Pop

Bruno Mars

Eleven names in the credits

"Uptown Funk" came out on 10 November 2014 with six writers and today it has eleven. In February 2015 The Gap Band's publisher filed a claim over "Oops Up Side Your Head" in YouTube's copyright system —there was never a lawsuit— and on 28 April five names were added, with 17 % of the publishing. It happened weeks after the "Blurred Lines" verdict, and the song had been fourteen weeks at number one.

André Rieu

It was not from the jazz suite

The waltz with which André Rieu reached half the world is not from Shostakovich's Suite for Jazz Orchestra No. 2: it is from the Suite for Variety Orchestra, which the composer did not assemble, and it was born in 1956 as music for a Soviet film about settlers in Kazakhstan. The error comes from a misprint in volume 10 of the complete works (Muzyka, Moscow, 1984), corrected only in 2001. And the title "The Second Waltz" was invented by his wife, because the real one did not sell.

Daniela Mercury

She took the neighbourhood out of the song

"O Canto da Cidade" was written by Tote Gira, a composer from Nordeste de Amaralina who recorded the demo on a borrowed cassette, marking the beat on the door of a refrigerator; Mercury's team almost threw the tape away. She shares the credit because she deleted the references to the Pelourinho so that the song would serve all of Brazil. The album, from 20 September 1992, sold more than 2 million copies and nationalised axé. But she did not invent it: the name was a journalist's insult in 1987.

Enya

They told her she would be nobody

In 1982, on tour in Switzerland, Clannad voted to sack their manager Nicky Ryan and told Eithne Ní Bhraonáin, in front of him, that with the Ryans she would be nobody and with them she would be a star. She went with the Ryans: "Orinoco Flow" at no. 1 in Britain in 1988, 4 Grammys, more than 26 million albums certified by the RIAA and not a single tour. Nicky Ryan died on 10 September 2025; her sister Moya Brennan, on 13 April 2026.

REO Speedwagon

Its only founder was already gone

On 21 December 2024, at REO Speedwagon's last concert, there was not a single founder on stage: Neal Doughty, the keyboard player who had copied the name off a university classroom blackboard in 1967, had stepped off touring in February 2023. The halt was announced on 16 September 2024 and settled 2-1 among the three owners of the name: "I just got outvoted", said Kevin Cronin.

Opus

The tape was full

On 2 September 1984, at the Oberwart stadium, Opus premiered "Live Is Life" for the band's 11th anniversary and it was not recorded: the tape was full. They played it again as an encore and that second take went around the world, so the eternal chorus is the one sung by five thousand people who had just learned it. It was no. 1 in six countries and no. 32 on the Hot 100, with no US certification: the American blow was Canada, with double platinum and a Juno in 1986.

The Cars

Bowie gave up a song for them

At Live Aid, on 13 July 1985, a montage about the Ethiopian famine was screened with "Drive" behind it: it had been filmed by the Canadian CBC and David Bowie, on seeing it, gave up a song from his own set so that it would be broadcast. Geldof said that tape was the turning point of the event and the phone lines collapsed. The Cars gave away the income from the single's reissue, almost 160,000 pounds, and Ric Ocasek handed the cheque over in London in November 1986.

Starship

A judge gave them their name

The name was a condition of the out-of-court settlement of March 1985: Paul Kantner had left in June 1984 and had sued in October, and nobody could use "Jefferson" or "Airplane" again. Of the ten tracks on "Knee Deep in the Hoopla" only one carries a credit from the group, and the three number ones —"We Built This City", "Sara" and "Nothing's Gonna Stop Us Now"— were written by outside authors. Grace Slick, who sang the first of them, called it the worst song ever.

Bersuit Vergarabat

Two hundred thousand dollars to play it

On 25 August 1998, the same day *Libertinaje* came out, the COMFER, Argentina's broadcasting regulator, threatened the country's radio stations with fines of around 200,000 dollars for playing "Sr. Cobranza", invoking law 22.285 from the dictatorship. Universal manufactured 20,000 copies it could not distribute. The song was not Bersuit's: Hernán "Cabra" de Vega wrote it in 1994 for the pedestrian mall, and he says that censorship was "more commercial than real".

Yazoo

Others got to number one

"Only You" was never a number one sung by Yazoo: it stalled at no. 2 on 16 May 1982. It reached no. 1 nineteen months later and a cappella, with The Flying Pickets, five weeks and the Christmas number one of 1983, the first a cappella no. 1 on the British chart. The duo no longer existed: they announced the break-up on 21 May 1983 and "You and Me Both" reached no. 1 on 4 July, without a single follow-up single or concert to push it.

Alphaville

He wasn't talking about Japan

"Big in Japan", number one in the Federal Republic in January 1984, is not about making it big in Japan: Marian Gold wrote it in a dentist's waiting room about two heroin-using friends from West Berlin's Zoo station, and "big in Japan" is, he says, the lie of the loser. The third verse of "Forever Young" the label made him change because it evoked a fascistic feeling, and Gold calls the replacement line the worst lyric in the song.

Shakira

Eight minutes in a Barcelona court

In 1993, at sixteen, Shakira came third in the Competencia Internacional at Viña del Mar, behind an Italian song: the Gaviota de Plata was not taken away from her, she did not win it. Thirty years later, on 20 November 2023, the Barcelona tax fraud trial was resolved in eight minutes, with a three-year suspended prison sentence and a fine of 7.3 million euros.

Carlos Vives

The fifteen songs that were not his

The fifteen tracks of Clásicos de la Provincia (1993) are covers of Emiliano Zuleta, Rafael Escalona, Leandro Díaz, Alejandro Durán and Adolfo Pacheco: Vives signed none of them. "La Tierra del Olvido" is indeed his, with Iván Benavides. In 2018 he stopped singing "La Gota Fría" because of a rights dispute, and after Egidio Cuadrado died in October 2024 his band stopped being called La Provincia.

The Rasmus

Nine years and four albums before the leap

The Rasmus had nine years of career and four albums behind them when "In the Shadows" reached number one in Finland, Germany, Hungary and New Zealand in 2003. They had formed in Helsinki in 1994 playing funk rock and were called Rasmus, with no article, until 2000. And they did not open the way: HIM had already done so in the same markets.

Empire of the Sun

Eight years to reach the Hot 100

"Walking on a Dream" came out on 30 August 2008 and was an Australian no. 10; it only entered the Billboard Hot 100 in 2016, at no. 65, pushed along by a Honda Civic advert. "We Are the People" was no. 1 in Germany in December 2010 and never entered the Hot 100. Nick Littlemore has not toured since 2009: the show is held up by Luke Steele alone.

Juanes

The shirt Italy read backwards

"La Camisa Negra" reached number one in seven European countries, and in Italy it was adopted by neo-fascist groups who read the title as Mussolini's camicie nere. Earlier, in 1997, the same Latin turn had cost him Ekhymosis. At Viña 2026 he won the Gaviota de Oro, which is not the festival's highest: the Platino went that year to Mon Laferte.

Björk

Debut was not her debut

Debut (1993) is not her debut: Björk had already recorded an album at eleven, released in 1977 by the Icelandic label Fálkinn. Before London there was punk — Spit and Snot, Tappi Tíkarrass, KUKL — and Gling-Gló (1990), jazz standards that are still her best-selling record in Iceland. A single Oscar nomination and sixteen Grammy nominations without a win.

Lifehouse

The number one of the year that stalled at two

"Hanging by a Moment" was the number one on Billboard's year-end Hot 100 for 2001 — the most successful song in the United States across the whole year — without ever being a weekly number one: its ceiling was number 2, on 16 June 2001, after fifty-four weeks on the chart. It was the third song in history to manage it, after "Wooly Bully" (1965) and "Breathe" by Faith Hill (2000).

Goo Goo Dolls

Eighteen weeks and no number one

In 1998, "Iris" spent eighteen weeks at number one on Billboard's Hot 100 Airplay and was never number one on the Hot 100: with no physical single it was not eligible. Billboard changed the rule on 5 December 1998, in its eighteenth week at the head of the airplay chart, and the song debuted and stopped at number 9. The record held for almost twenty-two years, until "Blinding Lights".

Patricio Rey y sus Redonditos de Ricota

The band that asked no one's permission

They reached the very top almost entirely outside television, through sheer self-management, and turned their audience into a community. That community came at a price that is not always named, and which a seventeen-year-old boy paid in full.

Los Piojos

The rock of the barrio

They put murga, candombe and football-terrace fervour inside rock, and filled stadiums without ever ceasing to look like the kids from the corner. They came back fifteen years later, and came back incomplete: one founder was missing.

Charly García

The dinosaurs and the survivor

"Canción de Alicia en el país" is from 1980, at the heart of the dictatorship. "Los dinosaurios" came out in November 1983, five weeks before the handover of power. Between the two lies everything that could and could not be sung.

Beto Cuevas

The one who grew up far away

It is often repeated that he is a child of political exile, and he has denied it himself: the family moved to Caracas in 1969 for his father's job, four years before the coup. The dictatorship is in his biography, but it came in through another door.

Saiko

The voice that came out of an audition

The band's most distinctive element did not come from the usual circle: it came out of an open audition that Denisse Malebrán attended, in her words, "out of sheer curiosity". She never imagined she would get the part.

La Ley

The song the dead man wrote

When Andrés Bobe died in 1994, the band came close to ending. They carried on, and the song that opened the continent to them — "El Duelo" — had been written by him before he died. It is not a metaphor about mourning: it is literally that.

Aparato Raro

Where the dynasty began

Their greatest legacy is not their songs: it is that two musicians met at their rehearsals. From that meeting came La Ley and, later, Saiko. The thread of the dynasty is not Andrés Bobe, who was only passing through, but Rodrigo Aboitiz.

Édith Piaf

The sparrow of Belleville

Legend has it she was born on the street, wrapped in a policeman's cape. Her birth certificate says otherwise, and she fed the myth herself in her memoirs. She understood before anyone that a life is also a performance.

Charles Aznavour

They told him his voice was no good

The French press dismissed him as "a small man, a small singer". He stood five foot three, had an odd voice, and wrote more than a thousand songs. Even the "artist of the century" title attributed to him deserves a clarification.

Fine Young Cannibals

The break-up at the summit

The story goes that they bowed out in time, with grace, so as not to spoil their legacy. That is not what happened: they broke apart in 1992, after two years of awards and hit singles. The romantic version is prettier than it is true.

Spandau Ballet

The perfect song and the lawsuit

The saxophone that defines "True" is played by a guitarist who had switched instruments for that record. Years later, three members took the fourth to court over royalties, lost, and walked out owing two hundred thousand pounds each.

The Human League

The one per cent the name cost him

To keep the name The Human League, in October 1980, Phil Oakey took on all the group debts and agreed to give the two departing founders one per cent of the royalties of the next album. That album turned out to be "Dare", triple platinum. The song holding it up, "Don't You Want Me", he thought was filler and did not want released.

The Beach Boys

The piano inside the sandbox

In 1966 Brian Wilson had a sandbox built in his house and put the piano inside it, so he could write with his feet buried. The man who had sold the world the California summer needed to build himself a beach in the living room. The band last number one, "Kokomo" in 1988, was written by the founder of The Mamas and the Papas, and Brian had no part in it.

Tears for Fears

The shout that sold millions

Roland Orzabal has spent decades saying that "Shout" is not an exercise in primal screaming but a song of political protest, and that the therapy reference strikes him as a little corny. The duo name really does come from a book by Arthur Janov, and that detail kept the misunderstanding alive for forty years.

t.A.T.u.

The song got away from the script

t.A.T.u. was not a band that formed: it was a project built by producer Ivan Shapovalov around two girls of fourteen, with a romance between them written as a commercial strategy. In 2004 the two of them broke their contract with him. In 2014, Yulia Volkova said on television that she would condemn a gay son.

Robert Palmer

The suit was the costume

Robert Palmer learned to sing listening to soul on an American forces radio station in Malta, walked away from The Power Station before the tour and before Live Aid, and won two Grammys, not one. In the "Addicted to Love" video the five models were copying the movements of five real musicians playing off camera.

Rick Astley

The one who served the tea

Pete Waterman saw Rick Astley singing in a soul band in Warrington in 1985, then put him to work for two years running errands and operating tape machines at PWL studios. He did not write "Never Gonna Give You Up", he quit music in 1993 at 27, and in 2010 he said rickrolling had earned him about twelve dollars in YouTube royalties.

Natalie Imbruglia

The fourth voice on the same song

When Natalie Imbruglia recorded "Torn" in 1997, the song was four years old and had already been released three times: Denmark's Lis Sørensen took it to radio in 1993 and Norway's Trine Rein into the Norwegian top ten in 1996. She rescued nothing from obscurity — she was the fourth to record it and the first to make it unforgettable outside Scandinavia.

Men at Work

The bars that cost too much

In January 1983 Men at Work became the first Australians to hold the number one album and the number one single in the United States at the same time. Twenty-seven years later a court ruled that the flute line in "Down Under" quoted a 1932 children's song, and awarded the publisher 5 per cent of royalties from 2002, far short of the 40 to 60 per cent it claimed. Greg Ham, who played those bars, was never a credited writer and was never sued.

Kim Carnes

The song that was not hers

"Bette Davis Eyes" had existed since 1974, written by Donna Weiss and Jackie DeShannon. Kim Carnes and her producer, Val Garay, took it apart in 1981 and rebuilt it with synthesizers: nine non-consecutive weeks at number one. At the Grammys, Carnes won Record of the Year and its writers won Song of the Year — the award the story has been handing her for forty years.

Huey Lewis and the News

The man who stopped hearing his own song

Huey Lewis lost his hearing all at once on 27 January 2018, before a show in Dallas, and said afterwards that he was suicidal for the first two months. A cochlear implant gave him speech back, not music. Before all of that, his band had turned down the "Ghostbusters" theme and sued the man who wrote it for plagiarism.

Gloria Estefan

She danced again

Gloria Estefan's bus did not crash: it was stopped in traffic on Interstate 380 when a tractor-trailer rammed it from behind, on 20 March 1990. Her doctors never said she might not walk again — they called her chances excellent, and her surgeon predicted a full recovery in three to six months. She was back in January 1991, inside that window.

Eurythmics

What was left when the love ran out

Annie Lennox and Dave Stewart had already broken up as a couple, and already buried two bands, when they founded Eurythmics in 1980. They recorded "Sweet Dreams (Are Made of This)" in the loft of an old warehouse in Chalk Farm, on an eight-track machine bought with a bank loan, for around five thousand pounds.

Eagle-Eye Cherry

The son's four chords

Eagle-Eye Cherry was working as an actor — "Born on the Fourth of July", the series "South Beach" — when his father, free jazz trumpeter Don Cherry, died in October 1995. He went back to Stockholm, gave up acting and recorded "Desireless" in a studio he set up in his bedroom. "Save Tonight" is not about grief: it is about a girlfriend leaving on a train.

Culture Club

The song that could not say its name

Boy George and drummer Jon Moss were in a relationship they could not declare while Culture Club was selling records all over the planet, and millions of people sang those songs without knowing where they came from. Both have since described a violent relationship, and the partnership ended forty years later in a 1.75 million pound settlement.

Bryan Adams

The other half he made with a camera

Bryan Adams recorded "(Everything I Do) I Do It for You" in 1991 and spent sixteen straight weeks at number one in Britain, a consecutive-weeks record nobody has matched since. While that was happening he built a whole second career with a camera: he photographed Elizabeth II for the Golden Jubilee and published "Wounded: The Legacy of War", on British soldiers maimed in combat.

Billy Joel

The pianist who stayed in the bar

Before "Piano Man", Billy Joel spent six months playing a Los Angeles bar under the false name Bill Martin, after two suicide attempts and a voluntary stay in a psychiatric hospital. The song that defined him for good is, at bottom, a report on the regulars of that room — the method was ready from the start.

The Carpenters

The warmest voice in pop, and the drummer hidden behind it

The warmest voice in pop belonged to someone who felt, deep down, like a drummer. The industry moved her out from behind the drums to put her up front, and she missed them always. What sounded easy was a goldsmith's work.

Gilbert O'Sullivan

The softest balladeer in pop changed the rules for all of music

He wrote one of the most melancholy songs in pop and seemed the last person you would call a revolutionary. But when a rapper used a piece of it without authorisation, he sued, and the ruling he won in 1991 put a price on every sample in the world.

Laura Branigan

The voice that came back from the dead to win a cup

Her two anthems came from Italian pop melodrama and she made them definitive with her throat. She died in her sleep in 2004, at the age of fifty-two, of an aneurysm nobody had diagnosed. Fifteen years later, a hockey locker room resurrected "Gloria".

Chubby Checker

They let go of each other's hands

He did not invent dancing apart, but he made it the norm. Since 1960, at any party on the planet, people dance the way he taught them.

The Hollies

The voices that split up and found each other again on a record

Two boys from Manchester learned to sing together, put a band together and split up in 1968, when one of them crossed the Atlantic to found a supergroup. The group that stayed behind kept piling up classics, and in 2023 the two voices braided themselves together again on a record.

Ed Sheeran

One man, one guitar and one pedal filling the biggest stadiums in the world

A stadium stage with no band, no dancers and no backing tracks: an acoustic guitar and a loop pedal with which he stacks layers live until it sounds like ten musicians. Underneath the trick are the songs, which he also writes for others.

INXS

The most magnetic frontman Australia ever produced

A sound that fused rock, funk and new wave out of Sydney, and out front a singer with a gravity of his own that forced you to look at him. "Kick" took it to the whole world in 1987; the death of Michael Hutchence, ten years later, left a hole nobody could fill.

Barbra Streisand

She changed nothing, and she won everything

She was asked for a different surname, a different nose and a different character, and she said no to all three. She then won two Oscars, and with "Yentl" she became the first woman to produce, direct, co-write and star in a film for a major Hollywood studio.

Sammy Davis Jr.

The total entertainer who carried the weight of the world while smiling

He sang, tap-danced, acted, did impressions of half a dozen stars and played several instruments, all in the same night. And he filled Las Vegas casinos that wouldn't let him stay there or come in through the front door.

Bomba Estéreo

The drum plugged in

They plugged cumbia and champeta into electronica without betraying either. And out of it came an anthem for everyone who has ever felt like the odd one out.

Café Tacvba

Never the same record twice

They put all of Mexico in a blender with punk, ska and electronica, and have gone thirty-odd years without repeating themselves. Not even the singer's name stays still.

Aterciopelados

The flower and the punk

A ceramicist and a punk met in Bogotá, named themselves after something they read in Simone de Beauvoir, and ended up singing about peace to a country at war.

Los Tres

The cueca plugged in

When sounding modern meant sounding American, they put the cueca inside rock and taught a generation to love its own roots. And the missing link has a name: Roberto Parra.

Duran Duran

Born with MTV

Their first album came out six weeks before MTV launched, and the two saved each other. They understood before anyone that music was shifting from listening to watching.

Luis Alberto Spinetta

Born a poet

He wrote a masterpiece at fifteen and recorded it seventeen years later. And he stopped playing his best-loved song for a reason almost nobody gets right.

George Harrison

The one who waited his turn

They called him the quiet Beatle, but he wasn't quiet for lack of anything to say. He brought India to rock, gave the benefit concert its scale, and ended up owning the song that sank him.

Roy Orbison

The glasses he left behind

The image that defined him for life came from something forgotten on a plane. And the man who sang sadness like nobody else lived it in a way that is hard to imagine.

George Michael

The immense talent, and the generosity only known when he died

Anonymous multimillion donations, volunteer shifts at a soup kitchen for homeless people, a stranger's fertility treatment paid for in full. He did it for decades asking that nobody tell, and almost all of it came to light when he died.

B.J. Thomas

The voice that put optimism into the rain

An effortless Texan voice held up the song Bacharach wrote for "Butch Cassidy" and that took home the Oscar. Then came the original that the Swedish ooga-chaka ended up burying, and a whole second career singing about his faith.

Savage Garden

They made a generation's love song, and left at the top

Two Australians, two records and a handful of songs that played at thousands of first dances in the late nineties. In 2001, with no flop and no falling-out involved, they decided that was as far as it went and left while the world was still applauding.

Billie Eilish

She made the future of pop in one bedroom, and swept the Grammys at 18

Four major Grammys in a single night, at eighteen, with songs recorded in a bedroom of the family home alongside her brother Finneas. She sang in whispers when pop rewarded shouting, and covered her body so nobody could have an opinion about it.

Kiki Dee

The friend who gave Elton John his first number one at home

She was the first British singer signed by Motown and already had a hit of her own, "I've Got the Music in Me", when the 1976 duet came along. What she put into it was not gratitude: it was the British number one Elton John was still missing.

Celine Dion

The most powerful voice in the world, and the courage to come back from the Eiffel Tower

The youngest of fourteen children of a humble Quebec household became one of the best-selling voices in history. In 2022 she revealed that she had stiff person syndrome; in July 2024 she sang Piaf from the Eiffel Tower, without being cured.

Harry Styles

He beat the boy band curse, and broke the rules of how a man dresses along the way

Almost nobody leaves a boy band and gets a respected solo career. He left One Direction, won the Grammy for album of the year for "Harry's House" and, along the way, appeared on the cover of Vogue in a dress: two ceilings broken in the same decade.

Norah Jones

The quietest album of the year swept the Grammys

In 2002, with the charts full of loud pop and heavy rock, a handful of quiet piano songs sung in a velvet voice sold tens of millions and took home eight Grammys at the 2003 ceremony. There is also an illustrious surname she decided not to use.

Justin Bieber

He grew up under the whole world's magnifying glass, and survived

A manager found him among home videos on YouTube and at fifteen he was already one of the most famous people on the planet, without a single day of privacy. He paid that bill in public and afterwards spoke about depression and showed his facial paralysis without hiding.

The Weeknd

He began with no name and no face, and ended up with one of the biggest songs in history

In 2010 a nocturnal, sickly R&B appeared on the internet signed with a pseudonym nobody knew anything about, and it made its way with no photo and no marketing. Behind it was Abel Tesfaye, a young man from Toronto who ended up playing the Super Bowl halftime show.

Miley Cyrus

The Disney girl who came to own herself, and waited almost twenty years for her first Grammy

She started out as Hannah Montana, a character Disney had designed down to the last detail, and breaking out of that cage cost her years of mockery and condemnation. The industry finally crowned her in 2024 with "Flowers", a song about being able to love yourself.

Benson Boone

The kid who made the stage a spectacle again

He walked away from a talent show halfway through and got further on his own: in 2024 "Beautiful Things" was one of the biggest hits of the year. And with him a lost habit came back: really singing and risking your body, with backflips off the top of the piano.

Chicago

They put a horn section into rock, and were hiding a guitar genius

They put trumpets, trombones and saxophones at the centre of a rock band and sold millions with that strange formula. But in their early years they were hiding something else: a guitarist whom Jimi Hendrix considered better than himself, dead at thirty-one from an accidental gunshot.

Peter Cetera

The voice behind Chicago's ballads bet on itself, and won

For eighteen years he sang the tenderest ballads of a horn band, and in 1985, at the top, he went solo. A year later he was at number one with the theme from a karate film, and he decided to retire before the voice gave up on him.

Mon Laferte

She never fit the boxes

She made her generation's most listened-to heartbreak song without radio's help, won five Latin Grammys without repeating the same trick, and climbed twelve metres of scaffolding to paint what nobody draws.

Sting

The teacher who never stopped studying

A milkman's son, a schoolteacher, and then one of the finest voices in pop. He had the biggest band in the world and left it at thirty-three to take on jazz, the orchestra and the Renaissance lute.

The Police

They knew when to leave

Three virtuosos dressed as punks who made the most perfect pop of their era and stopped when they were the biggest band on the planet. And a love song that is really about watching someone.

Pet Shop Boys

Dancing with T. S. Eliot

A pop journalist and an architecture student made the smartest dance pop of all. They smuggled «The Waste Land» into a disco hit and nobody noticed.

Julieta Venegas

The accordion and the border

She took Latin pop and made it personal, sophisticated and deep without ever losing the hook. A girl from Tijuana with a conservatory training and the soul of a ska band, who also had a Chilean marriage.

Fleetwood Mac

The album made from their own ruins

Five people whose relationships were all falling apart at once shut themselves in a studio and, instead of killing each other, made «Rumours». They sang their break-ups at one another, in the same room, harmonising perfectly on songs about leaving.

Camilo Sesto

Do you want to be my lover?

It is easy to file him away as the schmaltzy balladeer. Behind that voice there was a songwriter and a producer who bankrolled «Jesus Christ Superstar» out of his own pocket in a Spain just emerging from Franco. And a whole songbook about loves that could not be named.

Smash Mouth

The song that beat its own joke

It was not written for «Shrek», the singer did not write it and it was never number one. What «All Star» did do was survive fifteen years of parodies and come out more popular than ever.

Whitney Houston

The girl from the choir

Time magazine said that if the human voice is an instrument, hers was a Stradivarius among ordinary violins. She was formed in a Baptist church choir in Newark, and the same press that crowned her later filmed her decline.

a-ha

Bigger than yourself

«Take On Me» flopped twice before it became a hit: it was not luck, it was releasing the same song three times. Behind the chorus everyone knows are three Norwegians with a forty-year career and the largest paying concert audience in history.

Madonna

She never belonged to anyone

Pepsi pulled the «Like a Prayer» commercial and she kept the five million dollars. Madonna's story is not provocation but control: of her body, her image, her music and her business, in an industry built so that women controlled nothing.

John Lennon

A difficult man's prayer

The boy whose life Elvis set alight ended up burying his idol in a single sentence. John Lennon made a generation dream of peace while fighting his own violence, learned late how to be a father and died by the most senseless violence of all.

Elvis Presley

Not the fortunate son

He wrote almost none of his songs and still became the sound of an era. Elvis Presley transformed the Black music that raised him, benefited from a colour line he did not invent and, at the height of his fame, refused to hide from the draft.

Kenny Rogers

Somebody else wrote the song

"The Gambler" belongs to Don Schlitz, who wrote it at twenty-three and spent two years hawking it around Nashville. He died on 16 April 2026. A whole philosophy was built on that song.

Journey

The singer they found on YouTube

Neal Schon spent nights watching home videos until he found a Filipino singer doing covers in a Manila club. Pineda thought it was a scam. He has held the job longer than Steve Perry did.

Roxette

The record that crossed the Atlantic

They reached number one in the United States because an exchange student took the album home to Minneapolis and would not stop until a station played it. The label had no plans to release it.

ABBA

The divorce the song does not tell

Björn has expressly denied that "The Winner Takes It All" is his divorce. What is true is the calendar: they separated in January 1979 and kept working together for three more years.

Cher

Thirty-three years between two number ones

In August 1965 she had a number one. The next came in March 1999. It is the longest gap in the history of the Hot 100, and it means she was written off more than once.

Juan Gabriel

What is visible needs no asking

A boy placed in a juvenile home in Ciudad Juárez took his abandonment, his poverty and his loneliness and left them out there for anyone to use. That is why «Amor Eterno» stopped being his grief and became the place where a whole continent puts its own.

The Archies

The band that could not argue

Don Kirshner had already built a television band and it had gone badly: the Monkees rebelled. His answer was impeccable in the cold sense of the word: the next one would be a cartoon.

Louis Armstrong

The boss who hated the song

The label president thought it was rubbish. He tried to stop the session, was removed from the studio, and then took his revenge by not promoting it: "What a Wonderful World" sold under a thousand copies.

Paul McCartney

The lawsuit nobody understood

On 31 December 1970 he sued his three closest friends. Not to break up the band: to get the catalogue out of hands he did not trust. And he did reconcile with Lennon.

Neil Sedaka

The half somebody else signed

He died on 27 February 2026 and the obituaries called him the man behind "Breaking Up Is Hard to Do". The song has two names in the credits, and the second had been dead for twenty-five years.

Adele

The only stack left

When the album was being written off as dead, she sold thirty-one million copies. And four years later she pulled her record from streaming to force people to buy it.

Phil Collins

The one at the back

Genesis looked for a replacement for Peter Gabriel with an anonymous advert, and four hundred replies came in; several with photographs of applicants in costume and masks. None of them worked. The answer had been sitting behind the drums for five years.

David Byrne

A rectangle with legs

David Byrne put on a suit five sizes too big so that his head would look smaller. He explained it himself: music is physical and the body understands it before the head does. Rock's most cerebral man designed an object to escape his own head for a while, and made anxiety danceable along the way.

Michael Jackson

The man in the mirror

A genius who changed music for good, a cultural father to a whole generation, a man at war with his own reflection, and a shadow that never lifted. All of it is true at once, and this profile does not come to resolve it in either direction.

Linda Perry

The signature in the credits

She sang the nineties anthem of «hey-yeahs», and when the industry tried to turn her into a pop star she slammed the door. Then she wrote «Beautiful» and «Get the Party Started» for other women. Half the pop of twenty years carries her signature, hidden in the credits.

Elton John

An envelope of lyrics from a stranger

In 1967 a shy boy called Reginald Dwight failed an audition, and on his way out was handed a sealed envelope of lyrics by another applicant they were not going to sign either. Almost sixty years on, Elton John and Bernie Taupin still write that way, apart.

Andrés Calamaro

Writing the way you breathe

He released an album with a hundred and three songs. Not because he had something to say: because he never learned how to stop.

Maná

The chair at the end of the pier

The woman in "En el muelle de San Blas" existed. Almost everything else is more complicated, and her daughter refutes it point by point.

Cyndi Lauper

The glove turned inside out

A man wrote it, from a sexist point of view. She didn't change the words: she changed who says them and from where, and the song came to mean the opposite.

Olivia Newton-John

The two Sandys

The final transformation in "Grease" worked because it wasn't only the character's: it was hers. And thirty years later she repeated the gesture with something far more serious.

Eagles

The door that opens

They built their fame singing the Californian paradise and wrote their masterpiece about its underside: a place you can leave and never manage to get out of.

Miranda!

Permission to have a good time

Twenty years into a career, the normal thing is to live off nostalgia. Miranda! did the opposite: they handed their songs to the next generation to sing alongside them, and won Argentina's album of the year with it. A record of covers of themselves.

The Ronettes

Everyone playing at once

The wall of sound meant packing dozens of musicians into a small room playing at the same time. On top of all that went a single voice, and it was Ronnie's.

Frankie Valli

Four decades

A falsetto that climbs higher than almost any woman's, coming out of a guy from a Newark neighbourhood. Seven number ones in sixteen years, and the British wave didn't take him.

Paul Anka

Writing another man's life

One night in 1968 he sat down to write what Frank Sinatra would say if he had to sum up his life. Millions think they hear Sinatra and hear a twenty-seven-year-old Canadian.

Nancy Sinatra

Boots on the shadow

She carried the heaviest surname in American music and shook it off with a song her father would never have sung.

Peter Rock

The One Who Opened the Door

Peter Rock, or how a country filed away its own founder as the nice old man on television. On 27 October 1959, aged fourteen, an Austrian immigrant recorded the first rock and roll in Chilean record history. Everything that followed came through that door.

Los Bravos

Sounding like they weren't Spanish

A Spanish band, a German singer, a song by English writers recorded in London with English musicians. To break the charts you had to sound like you came from somewhere else.

Buddy Holly

The template

Two guitars, a bass and drums, playing their own songs. Today that is the obvious definition of a rock band. In 1957 it wasn't, and he settled it in eighteen months.

Santo & Johnny

The guitar that weeps

At the height of rock and roll, the most played record in America was a slow melody with no words. The last instrumental to top the chart in the fifties.

Brenda Lee

Sixty-five years late

She recorded a Christmas song at thirteen and it flopped. In 2023 it hit number one. What waited sixty-five years was the song: she had already topped the chart in 1960.

Tony Bennett

The room slowly fading

He recorded a whole album after his Alzheimer's diagnosis. His memory of life was going and his memory of the songs was not: the standards stayed intact when almost nothing else did.

Marciano Cantero

The Voice of Everyone's Adolescence

Marciano Cantero, or why the songs that reach you at fifteen never come loose. Enanitos Verdes were not the critics' band: they were the people's band, at every party and every school trip across a whole continent. Two of their biggest anthems were not even theirs.

Nat King Cole

The empty easel

No national advertiser would put its name beside a Black man's in prime time. NBC did not cancel his show: he walked away, and wrote down why.

Frank Sinatra

Breathing like someone talking

He learned to sing by watching a trombonist breathe, and took up underwater swimming to hold longer phrases. And no, "My Way" was neither his epitaph nor played at his funeral.

Federico Moura

Dancing at the Edge

Federico Moura, or why in a country governed by fear, dancing was also resistance. At first they threw oranges at him for making a seated rock scene dance. Nobody knew the dictatorship had torn a son from that family, and that his lightness was a chosen answer to the horror.

Toto

Five thousand other people's records

They were the most in-demand session players in Los Angeles. They played on the best-selling album ever, and then signed under their own name.

Quincy Jones

Check your ego at the door

Seventy years of work, twenty-eight Grammys, and the best-selling album in the world. Most people would not recognise him in a photograph.

Milli Vanilli

The tape that jammed

The only Grammy ever revoked. But behind the scandal there are two stories: the fake faces, and the real voices.

Lady Gaga

Under the costume, a piano

Piano from the age of four and her own ballad at thirteen. She conquered with the mask first and took it off later, once she no longer needed it.

Ritchie Valens

The first thing he ever won

An eight-month career, seventeen years old, and the first great rock anthem in Spanish, sung by a boy who learned the words phonetically.

Gustavo Cerati

Gracias Totales

Gustavo Cerati, or what to do once you have already been the singer of the continent's most beloved band. He was offered a tour replacing Sting and said no, because he was busy becoming himself. Out of that came «Bocanada», and a body of work that refused to repeat the formula.

Jorge González

What I've Eaten and Danced

Jorge González, or why someone sure of what is theirs does not chase what belongs to others. A profile built from his at-home interview: the fourth-hand piano, the X-ray of a country, the album born of a betrayal, the fame he dropped on purpose, and how he started writing again when his body changed.

Dolly Parton

Underneath the Sequins

Dolly Parton has died, the one who looked the most artificial and was the most true. Underneath the wigs, the nails and the impossible make-up there was a colossal songwriter and a razor-sharp businesswoman: the one who at twenty set up her own publishing company to own her songs, the one who said no to Elvis and cried all night, and the one who twenty years later made enough from that very song to buy Graceland.

Annie Lennox

The Mask That Didn't Hide

Annie Lennox, or how to become impossible to classify so that people will finally listen. In 1983, when a pop singer was supposed to be pretty and desirable, she put on a man's suit. Not to hide: to clear away everything that got in the way and leave the artist at the front. The voice behind the image, and the second act in which she turned the spotlight outwards.

David Bowie: The Perfect Amalgam of Rock and Pop

How the chameleon turned the distance between the rebellious and the popular into his own territory. From Ziggy Stardust to the Berlin Trilogy and the Trojan horse of "Let's Dance": the story of the artist who refused to choose, and why nobody has fused them like him since.

Pop Culture and Its Struggles Since the Sixties

How a music made to please became a battlefield for civil rights, feminism and sexual freedom. From Motown in white households to the girl groups singing their own desire and Bowie's Ziggy Stardust: pop as culture's Trojan horse.

How Pop Culture (and Pop) Was Born

The story of the most loved, best-selling and most looked-down-upon genre of them all: from the Brill Building song factory to the invention of the teenager and the soundtrack of the world's youth. Why a genre built to please ended up changing society without meaning to.

Why Latin America Loves Depeche Mode

A band from a grey English town that became a religion in the south of the world: three sold-out nights at the Foro Sol, two hundred thousand people and a film shot in Mexico City. The three layers —the sound, the machine and the dictatorship— behind a devotion the band itself can't quite explain.

Depeche Mode: The Machine That Became Soul

From teenagers in Basildon with cheap synthesizers to the kings of electronic rock: forty years of reinvention, darkness and devotion. The fifteen albums one by one, Fletcher's death, Memento Mori and a map of who picked up the baton.