What Was the Top 40?
by Tom Scocca
I was discussing music with an old friend and my friend said something in passing about the Breeders having had a Top 40 hit with their single “Cannonball,” and I had a moment of confusion, if not consternation. It did not seem to me, as I remembered it, that the Breeders had hit the Top 40, but memory is a distorting lens and the past is far away. The single came out in 1993 and it was possible that my very clear subjective sense of what happened 32 years ago was objectively wrong.
Whatever its cultural profile was in 1993, “Cannonball” is now important enough to have its own Wikipedia page. Down toward the bottom is a table of its peak performances across 11 different charts around the world: No. 58 on Australia’s ARIA chart, No. 8 on France’s SNEP, No. 40 on UK Singles. With apologies to France, and no apologies to the UK Singles chart, none of those count toward the question of whether or not a song was a Top 40 hit. But there are five different U.S. charts listed, four of them from Billboard. Among or across those, “Cannonball” reached No. 44 on the Billboard Hot 100, No. 2 on Billboard’s Alternative Airplay chart, No. 32 on Billboard’s Mainstream Rock chart, No. 39 on Billboard’s Pop Airplay chart, and No. 45 on the Cash Box Top 100.
Taking the Hot 100 as the standard, “Cannonball” was not quite a Top 40 hit, which jibes with my memory. But what I really had in mind was a different standard. What the question, “Did the Breeders have a Top 40 hit with ‘Cannonball’?” means, to me, is more or less “Would Casey Kasem have played ‘Cannonball’ on American Top 40?”
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