Numbers behind a No. 1

The subtitle of Chris Dalla Riva’s Uncharted Territory (Bloomsbury Academic, 352 pp.) is What Numbers Tell Us About the Biggest Hit Songs and Ourselves. By “numbers” Dalla Riva means data, by “biggest hit songs” he means Billboard No. 1 singles, and by “what the numbers tell us about” them he means a combination of intermittently interesting trivia and narrative-challenging deep takes.

Examples of the former: 55% of the biggest songs from 1961 to 1965 ended by fading out, 85% of the biggest songs from 1958 to 1971 were by artists younger than 30, and 86% of the No. 1s between 2004 and 2012 listed their performers as a co-writer (“up from 38% in the 1960s”). Examples of the latter: A need to feel better after the JFK assassination probably had little to do with why the U.S. went mad for the Beatles in 1964, disco definitely didn’t die in 1979 at Steve Dahl’s Disco Demolition Night, and performers who get co-writing credits haven’t necessarily written anything.

As for what the numbers tell us about ourselves, a lot of it could be summarized thus: We like different styles of music and songs about different topics at different times, depending on the political, cultural, and technological climates. And while Dalla Riva cites Elvis Presley’s “Stuck on You” (predatory!), Ricky Nelson’s “Travelin’ Man” (ethnic stereotypes!), and Johnny Preston’s “Running Bear” (ditto!) as examples of how insensitive we once were, he draws no moral conclusions from the explosion of hit-song profanity and sexual content that he documents as beginning in the 1990s.

What the book does confirm, as if we needed the confirmation, is that we really love money. Practically every ­significant music-business decision or development—from the lengths of songs to how many tracks albums contain—has been driven less by aesthetics, taste, talent, technology, or even fashion than by the bottom line.

The book confirms something else unflattering about us: We no longer proofread. One can only conclude from the number of minor and not-so-minor errors in Dalla Riva’s text that publishers are trying to boost the bottom line by spending less money on proofreaders.

Still, if you like the music of what Casey Kasem called the “pop-rock era” and related trivia, Dalla Riva’s investigations will both activate the jukebox in your head and fire up your synapses even when his observations, charts, and graphs don’t feel seismic. If, on the other hand, you number such music among the “childish things” that you’ve put away, you’ll likely consider his statistical lens just another glass through which to view human nature darkly.