023):
- ‘Miracle’ – Calvin Harris & Ellie Goulding
- ‘People’ – Libianca
- ‘Eyes Closed’ – Ed Sheeran
- ‘Calm Down’ – Rema
- ‘Search & Rescue’ – Drake
- ‘As It Was’ – Harry Styles
- ‘Flowers’ – Miley Cyrus
- ‘Forget Me’ – Lewis Capaldi
- ‘Green Green Grass’ – George Ezra
- ‘Creepin’ – Metro Boomin, The Weeknd & 21 Savage
Current US Number One: ‘Last Night’ – Morgan Wallen
One of the great things about this column is that I get to learn about artists who I had never previously heard of or known anything about. Sure, the pop charts are home to the biggest and brightest stars by design, but it’s not exclusively the domain of the Drakes and Taylor Swifts. Every once in a while, a peek beyond the English-speaking world reveals an entirely different strain of superstardom bubbling up just below our noses.
Not too long ago, that happened with BTS member Jimin scoring his first number one solo hit with ‘Like Crazy’. This week, it’s happening again. The only difference is that, instead of outsourcing to South Korea, we’re staying in the good ol’ U,S of A to talk about the regional Mexican group Eslabon Armando.
Originally formed in Patterson, California, Eslabon Armando combines the traditional Mexican genres of norteño and ranchera with a more modern spin. That still means that there are plenty of horns and requinto guitar involved in their songs, but it also means that these genres are getting some new exposure.
‘Ella Baila Sola’ might sound like a strange top ten hit if you’re a gringo like me, but for millions of Americans, this is the traditional music of their people. As it stands, ‘Ella Baila Sola’ is the first regional Mexican song to enter the top ten in the history of the Billboard Hot 100. Traditional barriers in pop music are meant to be broken, and a little bit of culture never hurt anyone.
Billboard Hot 100 Top Ten (Week of April 22nd, 2023):
- ‘Last Night’ – Morgan Wallen
- ‘Search & Rescue’ – Drake
- ‘Flowers’ – Miley Cyrus
- ‘Kill Bill’ – SZA
- ‘Creepin’ – Metro Boomin, The Weeknd & 21 Savage
- ‘Calm Down’ – Rema & Selena Gomez
- ‘Die For You’ – The Weeknd & Ariana Grande
- ‘Boy’s a Liar, Pt. 2’ – PinkPanthress & Ice Spice
- ‘Anti-Hero’ – Taylor Swift
- ‘Ella Baila Sola’ – Eslabon Armando X Peso Pluma
This Week in Number Ones: ‘Tie a Ribbon Round the Ole Oak Tree’ – Tony Orlando & Dawn (#1 on the UK Singles Chart, April 21st, 1973)
Here’s a common misconception: I don’t like shitting on people here. The genesis of this column was to trace the history of pop music through the various machinations that threw disparate songs to the top of the charts. The amazing thing about both the UK and US charts is that so many different genres, song types, and artists have occupied the top spot at one time or another. I don’t just appreciate that – I find it utterly fascinating. This column is a celebration of every single one of those artists, regardless of what I happen to think of the individual songs or singers.
I just wanted to say that because today’s entry is on the shortlist for ‘Worst Number One Song Ever’. I made a similar claim about last week’s choice, USA for America’s ‘We Are The World’, but I also included a shortlist of terrible number ones that also included Paul Anka’s ‘(You’re) Having My Baby’ and Eminem’s ‘Crack a Bottle’. The song that led off that list was Tony Orlando & Dawn’s ‘Tie a Yellow Ribbon Round the Ole Oak Tree’. When I wrote that, I had no idea that the song would actually line up for the following week’s column, but sometimes you just have to embrace happy coincidences when they pop up.
Songwriters Irwin Levine and L. Russell Brown had read an article in Reader’s Digest about a Union soldier in the American Civil War who wrote to his wife upon his return home. Since he had been gone so long, he asked her to tie the titular ribbon around the titular oak tree if she still wanted to be with him. When he returned, he was moved to see a hundred yellow ribbons. Levine and Brown originally pitched the song to Ringo Starr, who correctly believed that the song was terrible.
So Levine and Brown went to someone who was open to recording terrible songs: Tony Orlando. The trio had already gotten to number one with ‘Knock Three Times’, which shares a similar theme of using bizarre objects to communicate love (‘Knock Three Times’ had a pipe in an apartment building instead of a yellow ribbon). That track was credited to “Dawn”, a fictional band. By the time ‘Tie a Yellow Ribbon’ was being made, former Motown singers Telma Hopkins and Joyce Vincent Wilson were recruited to become “Dawn”.
‘Tie a Yellow Ribbon Round the Ole Oak Tree’ is everything bad about 1970s music condensed into one track. The lightweight beat is straight out of a cartoon. Orlando’s voice is smarmy, sickly-sweet, and schticky. There’s little in the way of actual melody. It’s impossible to care about the song’s story because Orlando can’t sell it. The harmonica solo sounds like it was recorded at the bottom of a well. Not even the slight garage rock quality of the plastic organ does anything to elevate the track.
In spite of its obvious mediocrity, ‘Tie a Yellow Ribbon Round the Ole Oak Tree’ was the biggest-selling single of 1973 in both the United States and United Kingdom. Soldiers were returning from Vietnam, and tying yellow ribbons around trees became a sort of “welcome home” gesture. Never mind that the US government was largely ignoring the needs of veterans in the face of an embarrassing and costly war that had no tangible benefit. But that systematic failure doesn’t really have anything to do with ‘Tie a Yellow Ribbon Round the Ole Oak Tree’.
Instead, ‘Tie a Yellow Ribbon’ is just the worst kind of early 1970s schlock. At best, it’s twee and harmless. At worst, it gets stuck in your head and makes you want to get a lobotomy because of its inoffensiveness. Tony Orlando managed to snag three number one hits in the US throughout the 1970s, and each one is awful in its own unique way. ‘Tie a Yellow Ribbon Round the Ole Oak Tree’ is the worst of them all. I don’t know any other song that gives me as much of a guttural reaction as this one, and with any luck, I will spend the rest of my days trying to forget it exists.
UK Singles Top Ten (Week of April 21st, 1973):
- ‘Tie a Yellow Ribbon Round the Ole Oak Tree’ – Tony Orlando & Dawn
- Hello! Hello! I’m Back Again’ – Gary Glitter
- ‘Get Down’ – Gilbert O’Sullivan
- ‘Tweedle Dee’ – Little Jimmy Osmond
- ‘I’m a Clown’ / ‘Some Kind of Summer’ – David Cassidy
- ‘The Twelfth of Never’ – Donny Osmond
- ‘Power to All Our Friends’ – Cliff Richard
- ‘Drive-In Saturday’ – David Bowie
- ‘Never Never Never’ – Shirley Bassey
- ‘Pyjamarama’ – Roxy Music
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