The Week in Number Ones: The Weeknd, Meghan Trainor, and Chuck Berry rise
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 took an incredibly brief look at Drake and 21 Savage’s new album Her Loss, wondered out loud about the possible plagiarism of Oliver Tree and Robin Schulz’s ‘Miss You’, and flashed back to John Lennon’s only number one hit during his lifetime, ‘Whatever Gets You Thru The Night’.
This week, we’re taking a look at nostalgia: the lynchpin of modern music. Welcome to a very special edition of The Week in Number Ones, where I’ve finally let go of the space-time continuum and embraced the unknowable in-between of modern existence. Or, to put it simply, we’re taking a nice long look at why we, as human beings, love things that are old and familiar.
I went on a bit of a tangent on this subject last week when we talked about ‘Miss You’, but that had less to do with nostalgia and more to do with straight-up plagiarism. But that case still has something to say about familiarity – namely, that it’s an incredibly powerful force ripe for manipulation.
The good news is that I’m not going to take the massively boring position of “There’s no good original music anymore”. There 100% is; it’s just not as prominent on the charts. It’s never been. That’s how the charts work – by plumbing the depths of your brain, looking for something, and exploiting it for clicks. Nostalgia isn’t as bad as some make it out to be, but it’s certainly one of the most influential forces in modern music.
So this week, we’re looking at three different cases of how artists could pull from the past to create modern hits. We’ll start with a half-decade-old song by The Weeknd that’s just now hitting its chart peak. Then, we’ll move on to Meghan Trainor embracing the sounds of her past to be successful in the future. Finally, we’ll round it out with Chuck Berry running the oldies circuit and managing to squeak out a fluke number one in the twilight of his career. 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 honestly have no idea what to make of Meghan Trainor. As I sit and write this article, ‘Dear Future Husband’ is on a perpetual loop in my brain, and surprisingly, I don’t hate it. Argue about the backwards (or possibly progressive?) politics of the lyrics all you want – it’s a damn catchy throwback to doo-wop music.
Evidently, that’s the style that Trainor feels is her niche. How else do you explain ‘Made You Look’, her new top-five hit that pulls from the same genre well as ‘Dear Future Husband’. ‘Made You Look’ relies on two different brands of nostalgia – throwbacks to the past style of Trainor’s music and callbacks to earlier styles of popular music in general.
This multi-layered nostalgia sandwich is all contextual: I’m sure if you saw someone making a TikTok with ‘Made You Look’ as the noise, you wouldn’t need to connect all those dots in order to like it and replicate it on your own. But Trainor and her team certainly did the math on this, targeting the perfect nexus point of nostalgia and optimizing it for ‘Made You Look’.
Does that make it a good song? Ehhhhhh… it certainly makes it a Meghan Trainor song. And, hey, she’s got a pretty good brand going, so my interest in talking shit is weirdly low. Positive body image is always a noble cause, but the chances that I listen to ‘Made You Look’ outside of my research for this article are pretty much nil.
UK Singles Top Ten (Week of November 23rd, 2022):
- ‘Anti-Hero’ – Taylor Swift
- ‘Unholy’ – Sam Smith & Kim Petras
- ‘Miss You’ – Oliver Tree & Robin Schulz
- ‘Made You Look’ – Meghan Trainor
- ‘Messy In Heaven’ – Venbee & Goddard
- ‘Rich Flex’ – Drake & 21 Savage
- ‘Psycho’ – Anne-Marie and Aitch
- ‘Hide & Seek’ – Stormzy
- ‘Lift Me Up’ – Rihanna
- ‘Calm Down’ – Rema
Current US Number One: ‘Anti-Hero’ – Taylor Swift
In the least surprising news of the week, a monster album that previously catapulted multiple album cuts into the top of the singles chart has virtually disappeared from the said chart. It happened with Taylor Swift’s Midnights, and now it’s also happening to Drake and 21 Savage’s latest collaborative album, Her Loss.
But lurking just outside the top ten is a fascinating “new” hit single from none other than modern pop icon The Weeknd. And by “new”, I mean a half-decade-old track making its second run as a contemporary hit. This is a distinct side of nostalgia: whereas Meghan Trainor was making direct allusions to the past, The Weeknd has an actual song from the past making a run up the charts.
‘Die For You’ isn’t what I’d call a “hidden gem”. Sure, it’s not ‘Can’t Feel My Face’ or ‘Blinding Lights’, but it was still well-loved enough to land on The Weeknd’s 2021 greatest hits album, The Highlights. Originally appearing on 2016’s Starboy, ‘Die For You’ was the sixth single from the album, didn’t have a music video, and peaked at number 43 on the Billboard Hot 100. It was a glorified album cut at best.
Then, as is the case with every modern hit, TikTok found a foothold and elevated ‘Die For You’ to a new high of number 12. If you’ve read this column before, you know that I’m fascinated by old songs making new runs up the chart (‘Mr. Brightside’ is at number 89 on the UK charts this week). I’m ready to bury the word “contemporary” as it relates to the pop charts, especially as we’re about to enter Mariah Carey season. ‘Die For You’ is just the latest example of a trend that’s here to stay.
Billboard Top Ten Singles (Week of November 26th, 2022):
- ‘Anti-Hero’ – Taylor Swift
- ‘Rich Flex’ – Drake & 21 Savage
- ‘Unholy’ – Sam Smith & Kim Petras
- ‘Bad Habit’ – Steve Lacy
- ‘As It Was’ – Harry Styles
- ‘Major Distribution’ – Drake & 21 Savage
- ‘I’m Good (Blue)’ – David Guetta & Bebe Rexha
- ‘Lift Me Up’ – Rihanna
- ‘Spin Bout U’ – Drake & 21 Savage
- ‘On BS’ – Drake & 21 Savage
This Week in Number Ones: ‘My Ding-a-Ling’ – Chuck Berry (#1 on the UK Singles Chart, November 25th, 1972)
Now we turn our attention to a different kind of nostalgia: the fluke number one hit from a classic artist well past their contemporary heyday. Today’s case study focuses on Chuck Berry, the legendary rock and roll pioneer who did more to shape the sound of post-1950s music than any other figure on earth.
Berry is the perfect example of an artist that was more impactful than he was successful, at least in terms of the charts. His style was ripped off by everyone from Elvis Presley to The Beatles, but Berry himself never scored a number one hit during his classic era. Songs like ‘Johnny B. Goode’, ‘Around and Around’ and ‘You Never Can Tell’ were popular and well-known, but they never managed to reach the top of the charts in either the US or the UK, Berry’s two biggest markets.
By the early 1970s, Berry had established a rigorous touring schedule that streamlined his expenses. He often travelled with just his Gibson guitar, picking up local bands in whatever town he was playing in to back him up. Berry wasn’t terribly concerned about the quality of his shows – he was fully reliant on his influence and the audience’s memory to carry him through. But on February 3rd, 1972, Berry hit just the right note, giving him his elusive number one.
‘My Ding-a-Ling’ was originally written by jump blues singer Dave Bartholomew two full decades before Berry took it to number one. It bounced around a bunch of different artists with a number of different titles, and Berry himself even took on the song in the late 1960s under the alternative title ‘My Tambourine’. No matter the title, the song’s content was always the same: a young boy finds the joys of playing with his “ding-a-ling” or “tambourine” or whatever double entendre you can fit into the title.
While performing at the Lanchester Arts Festival, Berry unleashed a mammoth ten-minute version of the song. The key to the track was getting the audience to participate, with men and women calling out different chorus sections. Berry is clearly in his element, joking with the crowd and getting them to join in on the sophomoric humour. It probably killed if you saw it in person, but it seems to be little more than a gimmick on record. As it turned out, gimmicks were exactly what record buyers were looking for in 1972.
Berry wasn’t the only artist striking the nostalgia nerve that week. Elton John’s classic single ‘Crocodile Rock’ was a conscious throwback to dance fads of the 1950s. The early 1960s girl group The Shangri-Las landed their signature song, ‘Leader of the Pack’, in the top ten as well. Audiences were clearly angling for some potent songs of the past, just as they seem to want them in the modern day.
But did it have to be ‘My Ding-a-Ling’? Weirdly enough, it seems oddly fitting that Berry’s only number one single is a horrible novelty dick joke. Despite being arguably the most important and influential figure in the history of rock music, Berry was, by most accounts, a deplorable human being with some perverted and highly illegal hobbies. Separating the art from the artist is just another part of analysing art, but you don’t have to worry about it with ‘My Ding-a-Ling’ – throwing the baby out with the bathwater is OK here.
Chuck Berry might have a bit of a complicated legacy, but his impact on music is undeniable. For my money, he’s the most significant figure in rock and roll history and possibly in all of music. But anytime some grandiose music writer tries to make that same case to you, counter with the fact that Berry’s only number one was a one-note penis joke. Hey, that’s rock and roll for you.
UK Singles Top Ten (Week of November 25th, 1972):
- ‘My Ding-a-Ling’ – Chuck Berry
- ‘Crazy Horses’ – The Osmonds
- ‘Clair’ – Gilbert O’Sullivan
- ‘Why’ – Donny Osmond
- ‘Crocodile Rock’ – Elton John
- ‘Leader of the Pack’ – The Shangri-Las
- ‘Loop Di Love’ – Shag
- ‘Gudbuy T’Jane’ – Slade
- ‘I’m Stone In Love With You’ – The Stylistics
- ‘Angel’ / ‘What Made Milwaukee Famous (Has Made a Loser Out of Me)’ – Rod Stewart
