best song with a one-word title currently on the Billboard Hot 100

Wiggle

Better songs:

'Classic Birthday Partition'
'Human Demons Animals'
'Burn Royals'
'Automatic Beachin''
'Rude Empire Wiggle'
'Paranoid Stoner Selfie'

Latch

Magic

So glad that "Radioactive" is finally off the chart

Stoner Partition Sing Rude Birthday Timber Work Burn, in that order

great poll

http://www.billboard.com/articles/columns/chart-beat/6015001/roar-royals-radioactive-why-hit-songs-now-have-one-word-titles

That's interesting - has anyone done that kind of chart controlled for the absolute number of songs on the Hot 100? I have no idea whether there are more or fewer hit songs total than in 1984, mind you.

Can't choose between "Partition" and "Stoner".

I don't know why, but seeing the title of this poll made me laugh out loud.

That said, voted "Team."

i would guess more than 84 for sure, though it'd be a narrower margin than vs 94 or 2004.

'partition'

Paranoid

Actually, NVM. Voted Paranoid, ignored Stoner right below it.

i voted paranoid with stoner and partition close behind

I have no idea whether there are more or fewer hit songs total than in 1984, mind you.

i have no idea either but my gut says there would have been more songs on the hot 100 in '84 than today b/c the turnaround was much quicker back in the pre-soundscan days and songs rarely stayed on the charts for as long as they have in recent years

voted #SELFIE because i heard it for the first time while speeding at 90 mph through the state of kentucky and it made me lol so hard

if i had to vote for the word alone, i think i'd go with either invisible or demons

speeding at 90 mph through the state of kentucky

not a great time to be taking #SELFIES tbh

I didn't take one!

technically '#SELFIE' is a hashtag rather than a word

In the future, all song titles will be hashtags.

Such as #womantookmycar by the Black Keys.

#Pop, a forty-minute megamix featuring all your favorite stars (and a few surprises!) issued twice annually

"#Hashtag," a trendspotting comeback single for Jennifer Lopez in 2019.

It's hard out here for Panic! at the Disco.

Panic! at the Disco's followers have been steadily increasing the number of words in their song titles/band names iirc

A star-studded charity single entitled "#BringBackOurGirls"

Has anyone yet proposed the theory that this is due to a shift in music consumption patterns from 'browsing' to 'searching'?

I.e. Fiona Apple's "When the Pawn..." (not a single I know but just pretend for the sake of argument) is just as easily found as anything else in the record store (maybe easier if it gets a big promotional display) but no wait this argument doesn't actually make sense now that I've finished my coffee

At any rate, there is definitely something to be said *against* the P!ATD approach of giving yr single an unwieldy title which appears nowhere in the lyrics (but perhaps moreso under the old system, where consumers who had heard&dug the song could walk right past a rack of physical singles due to irrelevant titling)

i think a big factor is that the kind of full-sentence Motown type song titles have gone way out of style. The Temptations' "The Way You Do The Things You Do" vs. Ariana Grande's "The Way".

PATD's last couple singles had 2-3 word titles, but Fall Out Boy had a big hit last year with a 12-word title (9 without the parenthetical)

the ironic thing is by making your song a one-word hashtag, you make it LESS likely for the hashtag to function as an actual hashtag. (cf "beautiful" -- put that into twitter, first thing you get is a seduction blog

Has anyone yet proposed the theory that this is due to a shift in music consumption patterns from 'browsing' to 'searching'?

I think this part of it, but there are many other forces at play in the streamlining of pop culture. It's a consequence of the way we engage/process/organize human thought now that everything must be reduced to a singular powerful image.

it reminds me of the vastly different naming conventions of books vs. movies...a huge number of books adapted into movies get the title shortened or changed just because you can have a bestseller with a 10-word title but multiplex blockbusters only tolerate more than 3 words or so unless it's a sequel with a subtitle (and even then, keep it short).

I still want to know if this is actually a trend, or how big a trend it is, before we pontificate on its significance. Would just as easily believe there's been a percentage rise in long-titled songs or that nothing has actually changed at all. So, being a crazy person, I just counted the words in last year's and 2004's Hot 100 lists for the year. Just looking at the top fifty, below which older songs start popping up...

One word: 13 in both years: Yeah!, Burn, Goodies, Tipsy, Someday, Sunshine, Hotel, Numb, Diary, Heaven, Milkshake, Toxic, Freek-a-Leek (borderline I know) versus Radioactive, Mirrors, Cruise, Roar, Stay, Royals, Clarity, Sail, Diamonds, Treasure, Daylight, Applause, Home

Two word: 19 going down to 16: This Love, The Reason, Hey Ya!, Lean Back, Slow Motion, Naughty Girl, My Immortal, My Boo, My Place, Overnight Celebrity, White Flag, Splash Waterfalls, Jesus Walks, Locked Up, Stand Up, Suga Suga, Salt Shaker, With You, Slow Jamz versus Thrift Shop, Blurred Lines, Harlem Shake, Ho Hey, Get Lucky, Wrecking Ball, Holy Grail, The Way, Love Me, F***in' Problems, Same Love, Sweet Nothing, Summertime Sadness, It's Time, Power Trip, Heart Attack

Three word: 10 in both years: Confessions Part II, Move Ya Body, Dip It Low, One Call Away, Turn Me On, It's My Life, Pieces of Me, Leave (Get Out), All Falls Down, Here Without You versus Can't Hold Us, We Can't Stop, Wake Me Up!, Suit & Tie, Scream & Shout, I Love It, Safe and Sound, Feel This Moment, One More Night, Girl On Fire

Four word: 5 in both years: The Way You Move, I Don't Wanna Know, Dirt Off Your Shoulder, Me Myself and I, She Will Be Loved versus Locked Out Of Heaven, Don't You Worry Child, Started From The Bottom, Come & Get It, Beauty & A Beat

Five+ word: 3 going up to 6: If I Ain't Got You, The First Cut Is The Deepest, You Don't Know My Name versus Just Give Me A Reason, When I Was Your Man, I Knew You Were Trouble, Hold On We're Going Home, Cups (Pitch Perfect's When I'm Gone), My Songs Know What You Did In The Dark (Light Em Up)

So, this is an extremely unscientific method - and obviously, perhaps not the best metric (would be better to use the whole list of songs that charted, or made the top 40). But the only shift shown here is a slight cut to the number of two-word songs, passed on as a slight increase in really long titles. Maybe 2004 is a freak year, or maybe the year-end top 50 skews the numbers in another way, but I'm kind of not sure anything is happening here at all.

Automatic thread bump. This poll is closing tomorrow.

That's interesting - has anyone done that kind of chart controlled for the absolute number of songs on the Hot 100? I have no idea whether there are more or fewer hit songs total than in 1984, mind you.

― Doctor Casino, Wednesday, May 14, 2014 1:24 PM (3 days ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

the graph in the post uses a single week -- around the third week of march -- as its reference point for each year

Oh duh! Wow, it says that right there too. Don't I feel silly. Is a single week considered a good enough sample for these kinds of things?

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