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.
Every pop star has beaten the odds.Even when we’re talking about nepotism cases who get major industry pushes, there’s so much that can go wrong, so many cases of supposed sure things who utterly failed to catch on.
The people who actually break through and find their way into mass adulation, however brief and evanescent, are the exceptions.But few pop stars are more unlikely than Sia Furler, an artist who had a long and counter-intuitive journey to her own limited moment at the top.
Consider: An Australian singer gets her start working with the sort of British electronic group that makes the background music that plays over the speakers at fashionable boutiques.She goes solo with indie-adjacent art-pop that soundtracks at least one big, emotional prestige-TV moment.
It doesn’t make her famous, but it makes her famous enough that she freaks out and plunges into deep depression.From there, she tries to build a behind-the-scenes career where she writes songs for singers far more famous than her.
She’s fabulously successful at that, but she accidentally gets shoved back into pop stardom when one of her scratch demos is released against her wishes and becomes a giant global hit.When this lady finds her way to actual pop stardom, she pulls an MF DOOM, attempting to reclaim her anonymity by wearing a big, weird wig that hides her face whenever she has to be on camera.
Something about that presentation and her performance-art modern-dance music videos captures the public imagination, and she briefly becomes just as famous as the people for whom she’s still writing songs.Finally, at the age of 40, she reaches #1 with a track that she originally wrote for one of those oth...