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At some point in our lives, many of us have turned on the radio and thought, “This is what passes for popular music?”

Maybe we suddenly find ourselves out of sync with modern trends or perhaps there are other contemporary artists we feel are more deserving of mass adulation. But, for better and for worse, every hit pop song is a product of its time and place, whether the song becomes an all-timer or a disposable blip in time.

That’s one of the central themes of Tom Breihan’s The Number Ones, a triweekly column that runs on the music website Stereogum. Since 2018, Breihan has been reviewing every song that’s hit No. 1 on the Billboard Hot 100 charts since its inception in 1958.

Breihan scores every song on a 1-10 scale, but the score isn’t really the point. For people with terminal trivia brain like me, he does a deep dive into every song he reviews, providing not only a history of the song and the artist, but also the songwriter, producer and countless other facts and figures.

Even if Breihan doesn’t like the song he’s reviewing, he attempts to figure out why the song resonated with so many people at that particular point in time. Although some years are stronger than others, reading the Number Ones made me realize that there’s never been a golden era in popular music: every period in pop has its fair share of mediocrity and drivel.

But that’s also led me to the conclusion that even something designed for mass appeal can be an art form. Because when you get to masterpieces like Aretha Franklin’s “Respect,” or Stevie Wonder’s “Superstition” or TLC’s “Waterfalls,” they hit especially hard because they make you feel something, like all good art.

You can catch up on past Number Ones by visiting stereogum.com/category/columns/. At the time of this writing, Breihan has made it all the way to 1996.

— Antonio Sierra, former East Oregonian reporter