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The Week in Number Ones: Taylor Swift owns the charts

Thu 3 November 2022 22:30, UK

Welcome back to The Week in Number Ones, where all the biggest movers from the US and UK charts get condensed into one article. Last week, we got caught up in the quiet storm of Stormzy’s new single ‘Hide and Seek’, gave a shout-out to Lil Baby’s impressive collection of Hot 100 hits, and made a case for Art Garfunkel being the superior solo act from Simon & Garfunkel.

Just a fair warning: turn back here if you have no interest in reading about Taylor Swift. When I tell you that this entire column is about T-Swift, I mean the entire article, front to back, top to bottom, is covering T-Swift this week. Is it because I’m a major Swift fan? No, not really. Is it because Taylor Swift has made history this week, the kind of history that could realistically never be replicated again? Absolutely.

So, if you haven’t heard, Taylor Swift has this new album out called Midnights. It’s pretty solid: I went from being Taylor Swift-ambivalent to being a decent-sized defender after really enjoying Folklore and Evermore. I also believe that, no matter how fussy people get, everyone likes to jam out to either ‘Love Story’ or ‘You Belong With Me’ every once in a while. Those are just good pop songs.

But now, Swift has done something that has never been done before. The pop charts might no longer be the most accurate assessment of fame, but when something as gigantic as this occurs, it’s impossible to ignore. So this week, we hand it over to Tay-Tay as she takes us through her absolutely dominant week on the charts. All that and more as we round up the best chart news of the modern-day and recent past.

Current UK Number One: ‘Anti-Hero’ – Taylor Swift

I don’t mean to brag, but I totally called it last week. During last week’s column, I discussed how impressive it was that the Red Hot Chili Peppers managed to snag two number one albums in the same year. In the same breath, I mentioned that it probably wasn’t going to matter, seeing as how “Taylor Swift’s Midnights will probably dominate next week”.

Now, I acknowledge that this proclamation was probably the safest ever made in the history of humanity, but I don’t know if anyone could have truly expected what was to come. In short, it’s been nothing short of complete and utter cultural domination.

Even in the UK, where Swift is objectively not as big as she is in her home country, Swift still landed three songs in the top five this week. Midnights is a cross-continental phenomenon, one that isn’t restricted by geopolitical boundaries or language barriers.

Sure, the big story for Swift this week is over in America, but ‘Anti-Hero’ is still only Swift’s second number one single in the UK after ‘Look What You Made Me Do’. Swift has been a global superstar for about a decade now, but ‘Anti-Hero’ is proof that she is truly, inescapably, at the top of the pop music mountain.

UK Singles Top Ten (Week of November 2nd, 2022):

‘Anti-Hero’ – Taylor Swift
‘Unholy’ – Sam Smith & Kim Petras
‘Lavender Haze’ – Taylor Swift
‘Snow on the Beach’ – Taylor Swift ft. Lana Del Rey
‘I’m Good (Blue)’ – David Guetta & Bebe Rexha
‘Forget Me’ – Lewis Capaldi
‘Hide and Seek’ – Stormzy
‘Miss You’ – Oliver Tree & Robin Schulz
‘I Ain’t Worried’ – OneRepublic
‘Psycho’ – Anne-Marie & Aitch

Current US Number One: ‘Anti-Hero’ – Taylor Swift

Here it is, folks: the big one. For the first time in Billboard Hot 100 history, one artist has claimed all ten spots of the top ten. Nobody, I repeat nobody, has ever accomplished this feat. Nobody has even come close. Objective metrics of popularity are hard to come by, but it’s almost impossible to argue against Taylor Swift being the biggest artist on the planet right now.

A little bit of history housekeeping while we’re at it: Swift becomes just the third artist to hold down all top five positions on the chart at once, a record matched only by The Beatles and Drake. Drake had nine of the top ten positions locked down back in 2021, but Swift is the first to perform a clean sweep of the top ten ever.

Swift is killing it in setting records for vinyl sales, physical album sales, total equivalent sales, and just about every other music business metric you could possibly think of. Hell, even the cardigans on her website are sold out. This is the kind of fame that you can’t manufacture – it’s just bananas.

Do you know how many songs Swift has landed in the Hot 100 across her career? 188. If we average out the length of each to four minutes (which is stupid because there are some ten-minute tracks to account for), that’s still 752 minutes of listening in order to get through every song that Swift ever put on the chart. That’s literally half a day of doing nothing but listening to Taylor Swift songs. Jesus Christ.

Billboard Top Ten Singles (Week of November 5th, 2022):

‘Anti-Hero’ – Taylor Swift
‘Lavender Haze’ – Taylor Swift
‘Maroon’ – Taylor Swift
‘Snow on the Beach’ – Taylor Swift ft. Lana Del Rey
‘Midnight Rain’ – Taylor Swift
‘Bejeweled’ – Taylor Swift
‘Question…?’ – Taylor Swift
‘You’re On Your Own, Kid’ – Taylor Swift
‘Karma’ – Taylor Swift
‘Vigilante Shit’ – Taylor Swift

This Week in Number Ones: ‘Shake It Off’ – Taylor Swift (#1 on the Billboard Hot 100, November 15th, 2014)

I’ll always know the moment when I got converted over to Taylor Swift. As a young, straight, white man who listened almost exclusively to classic rock, it’s fair to say that I was not a fan of Taylor Swift. Nearly every girl around me was, and if I were a smart person, I would have keyed into that, but I was unmoved in my position. I knew Swift, I didn’t explicitly hate Swift, but I wasn’t on board with Swift.

Then, when the awesome indie punk band Screaming Females arrived at the offices of The A.V. Club to take part in their ‘Undercover’ series, they unleashed what still could be one of my favourite covers of all time. They decided to play ‘Shake It Off’, the still-recent Taylor Swift single that fully transformed the singer-songwriting from a country star to an honest-to-god pop sensation. Screaming Females made me reconsider Taylor Swift by force by bringing a necessary edge to a song that hadn’t converted me yet. Was this actually a good song?

The truth was that ‘Shake It Off’ being a good song had nothing to do with anything. ‘Shake It Off’ was never meant to be a “good” song: it was meant to be a memorable song. Everything about it – from its earworm melodies to its quasi-rap breakdown to its twerk-heavy music video that got it called out for possible cultural appropriation – was scientifically concocted to be a hit single. And you know what? It worked.

Part of that DNA was bringing in the man who knows pop music better than anybody else in the world, Max Martin. At this point, you know who Max Martin is, but if you can’t remember, here’s a sampler: Britney Spears’ ‘Baby One More Time’, The Backstreet Boys’ ‘I Want It That Way’, Katy Perry’s ‘I Kissed A Girl’, Pink’s ‘So What’, and The Weeknd’s ‘Blinding Lights’, just to name a small few.

Swift had previously teamed up with Martin on ‘We Are Never Ever Getting Back Together’, Swift’s first number one on the Hot 100. Martin was also partially responsible for Swift’s other number one hit of 2014, ‘Blank Space’, which replaced (and then got replaced itself by) ‘Shake It Off’ at the number one spot at the end of the year.

Of course, Swift didn’t really need Martin in order to signal that she was going for crossover success. Each of her albums since 2008’s Fearless brought pop music more explicitly to the front of her sound. By 2012’s Red, Swift had almost fully pushed aside her original home genre of country in favour of a more world-dominating style. 1989 was simply the culmination of what was obvious for a while: Taylor Swift was the biggest pop singer in the world.

It wasn’t like she had a ton of competition, either. The pop stars of the previous decade, including figures like Beyoncé and Rihanna, were moving on to entrepreneurial pursuits outside of music (neither one released an album that year). Some of Swift’s other major competitors on the singles chart were Meghan Trainor and Iggy Azalea, who weren’t nearly on the same level as Swift. For Godsakes, the Canadian reggae band Magic! had a number one hit in 2014 with ‘Rude’. Needless to say, pop music needed Taylor Swift.

And so they got her, with big pop songs and big pop videos and big pop drama complete with the package. There was some blowback, certainly, with regard to her abandoning country music and her blatant attempts to go right for the mainstream. Still, anyone with at least two brain cells to run together could see that it was too little too late to be making those kinds of criticisms.

Still, music critics (around the tail end of when online music criticism was still, you know, relevant) tended to give the song mixed reviews, criticising the song for being too overtly chart-chasing. Funny thing about chart-chasing: it usually works. ‘Shake It Off’ wasn’t technically the biggest song of 2014 – that was Pharell’s earworm demon spawn ‘Happy’ – but it was almost certainly the song that was the most talked about in pop culture that year.

But ‘Shake It Off’ was much more than a song. It was an announcement that Taylor Swift wasn’t just a popular singer – she was the popular singer of the moment. That kind of single was what laid the groundwork for Swift to occupy all top ten positions on the Billboard Hot 100 nearly a decade later. This was international pop icon Taylor Swift, ready for her coming out party.

Billboard Hot 100 Top Ten, November 15th, 2014:

‘Shake It Off’ – Taylor Swift
‘All About That Bass’ – Meghan Trainor
‘Habits (Stay High)’ – Tove Lo
‘Animals’ – Maroon 5
‘Bang Bang’ – Jessie J, Ariana Grande, and Nicki Minaj
‘Black Widow’ – Iggy Azalea ft. Rita Ora
‘Don’t Tell ‘Em’ – Jeremih ft. YG
‘Hot Boy’ – Bobby Shmurda
‘Don’t’ – Ed Sheeran
‘Take Me To Church’ – Hozier

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