POLL: The 11 best selling singles ever

These songs seem kind of random - maybe with the exception of the Bing Crosby songs or the Bill Haley, they don't seem like particularly important landmarks or even particularly impressive examples of their particular styles. I mean, why that Elvis song? There must be dozens of better Elvis songs than that, even in that style. I'd never even heard of Mungo Jerry before. That song's okay I guess. I'd probably go with the Ink Spots, though I'd prefer "Whispering Grass" or "Java Jive" or some others by them.

The Mungo Jerry song is considerably more "rapey" than Blurred Lines

Yeah, true. It also encourages drinking & driving. But hey, it was 1970.

Agreed re: "Whispering Grass." Getting all bent out of shape about the "blabbering trees" is pretty memorable.

I've still never heard the Titanic song, which I guess is on the order of not having ever heard the Mungo Jerry song - a youth spent watching Time/Life comp ads in between reruns of bottom-of-the-barrel 50s-70s TV kinda locked that one in.

Volare is pretty great! Love the production.

A friend of mine ranks "I Will Always Love You" the #1 single of the 90s, and while I don't agree with that it gets my vote.

I'd never heard "If I Didn't Care" before, of even heard of it. Weird.

In case anyone was curious what singles have met this threshold in the digital era...

Carly Rae Jepsen - Call Me Maybe (15.1M) 2011
Black Eyed Peas - I Gotta Feeling (15M) 2009
Kesha - TiK ToK (15M) 2009

voting c-rae

Interesting that those are all 2009-2011 - after download purchases were really well-established but before streaming was really competitive, or what? At least they all do feel like massive super-hits.

''If I Didn't Care'' is the kind of thing that's now utterly, utterly homeless in the world, setting aside NPR specialty shows and things like that. I imagine the last 'oldies' formats that played prewar pop had to disappear by around 1980 or so, if not earlier (though one imagines the Reagans at home toasting old friends while this crackled out of the stereo). Apparently it's had a decent life on movie soundtracks needing a 'period' cut, perhaps particularly where the filmmakers want to evoke just this sense of an out-of-step, faraway past (Radio Days, Shawshank Redemption). I should try it on my great uncle, whose brother was in showbiz, see what he thinks.

Obviously, Bing is right on the same cusp, but his continued massive postwar popularity, enduring Technicolor musicals, and very popular cover versions have kept 'White Christmas' in much more regular circulation. The Drifters version being in 'Home Alone,' by itself, probably gave the song a whole generation's worth of memory-time.

voting white christmas

I am a giant sap

I mean, why that Elvis song? There must be dozens of better Elvis songs than that, even in that style

He had recently come back from the army, made one throwaway single ("Stuck On You") and then unleashed this, which has him singing in a whole new Italianate style with his voice opened way up. It was probably the first Elvis tune that many adult listeners could appreciate, thus his appeal broadened greatly in one stroke. He had been doing more or less soda shop records and now he'd graduated to Italian restaurant music.

The main follow-ups in this style were "Surrender" and then "Kiss Me Quick," which represent diminishing returns imo.

He still had a thing for Italian tunes though, and recorded "You Don't Have to Say You Love Me" in 1970, but by then I guess that stuff was a little out of fashion.

the friends of mine who recognize "if i didn't care" know it from its use in one of the bioshock games. one of the things about the digital era is that i think it lengthens our sense of having a collective past. when i was a kid i never heard anything older than patti page, but when you loosen music from needing to fit a "format" stuff like "how high the moon" and "if i didn't care" start becoming known again. if there's any "lost song" here it might be the modugno- here in america we all grew up with the dean martin version, but the italian version was unknown to my generation.

That's interesting about the Italian/"adult" sound. Would that have also helped it cross over in other markets, worldwide I mean? I actually have no idea how successful Elvis was outside the US in general.

There was probably some novelty value to an American hillbilly singing "O sole mio." It was, in fact, his first top 10 in Italy.

I think "Wooden Heart" was a hit in Germany around this time, because it is a German song.

(And the UK had fully embraced Elvis since "Heartbreak Hotel"…)

Listening to "Volare" presently. Now this is something my great-uncle (keystone of a long line of New Jersey Florentines) surely knows. Hell of a hook on it. Bet I've heard it before and just not retained it. Beyond Elvis, I wonder how much the 30s-50s songs here benefited from cross-generational popularity, as much as from the pre-album-era importance of the single. Like, clearly Bill Haley is a rock tune of some sort, but something like "Volare" hints to me at a world where a non-rockin' teenager born in 1940 might plausibly spend their pocket money on records that their parents or even grandparents would enjoy just as much. I suppose this applies to lots of really square-sounding 1950s music (Patti Page indeed) but at least "Volare" has some feeling to it, where you can picture people really relating to its (rather lovely) narrative, if they spoke Italian anyway.

I'm reminded also of a thought I've had since first hearing Frankie Laine's "Hey Joe" through Popular, which is that the archetypal 50s settling-down suburbanite grownup is someone who was, a minute ago, likely in the trench (male) or the factory (female), dodging real life-threatening dangers, swapping dirty jokes, certainly an urbanite, crowding on street cars and passing the red light district. All of that couldn't have just evaporated, and the upshot is that I can entirely relate to the people who found "Hey Joe" funny (whereas "Doggie in the Window" is like something from fucking Mars). Sorry, this doesn't really have much to do with "Volare," but maybe it does "White Christmas." Wiki notes that Bing's success with that one may have been driven in part by the song's wartime cast of yearning for safety and home. That's a human feeling that has maybe taken different forms at different times, but again doesn't sound Martian.

Yep, and Connie Francis was another one who bridged this generational gap and also went over really well in Europe

I think basically I'm trying to get inside the head of America circa 1950, when most of the baby boomers were still toddlers, men still wore hats, design work (cars, architecture, advertising, appliances) still echoed with Deco, and music for grownups was obviously the center of the biz rather than something slightly to one side or (much later) an evident niche with its own separate genre name. Not to put that time up on a pedestal or something - it's just fascinating to me.

This has to be 'Rock Around The Clock', which is one of the few songs here that doesn't make me want to rip my ears off.

Domenico Modugno - Nel blu dipinto di blu (Volare)

So was the Dean Martin version of Volare the bigger hit in the US and these millions sold in the rest of the world?

This is a pretty varied and interesting list of pop songs.

No, Modugno's version was slightly bigger (a #1) in the States, though it's funny because Dean Martin's version was also massive and on the charts at exactly the same time

The most surprising thing to me is that, barring Elvis's It's Now or Never at the top of the decade, the 60s had no singles big enough to make this part of the list. It seems like when boomer culture exploded all over the place, but perhaps they've inflated their impact on history in this regard like they have every other.

Gotta be album sales eating into that in a big way, in addition to the generational fragmentation effects. The choice of the top eleven is also playing a role, though... plenty of 60s/70s singles in the 10-15 million range, though not all necessarily boomer artifacts:

Kyu Sakamoto "Sukiyaki" 1961 - 13 million
The Beatles "I Want to Hold Your Hand" 1963 - 12 million
The Monkees "I'm a Believer" 1966 10 million
Procol Harum "A Whiter Shade of Pale" 1967 10 million - wtf
Roger Whittaker "The Last Farewell" 1971 11 million
Middle of the Road "Chirpy Chirpy Cheep Cheep" 1971 10 million
Carl Douglas "Kung Fu Fighting" 1974 11 million
George McCrae "Rock Your Baby" 1974 11 million
Gloria Gaynor "I Will Survive" 1978 14 million
Village People "Y.M.C.A." 1978 12 million

"I Will Survive," "All I Want For Christmas Is You," and, uh, "Winds of Change" are the only 14-million-sellers per this list, and thus the near-misses for this poll. Had the singles market held out for another year or two, I could totally imagine a reissue putting Mariah over the top.

I think basically I'm trying to get inside the head of America circa 1950, when most of the baby boomers were still toddlers, men still wore hats, design work (cars, architecture, advertising, appliances) still echoed with Deco, and music for grownups was obviously the center of the biz rather than something slightly to one side or (much later) an evident niche with its own separate genre name. Not to put that time up on a pedestal or something - it's just fascinating to me.

But it's also interesting that circa 1950 you had a lot of singers like Sinatra complaining about the record business abandoning jazz-based "Great American Songbook" type material in favor of more juvenile-sounding pop junk. Data from radio station playlists strongly confirm that from around 1948 into the early '50s there was a major shift in what was aired, indicating the generational re-adjustment was already in place before rock 'n roll. I've read about this in Ben Yagoda's book The B-Side, and elsewhere.

I glanced at the rest of the list, but I missed that Chirpy Chirpy Cheep Cheep was there. 10 MILLION?!

the ink spots, obv.

Josefa, that's super interesting. I might have to throw that Yagoda book on my list.

Elijah Wald's How the Beatles Destroyed Rock 'n' Roll (ignore the stupid title, which is not what it's about) - is really rich in detail about this transitional period also.

These sorts of lists are always interesting, esp since I don't know of a body that keeps track of global sales of music(?). A lot of the sources for Wikipedia's numbers don't seem very authoritative. Not saying that these are necessarily more reliable but this list contains a number of differences; for example, it doesn't include the Mungo Jerry (which I'm not sure I've heard before - and holy shit at rapeyness) or Domenico Modugno songs and does include Baccara's "Yes Sir I Can Boogie". This is totally unsourced and is completely different.

The Elijah Wald book is great btw!

holy shit at rapeyness

I wonder if I would have thought of it this way if I hadn't read this thread, though.

I can see how one line of it would be construed as rapey if that's really what you wanted it to be, but it doesn't strike me as the song's intent at all.

True that it does seem to advocate drinking and driving, though.

I voted for White Christmas bc i am a sap & Christmas aint Christmas in my house without Bing croonin that tune

It's also a really beautiful secular carol imo, but slightly elegiac too & I just find for me it holds up after a bajillion listens & that kind if longevity is an amazing achievement in song performance & writing imo

I can see how one line of it would be construed as rapey if that's really what you wanted it to be, but it doesn't strike me as the song's intent at all.

Agreed. The intent seems pretty innocent and "high school summer vacation" related to me. But ya know, it's 2015, so let's turn everything into a scandal.

Even the alliteration of placing "drink" and "drive" within the same line of lyric seems innocent in this context. Had "don't drink and drive" PSAs even been invented by 1970?

It had, yes. I remember this line being a bit naughty at the time.

What's the 'rapey' line?

A few years later they used that section of the song in a fairly hard-hitting PSA, to redress the balance.

xp about taking out a poor girl and doing as we please when the line before it was about having to take a rich girl out to dinner.

Both lines sound consensual.

Automatic thread bump. This poll is closing tomorrow.

''Volare'' hasn't really left my head since the other morning, kinda wishing I could change my vote.

If it had been the Dean Martin version, I'd have been sorely tempted to vote for it.

Automatic thread bump. This poll's results are now in.

Damn, missed it. Would've gone for White Christmas or Volare. Rock Around the Clock sounds great remembering it my head, but always disappoints when I play it -- tame, medical piece that doesn't live up to other rock'n'roll of the era.

Wow, surprised that every song got votes!

I'm surprised to see 'In The Summertime' quite high up there, to be honest with you, I've always found that song incredibly irritating.

Well I like it, I like their next number one hit more but hey..