My fascination with pop music charts began at age 10. Every Sunday morning, I listened to “American Top 40 with Casey Kasem.” The syndicated radio countdown show was based on the Hot 100 singles tally from music trade magazine Billboard. I might have been the only pre-teen among my peers with a subscription.
Wherever the family went, I brought my portable Sony Walkman tuned to a SoCal affiliate station, headphones, a notepad, and pen, all ready to jot down artists, song titles, and the weekly chart positions for four hours. Then I meticulously designed a colorful chart and hung it on the wall. This endeavor continued until my junior year of high school when my priorities and taste in music shifted, but that early attention to detail would later serve me well as a journalist.
Flashing forward to the present, “Uncharted Territory: What Numbers Tell Us About the Biggest Hit Songs and Ourselves” (Bloomsbury) immediately drew my attention. While absorbing those countdowns as a kid, I was always fascinated by the songs' chart trajectories and backstories. The book enlightened me about why a variety of factors determined the musical compositions' popularity.
Author Chris Dalla Riva examines Billboard No. 1 pop hits from the past six decades and provides thought-provoking insights. It is geared toward past or present pop chart enthusiasts like me, trivia buffs, casual music listeners and beyond.
Back in 2017, Dalla Riva, a self-described musician and data junkie, was an economic consultant who wanted another musical outlet in his life. After coming across a Spotify playlist of every Billboard chart topper since 1958 (when the ranking first appeared), Dalla Riva decided to listen to them chronologically.
“I’d come home after work, put on a song, maybe pick up my guitar and play along with it, read some information about the song,” recalls the author – now a New Jersey-based data analyst for on-demand music streaming/audio discovery platform Audiomack – in a video interview.
He tracked the tunes’ songwriters, producers, time signatures, lyrical complexities, and various facts in a spreadsheet. An example of the latter: I was quite surprised to discover the Golden State is among only four states to appear in the title of a No. 1 single, and that there weren't more songs besides the Eagles’ “Hotel California,” 2Pac feat. Dr. Dre’s “California Love,” and Katy Perry feat. Snoop Dogg’s “California Gurls.” Moreover, New York didn't even make the cut (the other states were Georgia, Kansas and Texas).
The shortest song to ever reach the top spot? “Stay” by Maurice Williams and the Zodiacs, which clocks in at 96 seconds.
Having amassed “a giant data set,” Dalla Riva noticed some trends. “I felt compelled to start writing about them (and) from there, a book slowly began to emerge over a handful of years.” He uses the information to tell the story of American popular music through musical, historical, and analytical lenses.
Dalla Riva rated the tunes on a scale of 10 and later recruited willing family, friends, and colleagues to help evaluate up to 25 songs. The results comprise the end of each chapter, divided into what the author terms highlights, lowlights, argument starters, odd and ends and everything else from each era, stopping at January 2025 (1,176 songs in total).
“I thought it would be more interesting if I brought another person to give some new perspectives on these songs,” he says. “That was the fun part. It was certainly a personal journey to some degree, but [also] a good reminder of the communal nature of music and how important it is to share songs with other people.”
Dalla Riva strove to making the book’s tone light and breezy “because I talk about some heavy topics” such as “racism, gender representation, and problematic artists…but at the same time, we are talking about No. 1 hits. These are things you hear on the radio, things you’d go out to a bar and hear and dance to; [often] really silly songs.”
He wanted to find out how they became popular and discuss what “tied these songs into a larger conversation about bigger topics.” In the 1960s, for instance, then-seemingly innocuous lyrics to such big hits as Elvis Presley’s “Stuck on You,” Ricky Nelson’s “Travelin’ Man” and Johnny Preston’s “Running Bear” could be considered predatory or stereotypical – and therefore offensive – in today’s society. Another chapter delves into a group of socially conscious songs later that decade spurred by the Vietnam War, civil rights, and assassinations.
“Uncharted Territory” is also frequently infused with humorous footnotes, easy-to-decipher graphs and charts, plus personal tales from Dalla Riva’s own life, like how his 10th grade mind was blown after his father played a Bruce Springsteen demo of “Grown’ Up.”
“I thought that including some random anecdotes or experiences people I knew had with these songs” would make the book more relatable.
Dalla Riva does an excellent job at providing a condensed music history where even a veteran music journalist can still learn a few things, such as the drum machine’s development and influence on my favorite music period, pop and New Wave of the early-to-mid-1980s.
The author’s topics-oriented approach also provides “a sense of that history” and an idea about “how the music industry works and changed over time,” he explains. Other notable subject matter includes the Beatles and Bob Dylan’s influence on music, short-lived trends (surf rock dance crazes), how Billboard shifting to Soundscan point-of-sale data transformed the charts during the early ‘90s, copyright infringement, the rise of sampling and much more.
After tearing through "Uncharted Territory" in a weekend - it's a really fun and easy read, with a comprehensive bibliography and index - I gained an even better understanding about the reasons why so many popular songs have become an integral part of our lives.
All told, Dalla Riva wants readers to “listen to some songs they never heard before; both good and bad. That's a goal of mine. I like to share music with people, so I hope that's the case. The through line is how technology impacts popular music over and over again throughout the decades, from the establishment of recording to radio and streaming.”
SOCAL CHART TOPPERS
Performers with SoCal roots have hit the Hot 100’s pole position several times over the years. Below is a select list:
1960s – Jan & Dean, The Beach Boys, The Monkees, The Doors, The Mamas and Papas, The Byrds
1970s - Three Dog Night, Carpenters, Eagles, The Knack
1980s - Van Halen, Toto, Bangles, Guns ‘N Roses, Berlin, Los Lobos
1990s - 2 Pac
2000s-2020s - Snoop Dogg, Gwen Stefani, Maroon 5, Kendrick Lamar
To view the author’s dataset and playlist used to write the book or subscribe to his Substack,
go to chrisdallariva.com/unchartedterritory. The books can be purchased at Amazon and most major retailers.
A version of my article originally appeared in Premium, a semi-monthly magazine for print subscribers of SoCal News Group (SCNG) papers such as the OC Register, Riverside Press-Enterprise, LA Daily News and San Diego Union-Tribune.
