billboard BREAKDOWN - hot 100 - january 6, 2024

Well, here we are folks - new calendar year, one more year-end list on the main channel to finish off, and wouldn’t you know, the Hot 100 tracking the week between Christmas and New Years tends to be the most dead of any point in a year, we only have two new songs so it’s going to be a short episode, and I’m gonna run with it before next week is a deluge of everything resetting!

But in the mean time we do have the most stagnant time of the year, especially for the top ten, where I might as well just look at the streaming charts and say ‘it pretty much mirrors that. Seriously, for the first seven, we can run it down: back at #1 we have ‘Rockin’ Around The Christmas Tree’ by Brenda Lee, where she overtook the sales margin of ‘All I Want For Christmas Is You’ by Mariah Carey at #2, followed by in order of their streaming performance ‘Jingle Bell Rock’ by Bobby Helms at #3, ‘Last Christmas’ by Wham! at #4, ‘A Holly Jolly Christmas’ by Burl Ives at #5, ‘It’s The Most Wonderful Time of the Year’ by Andy Williams at #6, and ‘Let It Snow’ by Dean Martin at #7. Now we do see a slight pickup for ‘Feliz Navidad’ by Jose Feliciano at #8 - I chalk this up to a sneaky good sales week - which overtook ‘Lovin On Me’ by Jack Harlow at #9, which is way more dependent on the radio and sales than streams, but then very close behind we have ‘Sleigh Ride’ by The Ronettes at #10 - again, this falls out really easy, and I’m kind of looking forward to more interesting competition… I hope by next week.

Now this does take us to our losers and dropouts, and we do have two big ones in the latter category: ‘Snooze’ by SZA and ‘What Was I Made For?’ by Billie Eilish finishing up their run and heading into recurrence. And the losers… .over half of them are Nicki Minaj, with ‘FTCU’ down to 53, ‘Everybody’ with Lil Uzi Vert at 55, and ‘Needle’ with Drake at 89 - it is going to be fascinating if or how any of these rebound when the holiday music goes away. On that note, ‘It’s Beginning To Look A Lot Like Christmas’ by Perry Como saw a sudden drop to 27 - what is it with this song’s wonky chart bouncing, for holiday music this is uncanny - and ‘Standing Next To You’ by Jungkook fell to 97 because even doing well on sales around this time of the year is not enough.

Now we have our returns and gains… and look, we’re dealing with the last stretch of holiday music in the former category, that’s why ‘Mistletoe’ by Justin Bieber is back at 37, or ‘Christmastime Is Here’ by the Vince Guaraldi Trio hit 39, or ‘Have Yourself A Merry Little Christmas’ by Michael Buble hit 41 or ‘Merry Christmas’ by Ed Sheeran and Elton John is a thing at 46. What I find more interesting are ‘El Amor de Su Vida’ by Grupo Frontera and Grupo Firme clawing back to 96 - call this one a victim of bad timing - but also ‘Man Made A Bar’ by Morgan Wallen ft. Eric Church is back at 98; this looks like it’s getting pushed as the next single out of Nashville, and I don’t precisely dislike it, but quite frankly I had enough of Morgan Wallen last year anyway, we could afford to cool off. Whereas the gains are split into two categories, the first being more goddamn Christmas music with ‘Santa Baby’ by Eartha Kitt up to 20, ‘Wonderful Christmastime’ by Paul McCartney at 26, and ‘This Christmas’ by Donny Hathaway at 34. The latter is the surge for Xavi, with ‘La Diabla’ at 62 and ‘La Victima’ at 79; I have the sneaking suspicion this kid is going to be a thing at least for the first month or so of this year ahead, expect major jumps in the next week or two, I can see it coming.

And this takes us quite neatly to our new arrivals… all two of them. And they’re both holidays standards. And look, I’d normally do a world hit or something in that vein, but I’m also trying to finish off my top 50 best albums of 2023 and that list is a bit of a monster to assemble, I’d like to keep this episode brief and surge back strong next week, so with that…

50. ‘(There’s No Place Like) Home For The Holidays’ by Perry Como with Mitchell Ayers and his Orchestra - okay, so this is going to take some explanation, because if you’re a chart watcher like me, you might blink and think ‘wait, this song from Perry Como has been charting semi-regularly for years, why call it a new entry’? Well, here’s where I have to inform you that there are two versions of this song, and the one you and I are more readily familiar with is from 1959 - it’s slower, it’s a bit more dynamic and bouncy with that one zany verse, it’s a holiday classic that’s one of my all-time favourite Christmas songs, and it was produced by Charles Grean and Lee Schapiro. But that’s not the original arrangement - that goes back to 1954, also produced by Lee Schapiro but now instead with Joe Carlton, and with the arrangement credited to Joe Reisman. I’ve also seen some annotations say that a very young Loretta Lynn worked on this - this is according to Wikipedia, and I think it might be wrong, given the printouts I found on images of the old 7’ singles and shellac records… look, while this was an interesting jaunt into the holiday music of nearly seventy years ago, the reality is that there’s a reason this version has not lasted as long; despite working with the same orchestra, the arrangement is stiffer, more indebted to old big band structures with the horns and a lot more backing vocals over the hook compared to the slow-burn crooner flair that would come for the 1959 version, which also happens to be better produced with more dynamic range and polish and a far better conclusion. I still think it’s a classic song, but there’s a better version.

43. ‘I Saw Mommy Kissing Santa Claus’ by the Jackson 5 - whereas I’ve always thought this was a Christmas novelty song that kind of sucked. The original actually predates ‘Home For Holidays’, being cut in 1952 and sung by Jimmy Boyd, who was just thirteen at the time; there was an urban legend that the ‘adultery’ in the song prompted some controversy in the 50s, but I can’t find much to back that up. What I can say is that the original is kind of lousy - the original arrangement is classic country that plays things way too tasteful especially with the adult backing vocals complimenting Boyd’s painfully adolescent delivery - and while the Jackson 5 are better singers opposite an arrangement with more rollicking flair and the tempo ramps well, especially with Michael belting his lungs out, the song is still really kitschy and about the last thing I want to hear around the holidays; once you get the one joke, I’m kind of done with it. And I’m always a little shocked that this is considered a holiday staple - the Jackson 5 Christmas album is actually really good, and the fact this is buried at the very end of the original track listing kind of gives the game away, now doesn’t it?

Anyway, that was our week - ‘(There’s No Place Like) Home For The Holidays’ runs away with the best, ‘I Saw Mommy Kissing Santa Claus’ is the easy worst, hopefully next week gives us something more to talk about as all the holiday music goes away!