In The Number Ones, I’m reviewing every single #1 single in the history of the Billboard Hot 100, starting with the chart’s beginning, in 1958, and working my way up into the present. Book Bonus Beat: The Number Ones: Twenty Chart-Topping Hits That Reveal the History of Pop Music.

Sadie Dupuis, of Speedy Ortiz and Sad13 fame, is a well-documented Menomena stan. This past week she even flew across the country from her Philadelphia home base to see the Portland band’s recent hometown reunion show. In an Instagram post documenting the trip, she wrote, “i believe i’ve seen them play more than any band i haven’t toured with,” adding that she’s “grateful for the influence this band and its members have had over the years & now on so many components of my songwriting & recording & listening.”

On Friday, breaking made its debut as a competitive Olympic sport — a wild progression from the breakdance battles of decades past. This might’ve be the only time that breaking gets its moment as an Olympic sport, since it’s not returning at the Los Angeles Olympics in 2028. The gold medal battles were surreal, impressive spectacles, with Japan’s Ami Yuasa becoming the first B-Girl to win a gold medal and Canada’s Philip “Phil Wizard” Kim winning in the B-Boy category. But the enduring image of Olympic breaking will always belong to the baffling, meme-generating performance from Australian B-girl Rachel “Raygun” Gunn.

On Friday, Adele kicked off her residency at a Munich stadium built specifically for her. The British singer performed “Chasing Pavements” from her debut album 19 for the first time since 2017.

Earlier this year, Billy Corgan defended Taylor Swift and called her “one of the most gifted pop artists of all time.” In a new interview, Slayer and Exodus guitarist Gary Holt also unexpectedly sang the pop star’s praises, exclaiming he doesn’t understand the animosity toward her.

Earlier this week, Water From Your Eyes announced a covers EP titled MP3 Player 1. The indie-pop weirdos unleashed their rendition of Chumbawamba’s “The Good Ship Lifestyle,” and now the EP is out in full.

The start of Pride Month occasioned an intense exchange at the Weekends With Adele residency show Saturday night at Caesars Palace. While Adele was sitting at a piano bench monologuing between songs, someone in the crowd shouted what sounded to her like “Pride sucks!” Adele responded immediately and forcefully to the heckler: “What was that? Did you just say Pride sucks? Did you come to my fucking show and just say that Pride sucks? Are you fucking stupid? Don’t be so fucking ridiculous. If you have nothing nice to say, shut up, alright?” Watch footage of the incident below.

Lady Gaga had her breakthrough in her acting career with the 2018 film A Star Is Born. The movie was also Bradley Cooper’s directorial debut, and at the 2024 Santa Barbara International Film Festival on Thursday, he revealed that he had considered Adele for Gaga’s role.

Back in 2022, Adele finally kicked off her long-delayed, much-anticipated residency at Caesar’s Palace in Las Vegas. Those shows went through COVID-related production delays, and Adele didn’t want to start doing those shows until she thought that they were ready. Once she started up in Vegas, Adele seemed to have a good time, and the shows were successes. Adele’s Vegas residency is set to run though June, and now she’s announced her next live venture: A series of four massive shows in Munich, at a massive open-air stadium setup that’s been built specifically for her.

The dichotomy of 2023: we had an amazing year for music, in terms of listeners having access to seemingly endless troves of virtuosity and bangingness. We also had a depressing year for music, in terms of the environment in which that music is made. Following are eight of the worst developments over the year.

In The Number Ones, I’m reviewing every single #1 single in the history of the Billboard Hot 100, starting with the chart’s beginning, in 1958, and working my way up into the present. Book Bonus Beat: The Number Ones: Twenty Chart-Topping Hits That Reveal the History of Pop Music.

In The Number Ones, I’m reviewing every single #1 single in the history of the Billboard Hot 100, starting with the chart’s beginning, in 1958, and working my way up into the present. Book Bonus Beat: The Number Ones: Twenty Chart-Topping Hits That Reveal the History of Pop Music.

In The Number Ones, I’m reviewing every single #1 single in the history of the Billboard Hot 100, starting with the chart’s beginning, in 1958, and working my way up into the present. Book Bonus Beat: The Number Ones: Twenty Chart-Topping Hits That Reveal the History of Pop Music.

Adele has been known to get saucy at her Las Vegas residency. Saturday night, she did so in defense of a fan who was catching flak for wilding out in the audience.

Noel Gallagher’s solo catalog is basically worthless. He should absolutely reunite Oasis and make millions of dollars while making billions of people happy. In lieu of that, it’s theoretically nice that we get to be entertained by his interviews slagging other artists, but his insults are starting to get as lazy as his High Flying Birds songwriting.

In recent months, there’s been a disconcerting trend at concerts around the world: Fans in the crowd are throwing objects at the singer onstage. Anecdotally, it doesn’t seem to be a revival of that old-timey cartoon bit where audience members would protest by pelting performers with produce. It’s more like people have emerged from their COVID isolation in a deranged and feral state, with no sense of decency or respect and no idea how to act in public. Last fall, Harry Styles took both a water bottle to the groin and a Skittle to the eye. More recently we’ve seen the likes of Kane Brown, Kelsea Ballerini, and Bebe Rexha attacked in this way. No one hit Pink, but they did toss both a wheel of brie and the ashes of someone’s mother up there. There have been more of these incidents than I can keep track of.

Our long national nightmare is almost over. Tonight, James Corden enters his final week as host of the Late Late Show. Soon, that man will presumably be headed back to the UK. He can continue to stage his viral musical-theater stunts and do insufferable voice-acting in children’s movies, and I will no longer have to blog about it. It’ll be great! Everybody wins! Before Corden cannonballs out of our lives, though, he has to tie up whatever loose ends he’s left in his long-running Carpool Karaoke series.

The Weeknd isn’t the only artist who has beef with Rolling Stone this week. Chaka Khan is apparently peeved that the magazine ranked Mary J. Blige and Adele above her on its “The 200 Greatest Singers Of All Time” list. The Queen Of Funk ranked at #29 (honestly, really good placement out of 200). Guesting on Los Angeles Magazine’s The Originals podcast, Khan told the host, who congratulated her on the placement, “I didn’t even know what the hell you were talking about, so obviously this don’t mean a great deal to me… These people don’t quantify or validate me in any way.”

For such a mundane institution, the Grammys have a way of bringing out extreme emotions, from scathing of-course-they-did laughter to searing oh-no-they-didn’t anger. Here are some takeaways from the newly unveiled nominations.

The Grammy Award for Album Of The Year is the biggest prize that the Recording Academy hands out every year, and its history is a thorny one. Before Jon Batiste’s random-ass win for for We Are last year, Album Of The Year hadn’t gone to a Black artist since Herbie Hancock in 2008. A rap-adjacent album hasn’t won since Outkast’s Speakerboxxx/The Love Below in 2004. This year, though, tons of A-listers have big albums up for consideration, and there will be a lot of interest around the award.

Back in November, pop superstar Adele announced plans to play a four-month residency in Las Vegas. The idea was for Adele to spend the first four months of 2022 singing her hits at the Coliseum at Caesar’s Palace. But in January, shortly before those shows were set to start, Adele made a tearful video announcement that COVID-related production delays had forced her to postpone that residency: “I’m so sorry, but my show ain’t ready.” Apparently, though, her show is now ready, and Adele has just announced those rescheduled dates.

Avril Lavigne is no stranger to emotionally bare material in her own music, but now she’s taken on a particularly volcanic song — Adele’s immortally intense “Hello.” Lavigne made her own rendition for the Spotify Singles series, alongside a stripped-down version of the title track from her recent album Love Sux.

The entertainment industry loves a good story of survival. The more compelling, the better. Well, if emerging country singer-songwriter Nate Smith has anything going for him, it’s a really moving backstory — a phoenix-y one about endurance and optimism in the face of tragedy. I’m not even being hyperbolic: Across the last 15-ish years, Smith’s tried to make it in Nashville multiple times, experienced a divorce, and lost everything he owned in the 2018 Paradise, California Camp Fire, including his guitar. The bio practically writes itself.

The second season of HBO’s the-kids-are-not-alright drama Euphoria has wrapped, but the internet is still talking about it, sharing “I’VE NEVER, EVER BEEN HAPPIER” / “Bitch, you better be joking” memes, and debating whether or not creator Sam Levinson exploited his young cast in the nudity department. And as long as we’re talking about Euphoria’s cast, headed up by superstar Zendaya, each actor has achieved incredible levels of fame (with some young’uns just now realizing that Maude Apatow is the child of Judd Apatow and Leslie Mann). HBO recently revealed that Euphoria is its second-most-watched program since 2004, behind Game Of Thrones. Meanwhile, Billboard reports that songs featured on Euphoria have earned streaming jumps of up to 2,316% and Shazam searches up by 10,000%, gains “unlike any other TV show.”

I think we all got a little tired of hearing what hobbies our peers took up during lockdown in early 2020. At first, baking sourdough and watching Tiger King were novel activities, since none of us could possibly know how long the pandemic would actually last. Those pastimes can’t help but feel inconsequential compared to the project undertaken by 17-year-old Ash Gutierrez, aka hyperpop breakout star glaive, who used his COVID lockdown boredom to forge a music career that is quickly making him one of the most recognized artists in his genre.

Change is inevitable. The clock ticks, the earth travels around the sun, we age and celebrate birthdays/anniversaries, and time marches on. But if you tab over to Billboard‘s Mainstream Rock Airplay chart, a funny thing happens. Time is frozen, like an everlasting gobstopper or one of those perfectly preserved midcentury interiors you see on TikTok. There, hard-rock lifers Three Days Grace are up against genre rivals/contemporaries Shinedown for the most number ones in the 40-year history of the chart. This week Three Days Grace have a song called “So Called Life” (which should read “So-Called Life” — ugh, my chronic urge to copy-edit song titles) at #1. It’s the band’s 16th chart-topper and its first since 2019 (“Right Left Wrong”). The competition is amplified, too, by the fact that both bands are releasing new albums this spring, with Three Days Grace dropping Explosions in May and Shinedown releasing Planet Zero in April.

If 2021 belonged to Olivia Rodrigo, 2022 is already about searching for the next Olivia Rodrigo. To that end, the pop machine is currently fixated on 18-year-old Canadian singer Lauren Spencer-Smith, who American Idol fans might remember from Season 18, where Spencer-Smith, then just 16, made it to the Top 20 singing P!nk’s “What About Us” and Lady Gaga’s “Always Remember Us This Way.”

Adele has posted a tearful video to social media announcing that her upcoming Las Vegas residency would have to be postponed indefinitely due to COVID-19-related production delays. Adele’s residency was meant to begin tomorrow (Friday) at the Colosseum of Las Vegas’ Caesars Palace Hotel. “All dates will be rescheduled, more info coming soon,” she wrote.

One of my favorite books as a kid was a novel called The Ordinary Princess by M.M. Kaye. It was sort of a spin on Sleeping Beauty, only instead of a royal baby being cursed with an eventual long nap, The Ordinary Princess was about a princess who, unlike her older, blonde, more beautiful siblings, receives the “gift” of being “ordinary.” That means “mousy” brown hair, freckles, and a disinterest in silky princess dresses. She’s pretty much the family embarrassment, so eventually the princess moves out of her castle, gets a job as a maid in another castle, meets a prince who’s also pretending not to be a royalty, and they fall in love and get married, etc. (I swear I’m going somewhere with this, so stay with me.)

Vinyl has outsold CDs for the first time in 30 years, according to MRC Data and Billboard. That means vinyl is now the leading format for all album purchases in the U.S.

CD sales are up for the first time in 17 years, and we have major marquee acts like Adele, BTS, and Taylor Swift to thank.

The holiday season is over, but the holiday charts — the Billboard Hot 100 top 10, in particular — mirror a certain ongoing generational war. Gen X pop icon Mariah Carey and her unshakable “All I Want For Christmas Is You” hit #1 (for a third straight year), while millennial Adele’s “Easy On Me” hovered at #3. At #2 was Brenda Lee’s “Rockin’ Around The Christmas Tree” — a boomer classic. Kicked out of the top 5 was Gen Z jam “Stay” by the Kid LAROI & Justin Bieber, replaced by midcentury yuletide bedrocks “Jingle Bell Rock” and “Holly Jolly Christmas,” which debuted in the ’60s and ’50s, respectively. So many decades, and they’re all knocking against each other in the top 10. It certainly makes you think about whether or not the generations can coexist peacefully in the pop music world when recent history (see: “OK Boomer,” etc) has suggested otherwise.

Vinyl just had its best sales week in decades. Billboard reports that Americans bought 2.11 million vinyl records in the week ending on December 23, the biggest sales week — and the first time that vinyl sales have broken two million — since SoundScan began tracking music sales in 1991.

Before we get to this week’s column, some housekeeping: After eight(!) years writing The Week In Pop, I am handing over the reins of this column in 2022. Starting in January, Rachel Brodsky will be Stereogum’s weekly pop columnist. Chronicling the twists and turns of the pop mainstream has been fun and challenging, but I’m excited to focus on different projects and spotlight a different perspective in this space. If you’ve read Rachel’s writing about pop — like, say, her universally acclaimed review of the new Adele album — you know The Week In Pop is in good hands.

The first on-demand streaming service turned 20 years old last week. On Dec. 3, 2001, the San Francisco startup Listen.com launched Rhapsody—not a personalized online radio station but a searchable “celestial jukebox” allowing users to stream any song in its library for a monthly fee. At the time, this was novel and, depending on your connection speed, impractical. Two decades later it is the baseline of the music industry.

Last month, before the release of her new album 30, Adele participated in a two-hour concert special called Adele: One Night Only, which was part Oprah interview and part filmed performance. That performance took place at Griffith Park Observatory in Los Angeles, and it was quite the star-studded event.

A lifetime ago, before he was a culture war figurehead posing for photos with Elon Musk and Joe Rogan, before he asked Michel Gondry to film his all-star block party, before he helmed his short-lived but generation-defining Comedy Central series, Dave Chappelle and his creative partner Neal Brennan wrote a stoner comedy called Half Baked. Chappelle and SNL actor Jim Breuer were billed as the two leads of Half Baked, but for my money the movie’s most iconic moment belongs to Guillermo Diaz, whose character Scarface memorably quits his fast food job by announcing over the restaurant P.A., “Fuck you! Fuck you! Fuck you! You’re cool. And fuck you, I’m out!” I thought of this scene upon hearing “abcdefu.”

Kanye West held another Sunday Service livestream today, which was dedicated to Virgil Abloh, West’s longtime creative director who died today at age 41 after a battle with cancer. During the livestream, West’s Sunday Service choir reworked Adele’s 30 lead single “Easy On Me” with some more religious-minded lyrics: “Go easy on me, father/ I am still your child/ And I need the chance to/ Feel your love around,” went the new chorus.

People sure do like Adele. It’s really something. The British singer can disappear for years at a time and then return with another album that sounds like virtually nothing else that’s happening in pop music. And then right away, she eclipses everyone else. In an era when streaming has come to define the music business, people actually buy Adele’s albums. This past Friday, Adele released her long-awaited new LP 30. Within three days, 30 had already become America’s biggest-selling album of 2021.