The top three songs on Spotify, March 20, 2012. "Young" is at No. 1 on the Hot 100; "Know" is at No. 5; and "Came" is at No. 4.

How do you know when you're at the dawn of a new pop era?

It's not like someone sends a memo. Sure, occasionally there's a well-timed cultural event that offers a hint—the disastrous Altamont festival in December 1969, which signaled that the flower-power dream was over, or Comiskey Park's Disco Demolition Night in July 1979, which warned that dance music's days were numbered, at least with middle-American dudes. But even bright temporal lines like these only seem significant in retrospect, and they don't actually change the sound of young America overnight.

The same goes for the Billboard charts, the Dow Jones Industrial Average of pop. Occasionally you get a No. 1 hit on the Hot 100 that feels like a revolution instantly. Or there's a blockbuster album that feels like a generational torch passing.

This week, the song sitting on top the Hot 100 doesn't necessarily sound like a revolution. But from its title on down, "We Are Young," the soaring, Janelle Monáe-assisted rock anthem by emo-pomp band fun, wants to be generational. Two weeks ago, fun. rampaged their way to the summit thanks to a pileup of digital sales. For each of the last two weeks, "We Are Young" has topped the very healthy sum of 300,000 downloads; it's the only song to roll that many weekly downloads in 2012, let alone do it twice.

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Cassandra (Tia Carrere): You've heard it?
Wayne (Mike Myers): Exqueeze me? Have I seen this one before? Frampton Comes Alive?! Everybody in the world has Frampton Comes Alive. If you lived in the suburbs you were issued it. It came in the mail with samples of Tide.
—Wayne's World 2 (1993)

For chart geeks, the Monkees loom large. To us, the candy-colored group, which included among its members the recently departed Davy Jones, have a status probably no other cultural observers would give them: album artists. In fact, by one measure, the Monkees have one of the 15 top-performing albums of all time—and that list of outperforming discs is undergoing a shift right now, thanks to a certain best-selling fellow Brit.

But for all the Monkees' success on Billboard's Hot 100 singles chart from 1966 through 1968—six Top Three hits, including three No. 1's—their real playground was the Billboard album chart. As veteran chart-watcher Paul Grein points out, the Monkees hold a distinction no other act has matched in 45 years: occupying the No. 1 spot with a record four albums in a single calendar year. With their first four discs, the group spent nearly two-thirds of 1967 monopolizing the top of what is now called the Billboard 200.

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Let's ignore the uncanny timing of Whitney Houston passing the night before the Grammys, a showcase for music royalty conceived to honor pop queens like her. A better measure of Houston's legacy is sitting right on top of Billboard's two flagship charts the very week of her untimely death.

Taking over No. 1 on the Hot 100, with her latest hit "Stronger (What Doesn't Kill You)," is Kelly Clarkson, a singer who has not only covered songs made famous by Houston—Clarkson's very career, launched a decade ago on American Idol, is the product of a big-voiced-diva culture Houston essentially codified.

Clarkson's single steals the penthouse from "Set Fire to the Rain," the latest hit by Adele. But the latter, no slouch in the big-voices department herself, held the top of the Billboard 200 album chart with 21 even before her six-award Grammy sweep last night. This is Adele's 19th week atop the U.S. album list, which, in the 21 years that Soundscan data has governed the Billboard charts, is the second-longest run on top by any title. The album 21 still falls shy of, however, is the Whitney-led The Bodyguard soundtrack, which held the top of the chart for 20 weeks in 1992 and 1993, powered by Houston's cover of Dolly Parton's "I Will Always Love You."

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Every year, when I get involved in Grammy debates with my cooler friends, I tell them the problem with the awards isn't that they reward mass-appeal schlock. If the National Academy of Recording Arts and Sciences is doing its job right, it should be rewarding popular, undeniable, and somewhat unhip records. The problem is that NARAS can't even reward the popular stuff right.

Nowhere is this more in evidence than in the Record of the Year category, which, next to the coveted, show-closing Album of the Year prize, should be the marquee award of the night. If NARAS were on its game, it would nominate five high-gloss, career-defining singles that crushed at Top 40, R&B/hip-hop, country or rock radio and then give the big prize to a title that makes everyone say, Yeah, okay, love it or hate it, that record dominated.

Instead, Record of the Year has largely become a head-scratching nonevent, in which NARAS, like a middlebrow missile, homes in on a song that's neither hip enough to be a critics' favorite nor undeniable enough to appeal to the casual TV viewership. Just in the last decade, NARAS has given you such Records of the Year as the Dixie Chicks' most atonal and bile-filled single; two little-heard "event" duets by Ray Charles with Norah Jones, and Robert Plant and Allison Krauss; and a U2 song some like to call a "9/11 anthem," ignoring the fact that anthems are usually widely known and this song came out a year before the tragedy and missed the Hot 100, not even charting after 9/11. Even some of the better RotY picks have been wrongheaded—I happen to like Coldplay's "Clocks," winner in 2004, but over OutKast's "Hey Ya!" and Beyoncé's "Crazy in Love"? Way to miss the plot, NARAS. (I wish YouTube had a clip from the '04 show of presenter and friend-of-OutKast Mary J. Blige, visibly deflating when she opened the envelope and read "Clocks," like the word was "broccoli.")

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Remember the album cut—the track deep on a disc that fans knew best, that only cool radio stations would play? Like so many cherished things from before the iTunes era, it's essentially extinct.

My evidence for this bold and seemingly facile statement isn't the steady, well-chronicled disappearance of the album-oriented rock band. Rather, it's the latest Top 40 radio smash by Adele, who retakes the summit of the Billboard Hot 100 this week with the melodramatic belter "Set Fire to the Rain," her third straight U.S. No. 1 single.

Let's talk about that word, too: single. What the heck is that anymore, anyway? You've been able to buy "Set Fire" as a standalone track since last February. Is a "single" a song picked by record labels, or by you?

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The national star-making machinery only begins to take you seriously when you command the field more than once. Just like, say, GOP presidential candidates, pop acts can't chart one strong number and assume dominance is permanently theirs. They've got to come back on top, week after week, survey after survey. (Even then, as Michelle, Rick, Herman and Newt learned the hard way, stardom is fleeting.)

So it goes for electro-pop duo LMFAO, who kick off 2012 at No. 1 on Billboard's Hot 100 with "Sexy And I Know It," their improbable second chart-topper.

At least, it seemed improbable a few weeks ago. Six months ago, they looked huge: The shufflin' smash "Party Rock Anthem"—a six-week No. 1 smash in July and August, and the year's No. 2 single—dominated the summer of 2011 and introduced an infectious dance. But then, so did "Macarena" in 1996. The only differences between Los Del Rio then and LMFAO now is about 30 years of age, six inches of hair-height, some barely concealed expletives and, now, a followup hit.

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Thanks to her husband, Katy Perry considers herself as an honorary Brit. But as the most frequent current inhabitant of the Billboard charts, she must wish we were all anglophiles.

If only America had a Christmas No. 1 competition as rabid and media-fueled as Old Blighty's! Katy would have that improbable, record-shattering sixth Hot 100 chart-topper from her Teenage Dream album all sewn up by year's end. All she'd have to do is call her current hit, "The One That Got Away"—currently No. 4 on the Hot 100—her bid for a Christmas No. 1, and thousands of pop buyers would comply.

But if she and her label, EMI, can't get us to give her a chart-topper the British way, they'll try other avenues—like peoples' hunger to fill that shiny new Apple gadget they're opening on the 25th.

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Later this week, Billboard is expected to announce its tallies for the biggest hits of 2011. And what a year for music it's been. Remember all those big hits: "Like a G6," "We R Who We R," "Raise Your Glass," "Fuck You!" and "What's My Name?"

What's that—you say the songs I just rattled off are kinda old? Like, 2010-old? You're absolutely right. But don't be surprised if these vintage hits feature prominently among the biggest Hot 100 hits of 2011.

Billboard's "chart year" runs from December 1 through November 30. Blame old-fashioned dead-tree production schedules—they do this so they can announce the year-end victors before the holidays arrive and run the lists in a big, collectible magazine the size of small phone book. (Makes a great stocking stuffer. Seriously!)

The upshot of this skewed calendar: Take a good look at what's topping the Hot 100 right now. Hits like Rihanna's "We Found Love" (No. 1), LMFAO's "Sexy and I Know It" (No. 2), or Bruno Mars's fast-rising "It Will Rain" are going to feature conspicuously among the top Billboard hits... of 2012, next December. On the 2011 list, they won't be very prominent at all.

Even with its abundance of aging tracks, the 2011 list will still be worth poring over when Billboard drops it in a few days. Unlike the year-end album chart—which is based on straight Soundscan sales totals, and whose victor is already a foregone conclusion—the formula of digital sales, radio airplay and online streaming that determines the weekly Hot 100 means year-end predictions require a lot more guesstimating. Which is more fun, anyway.

Let's run down, in alphabetical order, a baker's dozen of hits that are likely to figure prominently on Billboard's Top Hot 100 Songs of 2011. These are tracks likely to make the final Top 10 or at least the Top 20.

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When you go see a movie at a Saturday half-price matinee, should it count toward that weekend's box office? You paid less than the guy who saw the movie Friday night. Does that mean your viewing shouldn't count?

What about if you see an old movie at a revival house: Should that count toward the box office? I don't just mean a big, nationwide rerelease like this year's The Lion King in 3D. If enough people pay to see a restored print of Blade Runner, should it make the lower rungs of the box-office chart? What if that showing of Blade Runner was only playing at one theater, like the Ziegfeld in New York or Graumann's Chinese in Hollywood? Should that count?

These questions probably seem like no-brainers. Sure, count it all, you're saying. What's the big deal? Maybe the matinee-priced movie should count half as much as the full-price, but otherwise no one would object to all movies at all theaters competing for the weekend title. In fact, that's exactly how box-office tallying works. If it screens somewhere open to the public, it's counted and charted.

Switch the medium from movies to music, however, and answering these questions becomes a matter of hot debate.

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Pop-chart record-keeping can be as contentious as baseball's, and we've got quite the steroids-style asterisk forming atop Billboard's Hot 100. On the most recent chart, the most pervasive radio star of the last half-decade brushed past a couple of legends into the hall of fame. And like Barry Bonds after his record-setting 2001 season, she isn't done yet.

I'm talking about Rihanna, who scored her 11th billed credit atop the Hot 100 with the Calvin Harris-produced and supported single "We Found Love." The electro-thumping midtempo track has been America's top-selling single for two weeks now, and another 243,000 downloads sold this past week allows Rihanna to replace Adele's five-week chart-topper "Someone Like You" in the top slot. Even though Adele's torch ballad is the most-played song at radio, and Rihanna's song only ranks seventh in airplay, the huge sales margin for "Found"—topping "Someone" by nearly 100,000 last week—gives Ri the edge.

To put it mildly, the Barbadian pop goddess is on a tear. "Found" is her fourth No. 1 single just in the last 12 months, following last November's "What's My Name" featuring Drake; December's "Only Girl (In the World)"; and this April's "S&M" featuring Britney Spears. That run of smashes (which was broken up by a few lower-charting singles, including the recent Top 10 "Cheers (Drink to That)" and the flops "Man Down" and "California King Bed") has hurtled Rihanna into rarefied chart company.

Career No. 1 hits is one of the biggest chart barometers we have—only major superstars need apply. As recently as the early fall of 2010, before Rihanna started this latest run, her seven chart-toppers placed her in the neighborhood of such estimable pop kings as Phil Collins and George Michael. Now, by scoring her 11th No. 1, Ri has moved past the career totals of Stevie Wonder and Janet Jackson, and she's currently tied with all-time diva Whitney Houston. If she keeps this trend going, she could be surpassing the likes of Madonna, the Supremes and even Michael Jackson within a year or two.

Holy "Umbrella"! How did this happen?

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