How Billboard No. 1 Hits Mirror Social Change (Full Transcript)

[00:00:00] Speaker 1: I decided I was going to try to listen to every song to ever get to number one on the Billboard Hot 100. That's about 1,200 songs, starting in August 1958 up to the present. And as I started going along listening, I started to collect information about these songs. I noticed some weird trends, and then I felt compelled to write about it, which eventually turned into my book, Uncharted Territory. Popular music is often a reflection, at some level, of things that are going on in society. This is very prevalent in the 1960s. There was a number one hit called Chapel of Love by the Dixie Cups, which is, of course, about getting married. But as the age that people get married has increased, we see fewer and fewer popular songs these days that are about people getting married. In the 1960s, we see more and more artists of color topping the charts and successive labels like Motown. And this is at the same time that there is major civil rights legislation being passed in the United States. Because I did this, I have a much wider appreciation for different styles. But the style I came to appreciate the most was disco music, very dominant at the end of the 1970s. And I think the 80s, it's the era of MTV and the music video. So we're really making music that can be represented visually in some way. During the 1990s, we see a rise in the explicitness of popular music. And I think this is a reflection of our changing relationship with free speech in the United States. Over the last decade, as we've seen conservatism become more popular in America, we've also seen country music become more popular at the same time. And this seems to be a reflection, to some degree, of the political climate in the U.S. There are certain things that hit songs follow. For example, they usually follow the trends at the time. So if you're trying to write a hit, you're probably going to want to follow whatever sonic textures are popular within a current decade. Because I listen to every number one hit, people often ask me if I discovered some secret formula to writing a hit song. And I do promise, if I discover that, I would have just written the song instead of writing the book, because that would have been much quicker.