From Coolio to LMFAO, a Trip Down Memory Lane With Bilboard’s 100 Top Songs of All-Time Posted by Lucas Garrison on 08/05/13 | Filed under Charts, Sales

Regardless of how often you check them or how much weight you give ‘em—you would be remiss to put to much stock in what they reveal— you gotta respect the Billboard Charts. Since it’s start in 1940, they have been a staple of the music industry since and been the pinnacle of what “tastemaking”. Personally, I don’t really give two shits about them because the best music never makes it to the charts, but they are still a valuable tool for telling us what’s popular and are too big to ignore. Want to know just what kind of history these charts, specifically the Hot 100, which started 55 years ago, have?

Well in celebration of the Hot 100’s 55th birthday, Billboard released a countdown entitled, Hot 100 55th Anniversary: The All-Time Top 100 Songs. Now before you work yourself into a tizzy asking how “Party Rock Anthem” beat out “Hey Jude” and why Nickleback is even on the list at all, keep in mind this chart was made with a weird system and is no reflection on which songs are the best.

The 55th anniversary edition of the Hot 100 All-Time Top Songs chart is based on actual performance on the weekly Billboard Hot 100, since the chart’s inception in August 1958 through the July 27, 2013, ranking. 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. Due to changes in chart methodology over the Hot 100's 55 years (i.e., the inclusion of Nielsen Entertainment airplay monitoring and point-of-sales tracking and the recent inclusion of streaming data, among earlier modifications), certain eras are weighted differently to account for chart turnover rates over various periods.

Again, I want to make it clear, that this chart is not for those who want to say does song X deserve to be ranked higher than song Y, because if you want to do that you will only end up tearing your hair up. This chart wont tell you anything new or reassure your faith in music, but it is a pretty cool look back at music history and is fun walk through time. There were plenty of times I found myself saying “Holy shit I forgot about that song” (like number 50, Boyz II Men's, "End Of The Road") while clicking through, and it as fun to see how off my predictions were.



For starters, I thought the chart would be littered with Justin Timberlake and Michael Jackson, but both were few and far between. Again, I think that has to do more with the way the charts are ranked than the actual artists, but we can still guess right? There was one aspect, rankings aside, which I found very interesting about this chart and that was the lack of hip-hop songs represented.

In the 100 songs charted, amazingly, only two can really be considered hip-hop songs; Kanye’s “Gold Digger” (#58) and Coolio’s “Gangsta’s Paradise” (#79). I know others like “Yeah”, “Dilemma” and “I Got A Feeling” have hip-hop elements, I hardly consider any of them truly hip-hop based songs. It really shows that, while hip-hop might be out lives, it really is still a sub-culture and needs a pop/R&B/club hook to make its may to the mainstream. Its pretty crazy to think, regardless of how the chart is compiled, that songs like “Walk This Way”, “Changes”, and countless others we consider rap staples do not appear anywhere on the list. I know it doesn’t really matter at all, but it would be nice to see hip-hop get the respect it deserves.



Oh and in case you were curious, here is the number one song:

See Also:  Who Wants to Check Out Every Billboard #1 Single Since 2000? (Videos)