You could hear the sigh of relief among pop fans a couple of weeks ago, when Carly Rae Jepsen's single with Owl City, "Good Time," broke into the Top 10 on Billboard's Hot 100.

In his weekly chart roundup, veteran columnist Paul Grein remarked, "'Good Time' is an appropriately positive title for a song that guarantees that neither act can (fairly) be referred to as a one-hit wonder." (Emphasis mine.)

Hang on a sec: The week before it leapt to No. 9 on the big chart, "Good Time" was sitting at No. 13. What if it had gone no higher than that? Would it have been fair to call Jepsen, famed for the 2012 Song Of The Summer "Call Me Maybe," or Adam "Owl City" Young, owner of the 2009 bedroom-pop megahit "Fireflies," one-hit wonders? Didn't the rise of "Good Time" into the Top 20 already preclude that ignominy for both of them? Heck, didn't the one-hit wonder tag go away the minute the song appeared on the Hot 100 two months ago?

I know what some of you are thinking, though: C'mon... of course she's a one-hit wonder. She's always gonna be Ms. "Call Me Maybe."

More »

If you're a pop fan, I'm going to guess you like at least one of the last three No. 1 songs in America. In many ways, 2012 has been an entertaining year for discriminating chart-watchers, as a slew of left-field singles have made strides on Billboard's Hot 100.

I've met people who love fun.'s "We Are Young" featuring Janelle Monáe—it spent six weeks atop the Hot 100 for a reason—and people who hate it. But at least some members of the latter group have a soft spot for the record that ejected it from No. 1 in April, Gotye's Kimbra-assisted "Somebody That I Used to Know."

That Gotye smash, one of the least predictable chart-toppers of the last decade and the current frontrunner as Billboard's 2012 song of the year, inspired both admiration and passionate loathing during its eight weeks on top. But virtually everyone I know who hates "Somebody" loves Carly Rae Jepsen.

I mean, does anybody hate "Call Me Maybe"? About the worst thing anyone's said about it is it's like a drug. Frankly, even those of us who loved the Gotye record were rooting for Carly Rae to take over the penthouse, which she finally did in late June. Her smash is now in its ninth week on top.

More »

Usher's Looking 4 Myself, Frank Ocean's Channel Orange, and Chris Brown's wingdinged-out Fortune.

Here are a few recent data points from chart bible Billboard and data provider Nielsen Soundscan as we move into the second half of 2012:

• In its midyear music-industry report card, Soundscan reports a return to the dismal album sales climate; year-to-date disc sales are off 3.2% from the same period in 2011. Last year saw the first annual rise in sales in nearly a decade, with albums eking out a 1.4% gain in 2011 over 2010. In the first six months of 2012, only one album sold more than a million copies, and it didn't come out this year: Adele's 21. Among the Top Five best-sellers for the year so far are a pair of stalwart acts from the 1980s: Lionel Richie, who on Tuskegee reupholstered his old hits as country songs and wound up with the year's second-best seller to date (912,000 copies); and Whitney Houston, who passed away in February, fueling sales for her 2000 disc The Greatest Hits which is now the year's fourth-best seller (818,000 copies).

More »

After three weeks of patiently waiting at No. 2 on Billboard's Hot 100, Carly Rae Jepsen this week became the first solo female Canadian since Céline Dion to top America's premier song chart. Right on schedule for the start of summer, the ubiquitous "Call Me Maybe" finally climbs into the penthouse.

Or should I say treehouse? With its featherweight synth-string arrangement, its gently clubby dance beats and its boycrush-oriented video, "CMM" is the closest thing to a pure teenpop song we've had at No. 1 since the turn of the decade. You can keep your Teenage Dream, Katy Perry—it's Jepsen who's poised to clean up at the Teen Choice Awards this year.

Interesting, considering that Jepsen is 26. That's eight years older than fellow Canadian and actual teenager Justin Bieber, who with the tweet heard 'round the net helped break Jepsen in America. He's having a busy week, too, having just dropped his preordained blockbuster album Believe.

The age difference between these two—plus Carly Rae's gender—may account for why she is sitting atop our singles chart and he isn't. Bieber's album is poised for a massive No. 1 debut next week. But if he's ever going to earn a No. 1 U.S. single to match his blockbuster album sales and online-media dominance, he's going to have to get past U.S. radio programmers, who are inherently averse to the objects of teen crushes. Getting kids to buy singles by major teenpop acts has never been all that difficult. Getting radio to play those same songs is a perpetual struggle.

More »

This month, to celebrate the Internet's unbridled love for wallowing in nostalgia and even greater relishing of talking about why certain cultural artifacts are horrible, Sound of the City presents First Worsts, a series in which our writers remember the first time... they ever hated a song enough to call it The Worst. (And to be fair, we're also going to see how these songs have stood the test of time.)

THE SONG(S): Bon Jovi, "You Give Love a Bad Name"/"Livin' on a Prayer."
THE YEAR: 1986.
THE REASONS: A love of British new wave, a lack of girlie action.

Sophomore year of high school, 1986-87, was the worst. I received the first of several rejections by girls I had crushes on. Two Sony Discmen broke on me—they were crazy-fragile back then. Oh, yeah, and my dad lost his job.

As if adding insult to injury, the radio picked that year to turn on me. There are several culprits, but I blame it mostly on Mr. Big Hair and Shit-Eating Grin, my pop-music white whale and fellow half-Italian, Mr. Jon Bongiovi.

More »

I've never been happier to be wrong about something. Two weeks ago, the last line of my column read: "Probably won't happen. But wouldn't it be fun if it did?"

The event I didn't think could happen was Adam Lambert scoring a No. 1 album on the Billboard 200 album chart with his second disc, Trespassing. But I sure was wrong, and it sure is fun: By reaching the penthouse, Adam becomes the first out gay artist to have the best-selling album in America. Trespassing did this by selling roughly 77,000 albums last week.

What my early-May column revealed was that every prior well-known gay musician to top the big chart—Elton John, Freddie Mercury, George Michael, Ricky Martin and Clay Aiken, among others—only came out of the closet later. Since I chronicled this odd statistic, I've been (happily) inundated with comments, challenges, debates, rejoinders, retweets and attaboys. And questions—lots of questions.

Since this has been my most-read and most-commented chart column by far, I thought I might address a few of these questions, as best as I can. Some of the most heated questions I received regard issues better addressed by cultural critics like Camille Paglia or Wayne Koestenbaum, not some lowly chart columnist; but I'll do my best to wade into them.

More »

In the two-family house where I grew up in Bensonhurst, the two musical acts I heard most often, blasting from stereos at the top and bottom of the house, were the Beatles and Donna Summer.

The former was more my parents' speed, although my teenaged cousins who lived downstairs played the Fab Four plenty, too. But for me, my sister and my cousins, Donna was omnipresent. More than a disco queen, Summer was a deity we could call our own, a Boston native who recorded with Italians, married a Brooklyn paesano and fronted a group called Brooklyn Dreams. With that powerful, breathy-to-guttural-to-rafter-shaking mezzo-soprano, she recorded music of both florid grandeur and hard precision, the very essence of urban life in the 1970s.

She was, in short, an honorary New Yorker. Which I imagine is how hundreds of born-and-bred New Yorkers unconsciously regard the news today of her untimely death at age 63 from (reportedly) lung cancer. Regardless of where her upbringing and musical training had taken her—a childhood and adolescence singing in churches in Dorchester, salad days in Germany in the musical Hair before she met her Berlin-based studio collaborator Giorgio Moroder—Donna, to the end, belonged to all of us: outerborough ethnics; Manhattan velvet-rope aesthetes (and those who pretended); the gay, black and Latino communities.

Of course, if you're reading this in Detroit or Las Vegas or Minneapolis or Atlanta or Los Angeles or London, Donna spoke to you, too. Considering her lifelong association with a communal, hedonistic pop-culture moment, it's remarkable when one plays back her oeuvre how intimate, almost solitary her great works really were. Call her the Wanderer, for her ability to stretch, adapt and transmogrify dance music until it embraced everyone and everything.

More »

About a year ago, the movie Bridesmaids opened in the U.S. and was the subject of a rather unusual awareness campaign.

Female movie fans, largely independently of the film's producers, compelled women to go see the film in its opening weekend and defy common Hollywood wisdom that non-rom-com movies aimed at ladies were box-office laggards. To many cultural critics, it was a dubious effort: a Judd Apatow-produced flick that was still, after all, about a wedding—and with one notorious scene riddled with bodily humiliations—this was a feminist cause célèbre?

The thing is, it kinda worked. Bridesmaids opened very well for a "chick flick," with $26 million in ticket sales, and went on to gross just shy of $170 million domestically, soundly beating such summer tentpoles as Green Lantern and X-Men: First Class. The fact that the star-free, Kristin Wiig-led movie was actually good suggests it would've found its audience under any circumstances. We'll never know, but given Hollywood's ever-increasing promotional emphasis on opening weekends, it's totally defensible that the impassioned grass-roots launch was critical to the movie's ultimate success. It also sent a consumer-driven message ("This half of the population shouldn't be ignored or pandered to") that should've been screamingly obvious in 2011 but somehow wasn't.

One year later, I'd like to invite you to get behind another consumerist message that, in 2012, should be equally uncontroversial: Being openly gay shouldn't prevent you from having a No. 1 album in the United States.

More »

Consider this six-pack of rock acts: Siouxsie and the Banshees, Big Audio Dynamite, the Psychedelic Furs, U2, R.E.M. and Julian Cope.

My dream Rock & Roll Hall of Fame? Not quite—it's a list of the first six artists to go to No. 1 on the chart Billboard launched in the fall of 1988, then called Modern Rock Tracks, now called Alternative Songs. The titles of these first six chart-topping alt-rock hits were, respectively, "Peek-a-Boo," "Just Play Music!" "All That Money Wants," "Desire," "Orange Crush" and "Charlotte Anne." Except for U2's smash "Desire," none of these songs made the pop Top 40.

Truthfully, not all of these songs were totally great. But it's a very respectable list—short of including such '80s mope-rock favorites as the Cure or Morrissey, this is about as representative a list of what we used to call "college rock" as one could hope for. These acts would form an awfully good vintage Lollapalooza lineup.

Now, regard this sixer: Sinéad O'Connor, Barenaked Ladies, Crazy Town, Nickelback, Coldplay and fun.

More »

Whatever you thought of her performance at this year's Super Bowl, Madonna's halftime appearance had the desired effect: It drummed up awareness for her first album in four years, the longest recording gap of her career.

When the Billboard 200 album chart is tallied in the middle of this week, Madge's new disc MDNA is expected to dominate handily, with anticipated first-week sales of at least 300,000 copies. That tally would put MDNA solidly in the middle of the pack of Madonna studio-album debuts since the turn of the millennium—ranging from a low of 241,000 copies for 2003's American Life to a high of 420,000 for 2000's Music. All of these albums debuted atop the album chart, and MDNA will be her fifth consecutive No. 1 studio album, after Music, American Life, Confessions on a Dance Floor (2005) and Hard Candy (2008). That streak outdoes her previous three-album run of chart-toppers, Like a Virgin, True Blue and Like a Prayer, notched in her '80s heyday.

The debut of MDNA will also mean the album chart and the Hot 100 are simultaneously topped by recordings boosted by the 2012 Super Bowl. "We Are Young" by fun., heading toward its fifth week as Billboard's No. 1 song, hurtled up the chart in February after its appearance in a Chevy commercial that debuted during the game. Never, ever doubt the promotional prowess of America's national consumerist holiday.

More »