The Week in Number Ones: Raye, SZA, and Chubby Checker hit big
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 bid adieu to yuletide cheer by taking a look at Nat King Cole’s classic ‘The Christmas Song’ and The Chipmunks’ ‘The Chipmunk Song’. We also saw some light at the end of the tunnel with Stormzy’s non-Christmas song, ‘Firebabe’.
Good news, folks: we’ve officially made it through the holiday season. Time to take down your trees, wrap up those ornaments, put away the advent calendars, and stop listening to Christmas music.
Yes, as we look to stare down yet another year, let this serve as a public service announcement: please, for the love of everything that was holy, stop putting on holiday songs. We’re done. Been there, done that. It’s over. It’s time to let go. You’ve got ten more months to plan for next year’s onslaught. Take the proper precautions now.
If you need proof, just look at this week’s charts. When we checked it last week, nine of the top ten songs in the UK were holiday-themed. This week? None. Zip. Zilch. Nada. Not a single one. Christmas season has officially been called, and if you’re still pumping out those jungle bell jams, you are now officially a part of the problem. Be a normal freak and start sketching out your Halloween playlist.
This week, we take note of what the first week without holiday music looks like on the charts. British soul singer Raye is sitting on top of the UK charts, while American R&B queen SZA is looking to make moves in the US. We’ll also take a look at how Chubby Checker became the first true one-hit wonder and how his embrace of ‘The Twist’ forever changed pop music’s approach to hit songs. All that and more as we round up the best chart news of the modern-day and recent past.
Current UK Number One: ‘Escapism’ – Raye ft. 070 Shake
I’ll be completely transparent with you: I’m old. Not technically, since I haven’t even reached my 25th year on this earth, but physically and spiritually, I am 80 years old. I tell you this because I honestly have no idea how things go viral or become trends on TikTok anymore.
The good news is that, according to my limited resources, nobody else knows either. It just happens for unknown reasons, or mostly, for no reason at all. Trying to pry logic and reason out of TikTok is a fool’s errand, and I am coming to peace with the idea that it is the unknowable bubble of culture that controls us all somehow or another.
But, hey, being at peace by embracing the void is actually a great segway to the current number one song in the UK, ‘Escapism’. It goes like this: fuck the guy who just dumped you because it’s time to go out and get wasted. That’s a tried and true formula for any hit, and British soul/rap upstart Raye has grabbed that formula by the balls and wrung out a killer song.
‘Escapism’ has everything a song like this needs to succeed: plenty of quotable lines, a good feature from a fellow up-and-comer (this time, it’s American rapper 070 Shake), and a solid hook at the centre of the track. In the race to see who is taking the spotlight at the start of 2023, Raye is out to an early lead.
UK Singles Top Ten (Week of January 11th, 2023):
- ‘Escapism’ – Raye ft. 070 Shake
- ‘Anti-Hero’ – Taylor Swift
- ‘Messy in Heaven’ – Venbee & Goddard
- ‘Kill Bill’ – SZA
- ‘Made You Look’ – Meghan Trainor
- ‘Let Go’ – Central Cee
- ‘Miss You’ – Oliver Tree & Robin Schultz
- ‘Calm Down’ – Rema
- ‘Out of Nowhere’ – Bugzy Malone & Teedee
- ‘Another Love’ – Tom Odell
Current US Number One: ‘Anti-Hero’ – Taylor Swift
At the start of 2023, the Billboard Hot 100 is looking a hell of a lot like the 2022 version of the chart. Eight of the top ten songs this week had all previously been in the top ten at some point in 2022, showing that audiences are returning to their familiar listening habits while adjusting to the new calendar year.
One of the two exceptions is SZA’s major hit single, ‘Kill Bill’. In all honesty, ‘Kill Bill’ should probably be the number one song in America right now: it’s easily at the top of streaming services for most popular songs and currently sits at the top of Billboard’s Global 200 chart. Everybody is listening to SZA’s murder fantasy track right now.
With any luck, SZA is now on that short list of top-tier artists who command respect with every new thing they put out. She checks all the boxes: viral hit (I’m thinking of ‘Shirt’, but you could probably put a couple of different songs here), big surprise album release, and global recognition. All that’s missing right now is a number one hit.
Do I think that SZA will hit number one with ‘Kill Bill’? Yes. Yes, I do. Especially when taking the other older songs in the top ten into consideration, it seems like there’s a clear path for ‘Kill Bill’ to be the first real hit of 2023. It already is, but it just needs to inch past the Swifties next week to secure its place.
Billboard Hot 100 Top Ten (Week of January 14th):
- ‘Anti-Hero’ – Taylor Swift
- ‘Unholy’ – Sam Smith & Kim Petras
- ‘Kill Bill’ – SZA
- ‘I’m Good (Blue)’ – David Guetta & Bebe Rexha
- ‘Rich Flex’ – Drake & 21 Savage
- ‘Creepin’ – Metro Boomin’, The Weeknd, & 21 Savage
- ‘As It Was’ – Harry Styles
- ‘Die For You’ – The Weeknd
- ‘Bad Habit’ – Steve Lacy
- ‘Cuff It’ – Beyoncé
This Week in Number Ones: ‘The Twist’ – Chubby Checker (#1 on the Billboard Hot 100, January 13th, 1962)
One-hit wonders were still unknown phenomena in the early 1960s. While the concept of a one-and-done star might have been around, the truth is that the Billboard Hot 100 simply hadn’t been around for long enough by 1962 to accurately call anybody a true “one-hit wonder”. That being said, there was a hell of a lot of one-hit wonders in the early days of the charts.
Just tell me if you could recognise any of these artists by name: Domenico Modugno, The Elegants, The Fleetwoods, Johnny Horton, Wilbert Harrison, The Browns, Santo & Johnny, Johnny Preston (side note: lots of Johnnys in the early charts), Hollywood Argyles, Larry Verne, Ernie-K-Doe, Joe Dowell, and Bruce Channell. All had number-one hits in the first five years of the Billboard Hot 100, and not a single recognisable name among them.
I can’t tell if it was the way people took in music at the time or just the way people have always taken in music, but novelty acts were huge in the early days of the Hot 100. Instrumentals, goofy throwaway jokes, weirdly racist caricatures – these were all present in a number of early-era number ones. In fact, the first number one of 1962 went to a novelty one-hit wonder: The Tokens and their classic slab of nonsense ‘The Lion Sleeps Tonight’.
But then came Chubby Checker. The difference between Checker and the one-hit wonders who came before him was two-fold: one was how big his hit was compared to songs that came before him, and the other was how he reacted to the hit. Chubby Checker didn’t just make ‘The Twist’ a part of his artistic identity – he made it the very lynchpin of his entire existence in pop culture.
It didn’t have to be this way. Chubby Checker, born Ernest Evans, was just a kid from Philadelphia with a few musical impressions in his back pocket when he met American Bandstand host Dick Clark in the late 1950s (Clark’s wife gave him his full stage name as a play off of Fats Domino). A Christmas recording made specifically for the Clark family was eventually released as Checker’s first single, ‘The Class’, which charted within the top 40.
Checker’s story goes hand in hand with the rising fad of dance crazes. At sock hops and community dance halls all across America, teenagers were picking up specific moves that began to gain traction. Singers and songwriters began to tailor specific songs for specific dances. The Diamonds had one of the first dance-focused hits with ‘The Stroll’ in 1957, but it would be Checker who embraced the complete dedication to singing about goofy dances.
It’s important to note that while Checker’s focus on dance craze songs was a gimmick, it was still a diverse gimmick. In fact, Checker scored a number one hit in 1961 with ‘Pony Time’. But it would be his first number one that forever changed Checker’s artistic vision… even though it would take two years to form fully.
For one week in 1960, Checker rose to number one with ‘The Twist’. Kids had been doing the twist for years, but Checker’s song was the first time that the dance got national exposure. Even still, the twist wasn’t quite at its tipping point yet. Checker went back to the drawing board and hit number one with ‘Pony Time’ the following year. Then something strange happened: people kept listening to ‘The Twist’. It became more popular than it had on its original release. After having dropped off the Hot 100, ‘The Twist’ was making a return trip up the charts.
When ‘The Twist’ hit number one again in January of 1962, it became the first song to have two separate runs at number one. That might be a common occurrence now, but it was unprecedented at the time and continued to be for nearly 60 years. In fact, it was only when Mariah Carey went to number one for the second time with her annual ‘All I Want For Christmas Is You’ run in 2020 that the feat was repeated for the first time. For most of modern pop music’s relatively brief history, Chubby Checker was unparalleled.
Checker’s reaction to the success was simple: everything became centred around the twist. His follow-up, ‘Let’s Twist Again’, was a number one hit in the UK (on the NME chart, though not on the Record Retailer chart that eventually morphed into the official UK Singles Chart). By my count, Checker has at least seven different Twist-themed singles and six albums with “Twist” in the title. He even appeared in Twist-themed movies like Twist Around the Clock and Don’t Knock the Twist.
Checker’s embrace of ‘The Twist’, at the expense of anything else anyone could ever associate with him, is the kind of shameless hucksterism that became de rigueur for tons of one-hit wonders who followed him. Everything from shameless song sequels to modern-day sped-up remixes can be traced back to Checker’s decision to make his career all Twist, all the time.
In that regard, Checker remains massively influential in the way pop music has progressed over the years. But he did it in a way that came at the expense of his artistic credibility. In an ironic twist (thank you, thank you), Checker protested outside another artistically bankrupt institution, The Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, in 2002 for his lack of recognition. Maybe he deserves to be in, or maybe not, but the two definitely deserve each other.
The actual modern footprint of ‘The Twist’ is now forever in the past, but the ripple effects it had makes it arguably one of the most important number one songs of all time. Even though he had other hits, Chubby Checker was truly the first one-hit wonder, and his embrace of ‘The Twist’ likely led to a more cynical but far more profitable record industry.
Billboard Hot 100 Top Ten (Week of January 13th, 1962):
- ‘The Twist’ – Chubby Checker
- ‘The Lion Sleeps Tonight’ – The Tokens
- ‘The Peppermint Twist’ – Joey Dee and the Starliters
- ‘I Can’t Help Falling In Love’ – Elvis Presley with The Jordanaires
- ‘I Know (You Don’t Love Me No More)’ – Barbara George
- ‘Happy Birthday, Sweet Sixteen’ – Neil Sedaka
- ‘Walk On By’ – Leroy Van Dyke
- ‘Run to Him’ – Bobby Vee
- ‘Unchain My Heart’ – Ray Charles and his Orchestra
- ‘When the Boy in Your Arms (Is the Boy in Your Heart)’ – Connie Francis
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