The Number Twos: Introduction

Number Ones are great. There’s no doubt about it. They’re the best, they’ve topped the charts, set the records, and gone as far as they could go. They’ve reached the pinnacle for popular music and can have no regrets. But everybody talks about them; and they don’t need someone else in their corner.

The true underdogs are the #2s. They’ve often got everything the #1s have but they just couldn’t make it quite over the top, for a variety of reasons. A little too strange, a bad quirk of timing, a powerhouse occupying the #1 spot. For but a quirk of fate, they don’t reach the pinnacle and thus get left out of all the trivia and nostalgic remembrances. Well, not here. An ingenious writer at Stereogum has been chronicling all the number ones of the Hot 100 era, which begins in late 1958. Here, we’ll do the same for the number twos. I’ll rate every one from 1-10 as well because, it’s a good idea.

(To get technical for a second, this means songs that peaked at #2, so if a song hung around the second spot for a couple weeks on the way to the top, or stopped at second on the way down from the pinnacle, we’ll leave it alone.)

Our first #2 coming up.