The Most Popular Song The Year You Were Born

There's a comedy duo called Garfunkel & Oates whose joke name is instantly understandable — it's derived from combining the less successful halves of famous musical duos: Art Garfunkel of Simon & Garfunkel, and John Oates of Hall & Oates. Yes, Paul Simon went on to have a legendary and extraordinarily successful solo career, and Art Garfunkel didn't. But neither Paul Simon nor anybody else can ever take away the fact that Art Garfunkel sang the most moving and commercially successful song of their S&G years (particularly because it was the dominant song of 1970). 

Taking a break from the voice-blending and harmonies found on their other songs, like "The Sound of Silence" and "Mrs. Robinson," Garfunkel takes the lead on "Bridge Over Troubled Water," delivering a song about the profound power of love and friendship while he slowly adds in more and more vocal firepower, building to an almost operatic peak. If you aren't moved to tears by Garfunkel's impossibly clear and beautiful voice, you might not have a soul.

Smooth, baby-makin' soul was at its absolute peak in the early 1970s, what with Al Green's "Let's Stay Together," Billy Paul's "Me and Mrs. Jones," and this ultra-slick, ultra-slow, extraordinarily intimate ditty from Roberta Flack, the honey-throated singer who also delivered the similar "Killing Me Softly With His Song." This ballad with the awkwardly worded title didn't start out as a slow jam — it was written in the '50s by Ewan McColl, who was usually a political singer-songwriter.

It subsequently became a folk standard during the craze for that genre, but it wasn't a big hit or identified with any particular singer until Flack — and Clint Eastwood — got a hold of it. In 1971, Eastwood used it to score a love scene in his directorial debut, Play Misty for Me. The movie and song proved popular enough to earn the single a proper release. It dominated the pop chart, and, unsurprisingly, the easy listening chart, enough to make it the biggest song of 1972.

Babs doesn't seem like the kind of performer that would have actual hit pop songs — she's more the Broadway belter and standard singer, delivering albums, nightclub acts, and Vegas shows. But she's flirted with the pop charts occasionally, finding a niche singing rich, sad ballads like "The Way We Were." This one also comes from another one of Streisand's domains: acting in romantic dramas, such as The Way We Were, A Star is Born, and The Prince of Tides. 

The song won the Academy Award for Best Original Song, although the movie it came from — a weepy thing starring Streisand and Robert Redford — is forgettable for pretty much everything except its bittersweet theme song about a love from long ago colored by the tint of nostalgia. It was the biggest hit of 1974, as well as of Streisand's storied career. It also helped co-writer Marvin Hamlisch win the Grammy for Best New Artist, because the '70s were weird.

Some people want to fill the world with silly love songs, and Paul and Linda McCartney were among them. And, as the lyrics say, what's wrong with that? Nothing, because this bass-heavy, sort-of-disco song about the joys of love and listening to love songs when one is in love was the most popular song of the year of the American Bicentennial. 

And while McCartney had plenty of hit songs, both on his own and with his band, Wings, in the first few years after the Beatles split in 1970, "Silly Love Songs" proved that he could be just as much of a superstar all by himself (or rather, with his wife, who co-wrote the song and played keyboards in Wings). That was even the intent of the song — Paul McCartney says he wrote it in response to critics who said that while John Lennon wrote deep and political songs, McCartney was content to write "silly love songs." The world didn't mind — the song spent five weeks at number one and is the biggest hit of his post-Beatles career.

Disco, particularly the Bee Gees' brand of disco — soft rock with a beat you could dance to — was so popular in the late 1970s that the world wanted more Bee Gees than the Bee Gees could provide. And so, those three brothers Gibb outsourced the job to their younger brother, Andy Gibb, who had a string of hits that sounded exactly like Bee Gees songs because they were written and produced by the Bee Gees. 

Gibb rivaled his brothers for popularity in 1978 because not only did he make the smooth disco hits that the people wanted, but he was also a super-foxy '70s blonde teen idol kind of dude. Still, his song "Shadow Dancing" was truly the "Let It Be" of songs about Shadow Dancing. After "I Just Want to Be Your Everything" and "(Love Is) Thicker Than Water," "Shadow Dancing" was Gibb's third straight number-one hit, and the most popular song of the year.

If you watch one '80s movie in which Richard Gere plays a male prostitute, watch American Gigolo. The salacious (for 1980) movie about a professional love-maker traipsing around Los Angeles pleasuring women launched the theme song — co-written by Italian disco architect Giorgio Moroder and which hints at the movie's plot ("call me" makes one think of a "call girl," or call boy, as it were) — to the top of the pop chart for the whole of 1980. 

There was no one better to perform this rock-meets-disco tune than Blondie, a band that could handle almost any style of music, from full-on disco ("Heart of Glass") to reggae ("The Tide is High") to punk ("One Way or Another"). "Call Me" was the perfect song to bridge the '70s and '80s. It smacked of '70s excess and disco, but also hinted contained elements of New Wave, as well as suggesting the glitz, glamour, and sheen of the new decade to come.

Olivia Newton-John took a huge risk with "Physical." Primarily known up to that point as a singer of easy-listening songs like "Have You Never Been Mellow" and "Magic," the bubbly Australian singer and Xanadu star rocked a wholesome, innocent persona (with the exception of the final scene of Grease, where she wears leather pants and puts out a cigarette with a stiletto heel). 

Suddenly, with "Physical," Olivia Newton-John was a man-hungry New Wave sexpot. She tapped into the '80s fitness craze with both this song and its gym-set video, in which "physical" could mean either exercising in a gym or exercising in the bedroom. (Nevertheless, this one was definitely played at more than one '80s-era Jazzercise class.) 

The combination of the charming Newton-John delivering a synth-and-guitar-powered ode to lust and the strenuous expression of such was irresistible — "Physical" topped the charts for a whopping ten weeks, enough to make it the hottest tune of '82.

How good does a song have to be to differentiate itself as one of the best and biggest songs of Price's career (and 1984), as well as one of the standout tracks from Purple Rain, a landmark album? It has to be exactly as good as "When Doves Cry." 

Based on some plot elements from the movie Purple Rain, it's a song about sex and love (because it's a Prince song), that somehow manages to weave in some lyrics about the universal fear of turning into one's parents ("maybe I'm just like my father / too bold"). "When Doves Cry" features many more trademark Prince touches that were so outside the pop mainstream at the time that listeners couldn't help but pay attention. There's the opening, lightning-quick guitar riff, the fact that there's no bass line, and the song-ending keyboard odyssey. 

Pop music had a big year in 1984 — Madonna, Cyndi Lauper, Van Halen, and Phil Collins loomed large — but no other act could hypnotize and innovate like Prince.   

The mid-1980s were the golden age of well-meaning all-star charity records. Boomtown Rats singer Bob Geldof started the fad with the famine relief single "Do They Know It's Christmas?" which was followed by USA for Africa's "We Are the World." Then came "That's What Friends Are For," which trimmed the usual lineup down from a small army to just four — but what a foursome it was. 

All were (and are) soulful legends of pop and R&B: the Dionne is Dionne Warwick, and the "Friends" are Gladys Knight, Elton John, and Stevie Wonder. The song was a pleasant if forgettable Rod Stewart song that played over the end credits of the 1982 comedy Night Shift. But re-recorded by Dionne and Friends, it became a showstopper that raised $2 million in the fight against AIDS (one of the first major fundraisers toward that end) en route to outperforming all other songs in 1986. That's what friends are for, indeed.

After Wham! ended, George Michael returned in late 1987 with a new attitude, a new look, and a new sound. He left behind the frivolous music, "Choose Life" T-shirt, and Andrew Ridgeley, and re-invented himself as a bearded, earring-wearing, singer-songwriter of thoughtful pop songs. 

The first single from his debut solo album Faith was "Faith," a song about being reluctant to fall in love (which could also serve as a metaphor for Michael's reluctance to re-enter the musical mainstream), and with a melody and acoustic guitar-heavy arrangement reminiscent of an Elvis Presley or Buddy Holly song from the '50s. The world embraced the new George Michael arguably even more than they did the old George Michael. Faith won the Grammy for Album of the Year, which makes sense because it produced four chart-topping singles: "Father Figure," "One More Try," "Monkey," and the 1988-leading "Faith," which spent four weeks at number 1 in late 1987 and early 1988.

"Wilson Phillips" sounds like the name of a Montana law firm, not a three-woman vocal group, and yet it dominated the charts at the dawn of the '90s. There were a lot of "girl groups" at the time — Expose, Sweet Sensation, Seduction, Jade, SWV. But none had the pedigree and marketing factor of Wilson Phillips: All three were the daughters of rock n' roll legends. 

Chynna Phillips is the offspring of John and Michelle Phillips of the Mamas and the Papas ("California Dreamin'"), while Carnie Wilson and Wendy Wilson's dad is Brian Wilson, the musical genius who wrote all of the best songs for the Beach Boys. They all had lovely voices, which propelled the first four singles off their self-titled debut album to the Billboard top 5. "Release Me," "You're in Love," and "Hold On" all hit number one, with the latter the most successful of all. The "radio station you can listen to at work" staple was the most popular song of 1990.