Lavishing sustained attention on music is one way to show that you love it – here at Pitchfork, where we are perhaps a little biased, it is our favorite way – and each year brings a flood of great new music books giving the opportunity to do just that. The best music books, whether they are history, cultural criticism, memoir, or some hybrid of all three, give you new ears with which to listen. What follows is a list of favorites from 2022, picked by Pitchfork staffers and contributors. (If a few of the entries seem familiar, that’s because they are excerpted from past Book Club entries.) Happy reading!
The Number Ones: Twenty Chart-Topping Hits That Reveal the History of Pop Music
In 2018, Stereogum senior editor (and former Pitchfork staffer) Tom Breihan began reviewing every single No. 1 pop hit in American chart history for a column called The Number Ones. What began as a series of breezy capsule reviews quickly snowballed into a series of sprawling histories examining the cultural conditions that allowed each song to achieve this peculiar, highly specific honor. Each No. 1 song in America, Breihan was discovering, was an unrepeatable convergence of culture and luck. In the meantime, his column had become a reference guide, a repository, and—in the comment section— a community. Finally, it has become a book, consisting of 20 original essays, each one centered around a particular No. 1 hit. Each one illustrates what Breihan calls “BC/AD moments,” or harbingers or catalysts for cultural sea change, and he has bound them together so that the story each one tells leads, however indirectly, into the next. For long-time readers of Breihan’s work, either at Stereogum or on this site, the tone will be instantly familiar: affable, conversational, and always funny, with surprising insights and ear-catching phrasings gliding in from every direction. —Jayson Greene