The second non-English song to reach #1 on the Hot 100 was Kyu Sakamoto’s ‘Sukiyaki,’ which I wrote about this past weekend. That was in June of 1963, five years after ‘Volare.’
It was later the same year that Soeur Sourire, also known as The Singing Nun, took the next non-English song to #1. Though Sourire was Belgian, she wrote and performed her chart-topping hit ‘Dominque’ in French.
On Saturday, I mentioned that only nine songs in languages other than English have topped Billboard’s Hot 100. This week I’ll reveal those titles in chronological order.
The first song to pull off the feat was 1958’s ‘Nel blu, dipinto di blu’ (popularly known as ‘Volare’), a ballad co-written and performed by Italian performer Domenico Modugno. Not only was this the first non-English #1 in Hot 100 history, it was just the second #1 on the Hot 100, period, as the chart had debuted just two weeks prior. So for a very brief time, 50% of all Hot 100 chart-toppers were in Italian.
Throwing back to the week of June 23, 1973, we find Paul McCartney & Wings holding on to the top spot with ‘My Love,’ featured here earlier this month.
Right behind is a one-hit wonder that spent 23 weeks on this chart but never made it higher than #2. ‘Playground in My Mind’ was recorded by Clint Holmes, an English-born entertainer who was raised in the States and has been a Las Vegas entertainer for most of his five-decade career.
Today’s Throwback Weekend selection brings us to the week of June 22, 1963, when the Billboard Hot 100 was topped by Japanese singer Kyu Sakamoto’s song ‘Sukiyaki.’
This was the first song by an Asian artist to reach #1 on this chart and remained the only one for nearly six decades, until BTS did it with ‘Dynamite’ in 2020. It is one of only nine songs not in English to top the chart, and the only one in Japanese. Extra credit to anyone who can name three or more of the others (and more on that next week).
My final example of an AI-generated song features two artists once locked in a bitter feud. Taylor Swift and Katy Perry squashed their beef on their own a few years ago, but if they hadn’t the machines were ready to do it for them.
This is a pretty convincing rendition, in part because ‘Roar’ sounds a bit like a Taylor Swift song from the early to mid 2010s. That makes sense, as many of Swift’s hits from that period were co-written by Max Martin, as was ‘Roar.’
Meet Me In Montauk 