The Chainsmokers Placed 13th On Billboard’s Biggest Hits Of All Time
Two summers after “Closer” turned into inescapable radio wallpaper, Billboard just handed The Chainsmokers a mind-bending stat to hang on the wall. To celebrate Billboard’s 60th anniversary of the Hot 100 Chart, the music publication decided to publish the biggest hit songs of all time. So what do Mariah Carey’s “We Belong Together,” Usher’s “Yeah!,” Survivor’s “Eye of the Tiger,” and Luis Fonsi’s “Despacito” have in common? They all ranked lower than The Chainsmoker’s hit single “Closer.”
With The Chainsmoker’s ranking #13, Chubby Checker’s 1960 single “The Twist” ranked #1, Santana and Rob Thomas’ “Smooth” ranked at the #2 position, Bobby Darin’s 1959 single “Mack The Knife” ranked #3, and Mark Ronson and Bruno Mars‘ “Uptown Funk!” ranked #4.
Landing at #13 puts “Closer” — Drew Taggart and Alex Pall’s duet with Halsey — sandwiched somewhere between The Beatles’ “Hey Jude” and Mariah Carey’s “We Belong Together” on a list spanning six full decades of chart history. That’s a wild flex for a duo that started out making novelty tracks like “#Selfie” on SoundCloud only a few years earlier. It’s also a solid showing for dance music across the list as a whole: LMFAO’s “Party Rock Anthem” landed at #6, the Black Eyed Peas’ David Guetta-produced “I Gotta Feeling” came in at #7, and Calvin Harris and Rihanna’s “We Found Love” made the cut at #27. “Closer” spent 12 weeks at #1 on the Hot 100 back in 2016 and was crowned Billboard’s biggest song of that year, so the #13 all-time placement isn’t exactly coming out of nowhere.
Read the full list here.
This is a pretty insane honor! #13 ALL time @billboard pic.twitter.com/jso86O5LS2
— THE CHAINSMOKERS (@TheChainsmokers) August 3, 2018
https://twitter.com/TheChainsmokers/status/1025286883058827264
The duo clearly couldn’t believe it either, hopping on Twitter almost immediately to call the honor “a pretty insane honor.” Considering they’re sharing a top-15 with songs that have been charting since before rock and roll fully took over the airwaves, we can’t really blame them for the disbelief.
What makes the placement even wilder is how fast it all happened. The Chainsmokers went from a duo most people had never heard of to co-headlining arenas in the span of about two years, and “Closer” was the song that sealed it — it also set the record for most weeks spent atop Billboard’s Dance/Electronic Songs chart. For a genre that’s spent years fighting for mainstream chart respect, watching one of its own crack the top 15 of a list covering six decades of American pop music is the kind of validation dance music fans have been waiting on for a while.
