Billboard Lists
Ever since Ralph Peer held his famous recording sessions in Bristol, Tennessee in the late 1920s with such acts as Ernest Stoneman, Jimmie Rodgers and the Carter Family, country music has uniquely told the story of American life.
Those early country stars and other artists recorded songs that reflected the down-home appeal of rural living, a nostalgia for what seemed to be a simpler past, a lure of a good old-fashioned murder ballad or a longing for an absent love.
The pioneers and trailblazers who brought these songs to the masses through the Grand Ole Opry weekly radio show (which celebrates its 100th anniversary this year) or by traveling the nation’s highways and byways helped establish country music, perhaps more than any other genre, as a storytelling medium.
Billboard looks at the those early, mid-century and 21st-century contemporary country artists who have delivered, and in some cases written, the songs that have made us cry in a tear in our beer –and who have widened the scope of what it means to be a country artist, without every sacrificing the genre’s heart.
In determining these rankings, members of the Billboard editorial staff selected their top artists from a list of nearly 200 names spanning the past century. Certain parameters were set, including focusing primarily on mainstream country artists, instead of embracing adjacent genres like Americana or bluegrass (therefore, no Jason Isbell or Sturgill Simpson).
While commercial success was a factor, artistry, longevity and enduring influence counted just as much. Because it’s too early to gauge the long-term impact of many of the newer acts yet, the list leans largely on artists whose place in country music history is already secure. But everyone on the list has in their own way moved the genre forward.
Lists such as these are always lightning rods for debate — and while our No. 1 choice, which will be revealed Nov. 19, feels pretty unassailable, there are certainly others in the Top 10 who many will feel deserved the top spot. In fact, we had a healthy staff debate over who it would be. That just goes to show the depth and richness of the talent in country music. The list will unfold over the next two weeks in five parts, starting with Nos. 100-76.
100. Brothers Osborne
Image Credit: John Shearer/2021 CMT Awards/Getty Images
Just after POW reached their first anniversary, the rock-inspired K-pop boy band dropped a new EP, Boyfriend, whose lead single title track paid homage to one of the scene’s favorite artists — pop-punk princess Avril Lavigne.
For “Boyfriend,” the quintet reinterpreted Avril’s 2007 single “Girlfriend,” the Canadian superstar’s first No. 1 on the Billboard Hot 100 and one of the year’s biggest tracks. POW kept the original’s stomping production and undeniably catchy chorus intact for the hybrid track with a new mix of Korean and English lyrics.
POW members Jungbin, Yorch, Hyunbin, Dongyeon and Hong tell Billboard that the superstar played a significant role in their musical backgrounds and made a song like “Boyfriend” happen.
“We’ve loved band sounds and Avril Lavigne’s songs were always on our playlist,” the group says. “We think she was the first to show how punk can be so appealing in pop music. We’re grateful she made it possible for us and so we’ve worked hard to release ‘Boyfriend.’”
“For this remake, I listened to all of Lavigne’s albums,” adds POW eldest member Yorch. “I was drawn to her timeless drum sounds and couldn’t get over the rawness and cool beat of the drums. I recently got an electric guitar and she’s opened my eyes to acoustic real sound. And, it’s something K-pop should also look out for.”
When honoring both the sound and aesthetics from Avril’s debut in 2002, the A&R for POW’s record label, GRID Entertainment, saw their work as helping connect K-pop more extensively to music culture today.
“We believe that youth culture is the essence of mainstream K-pop,” a representative from GRID’s A&R says. “Rebellious, grunge-like, and youthful innocence defines K-pop and POW’s music is grounded in real rock and band sounds. It still feels like the 2000s era, a period where analog and digital collide. That is why we find Avril Lavigne’s music relevant, powerful and resonating with people in their teens, 20s, and 30s. It’s her greatest strength and the reason her music inspires us for interpretation.”
From bands like POW, SEVENTEEN and Stray Kids to solo superstars like BoA and former LOONA members Yves and Heejin, here is a collection of K-pop stars who have expressed their admiration for Avril Lavigne.
POW
Image Credit: Courtesy Grid Entertainment
Former A&M Records executive Derek Taylor captured the sound of Sergio Mendes and Brasil ’66 in a few well-chosen phrases in in his liner notes to the group’s first album for the label. Taylor wrote excitedly about its “delicately-mixed blend of pianistic jazz, subtle Latin nuances, cool minor chords, a danceable beat, gentle laughter and a little sex.”
With all that going for it, how could it miss?
Mendes, who died on Thursday Sept. 5 at age 83, had the kind of career artists dream about. He had enormous success in the 1960s fronting Sergio Mendes & Brasil ’66, which had three top 10 albums on the Billboard 200 and two top 10 hits on the Billboard Hot 100. But Mendes’ success didn’t end when that group’s fortunes cooled. He enjoyed periodic comebacks and periods of rediscovery for decades to come.
He had a big comeback in 1983 with the Barry Mann & Cynthia Weil power ballad “Never Gonna Let You Go,” which reached the top five on the Hot 100. He enjoyed another rediscovery in 2006 when his album Timeless, which he co-produced with will.i.am, reached No. 44 on the Billboard 200 and received a pair of Grammy nods. (The album featured such guest artists as The Black Eyed Peas, Erykah Badu, Stevie Wonder, John Legend and Justin Timberlake.) In 2012, he was nominated for an Oscar for best original song for a song he co-wrote for the film Rio.
Mendes won a Grammy for best world music album for his 1992 album Brasileiro and two Latin Grammys for best Brazilian contemporary pop album for Bom Tempo and Timeless. He received a lifetime achievement award from the Latin Recording Academy in 2005.
In 1966, Mendes came to the attention of Herb Alpert, co-founder of A&M Records, and one of the top-selling album artists of the 1960s. Alpert produced the group’s first three albums, all of which went gold. Alpert also took Brasil ’66 on tour with him and even wrote an enthusiastic recommendation that appeared on the back cover of their debut album: “One afternoon recently, a friend of mine called to ask if I wanted to hear a new group. From the first note I was grinning like a kid who’d just found a new toy.” That album remained on the Billboard 200 for more than two years (a rarity in those days) and was voted into the Grammy Hall of Fame in 2012.
Alpert was a close friend of Mendes’ for nearly 60 years. “Sergio Mendes, my brother from another country, passed away quietly and peacefully,” Alpert said in a statement on Friday. “He was a true friend and extremely gifted musician who brought Brazilian music in all its iterations to the entire world with elegance and joy.” (Another bond between the two musicians: Lani Hall, to whom Alpert has been married since 1973, was one of two female singers in Sergio Mendes & Brasil ’66.)
The group’s sound was cool, yet hot, and brimming with confidence. Still, it was a new sound in 1966, so new that A&M took no chances and supplied parenthetical phonetic spellings for five song titles on the album, including “Mais Qu Nada (Ma-sh Kay Nada).” That pronunciation gambit may seem quaint in an era when Bad Bunny gives acceptance speeches on general-audience award shows in Spanish, but, hey, baby steps. One generation paves the way for the next.
The group’s music was often featured in “lounge music” compilations of pop songs from the 1960s, which were a forerunner to today’s “yacht rock” collections of pop songs from the 1970s and 1980s. Some people, it seems, can only enjoy pop music if they’re being ironic about it. (But they’re listening, so I’ll take it.)
Here are 10 Mendes tracks which will remind you of his greatness or give you a good place to start in exploring this talented and innovative musician.
I wrote the liner notes for a CD compilation, Sergio Mendes & Brasil ’66-86, which was released in 1987 amid A&M’s 25th anniversary celebration. This piece draws some material from those notes.
“Acode” (2008)
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Broadway’s biggest night, the Tony Awards, is almost here. It all gets underway Sunday, June 16, at 6:30 p.m. PT/3:30 p.m. PT with The Tony Awards: Act One, co-hosted by Julianne Hough and Utkarsh Ambudkar. That 90-minute pre-show, where many of the technical awards are presented, streams on Pluto TV (click on the “ET” channel). […]
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Taylor Swift’s Lover logs its 45th week at No. 1 on Billboard’s Catalog Albums chart, extending its record for the longest run by a female solo artist in the chart’s history. Lover eclipsed Adele’s debut album, 19, four weeks ago.
Lover didn’t get all that much love (at least by Swift’s sky-high standards) when it was released. The album spent just one week at No. 1 on the Billboard 200 and was passed over for a Grammy nod for album of the year (though it did receive a Grammy nod for best pop vocal album). But the belated success of “Cruel Summer,” which topped the Billboard Hot 100 for four weeks starting in October 2023, more than four years after the album’s release, has revived the album. The phenomenal success of the Eras Tour has also kept it high on the charts.
The Catalog Albums chart ranks the week’s most popular catalog albums in the U.S. Catalog albums are titles that are older than 18 months old and have fallen below No. 100 on the Billboard 200 — or holiday albums in their second holiday season. The chart was introduced in Billboard in the issue dated May 25, 1991.
For the first 18 years of Top Catalog Albums, catalog albums weren’t eligible to appear on the Billboard 200. That changed with the Dec. 5, 2009-dated chart, when catalog restrictions were lifted, turning the Billboard 200 into an all-inclusive list of the best-selling albums in the country, regardless of their age. (The adjustment came after Michael Jackson’s death in June 2009, which triggered a sales explosion for his catalog titles. Jackson’s catalog compilation Number Ones was the best-selling album in six of the first seven weeks following his death, yet was ineligible for Billboard’s flagship chart – marking the first time a catalog album had outsold the No. 1 album on the Billboard 200.) Starting with the issue dated Dec. 13, 2014, Billboard shifted from pure sales to a multi-factor consumption formula that also includes on-demand streaming and digital track sales.
We’re going to count down the 17 albums with the longest runs at No. 1 on Catalog Albums from 1991 to the present. It’s an eclectic list, to say the least. It includes two Christmas albums, a film soundtrack and a remarkably wide range of music, including pop, traditional pop, rock, hard rock, R&B, rap, country and reggae.
Eight of the albums on the list were released prior to the 1991 inception of the chart. Impressively, they made the list even though activity prior to the chart’s inception doesn’t count.
Here are the albums with the longest runs at No. 1 on Catalog Albums from 1991 to the present. Each entry includes the album’s release date, the date the album first reached No. 1 on Catalog Albums and the album’s peak position on the Billboard 200.
Prince, The Very Best of Prince, 18 weeks
Image Credit: Jonathan Daniel/Getty Images
Depending on who you’re talking to, sex is either the most natural thing on earth or a shameful sin that must be endured without pleasure to ensure the future of the human race.
Whether it’s being celebrated or censored, discussed openly or surreptitiously, done for procreation or recreation, you can be sure of one thing – if you mention it, you get people’s attention. (Hey, that’s just biology. Or chemistry. Or some sort of science thing.)
When the Billboard Hot 100 launched on Aug. 4, 1958, America wasn’t exactly in its most socially progressive era. You could sing about crushes, hand holding and even kissing on the radio, but you dare not mention the dirty. But since humans are wired to think about it regardless of social mores, songs that subtly tipped to the nasty penetrated popular music anyway.
Musicians spoke about it in coded slang terms, alluded to it in song lyrics (both poetic and crass) or implied it by singing the most innocent words in a suggestive tone. Heck, rock n’ roll – the youth culture music of the Boomer Era – is named after it (as far back as the 1910s, African American communities were using the phrase “rock and roll” as a euphemism for sex).
Following the sexual revolution of the ‘60s, the U.S. began to loosen up, and by the ‘70s, it was only the old fogies wagging their fingers and clucking their tongues when the words “sex” and “sexy” began to appear in the titles of hit songs on the Billboard charts.
And that’s what this list is about – the most popular songs in Hot 100 history to have the words “sex” or “sexy” in the title. Some of these Hot 100 hits are, well, hot; others are hokey; a couple have aged poorly.
Without beating around the bush any further, here are the 15 biggest songs with “sex” or “sexy” in the title in Hot 100 history.
This ranking is based on actual performance on the weekly Billboard Hot 100 chart. Songs are ranked based on an inverse point system, with weeks at No. 1 earning the greatest value and weeks at No. 100 earning the least. To ensure equitable representation of the biggest hits from each era, certain time frames were weighted to account for the difference between turnover rates from those years.
Marcy Playground, “Sex and Candy”