By the end of the 70s, acts like Parliament/Funkadelic, Teddy Pendergrass, and Tyrone Davis essentially had core R&B careers. A track or two by these acts would make the lower rungs of the pop Top 40, but the bulk of their Top 10 R&B hits wouldn’t even touch the Hot 100’s upper half, if at all. The bad news for such acts was that their lack of crossover generally meant lower label promotional budgets; the good news was that R&B success could sustain a career. And when pop crossover did happen, it really meant something. By the time the Commodores and Kool & the Gang started scoring Hot 100
No. 1’s at the turn of the 80s, they’d already racked up strings of
R&B chart toppers since the mid-70s, presaging their pop success.
It also meant something when a white act charted R&B—the crossover validation worked the other way, too. Scores of acts that normally dominated the Hot 100 would occasionally record a song embraced by the R&B audience. Elton John has long
attested to how thrilled he was when his “Bennie and the Jets” was the top song on black radio in Detroit and ultimately crossed to the R&B chart, where it peaked at a respectable No. 15. Other hits by white acts did even better, reaching the R&B chart’s Top Five: Average White Band’s
“Pick Up the Pieces”, KC and the Sunshine Band’s
“Get Down Tonight”, Wild Cherry’s
“Play That Funky Music”, Bee Gees’
“You Should Be Dancing”, Rod Stewart’s
“Da Ya Think I’m Sexy”, and, by the early 80s, Daryl Hall and John Oates’s
“I Can’t Go for That (No Can Do)”. These songs didn’t chart high on Hot Soul Singles because someone in charge of the charts thought they sounded black enough—they crossed over because black radio stations and core R&B stores were playing and selling them in quantity.
(Payola surely played a role in those good-old-bad-old days, as it did throughout the 70s and 80s on the
pop charts and rock radio. But R&B chart success in and of itself likely wasn’t a lucrative enough prize for labels to budget serious “incentives.” Anyway, as the evidence shows, the aforementioned white acts only occasionally scored serious R&B hits. If Warner had wanted Rod Stewart to have more than one R&B smash—rather than the solitary one he did—they’d have greased more palms.)
By the 80s, the R&B chart was its own demimonde with its own lineup of stars. On the surface, the chart had a more racially defined identity: In 1982
Billboard,
not without controversy, renamed the chart Hot Black Singles, even though white acts like
Hall & Oates,
Madonna,
Phil Collins,
George Michael, and
Lisa Stansfield sporadically charted R&B.
But these occasional appearances by white acts didn’t affect the chart in any major way during the decade of
Michael,
Lionel,
Prince and
Whitney—black music was doing just fine, thank you, both on the Hot Black Singles chart and on the Hot 100. In addition to the major inroads made at Top 40 radio by these megastars, a lower tier of core black superstars gave the 80s R&B chart its own distinct identity:
Luther Vandross,
the Gap Band,
Freddie Jackson,
Maze,
Stephanie Mills,
Melba Moore,
Guy—with rare exception, these artists’ strings of top-charting R&B hits would bypass the pop Top 40 entirely. Indeed, what made the 80s one of the richest decades for black pop in a generation could be seen each week right at the top of Hot Black Singles—one week, Michael Jackson’s über-crossover hit
“Billie Jean” could be on top, and then a week later, it would be replaced by a record as un–Top 40–friendly as George Clinton’s
“Atomic Dog”.
SoundScan Ushers in an R&B/Hip-Hop Chart Boom
The deep-data era on the U.S. charts began in May 1991, with the introduction of SoundScan (later Nielsen SoundScan) technology—accurate tallying of sales at the retail counter, through scanned UPC barcodes on music purchases to Billboard's flagship album chart. Immediately, this revolutionized the chart, giving a boost to genres that the old manual-charts system had underreported. In particular, hip-hop and country artists benefited massively when sales were tallied more accurately.
Then in November 1991, the magazine brought SoundScan technology to the Hot 100. Because the Hot 100 was based not only on sales of singles but also radio airplay,
Billboard introduced a computerized data feed from
Broadcast Data Systems, which counted radio plays via a sonic fingerprint. While BDS didn’t eliminate recording industry payola, it made it much harder for labels to pay for a “paper” (phony) playlist add; the Hot 100 was now based on songs receiving actual airplay. Once again, the changes to the Hot 100, thanks to both BDS and SoundScan, were profound—it’s difficult to imagine
Sir Mix-a-Lot topping the Hot 100 for over a month in the summer of 1992 without the more accurate technologies.
In 1992, the SoundScan and BDS technologies made their way to the black-music chart (two years earlier, the chart had been renamed again, this time as Hot R&B Singles). Billboard was so careful about not screwing up their R&B retail/radio formula—many small retailers couldn’t afford barcode scanners at first—that the magazine phased in the new technologies over several months to be sure they didn’t misrepresent what black retailers and stations were playing. But once the new formula was in full effect, by the start of 1993, rap’s profile on Hot R&B Singles improved almost immediately. Within the first three months,
Naughty by Nature and
Dr. Dre scored their first No. 1 hits on the more data-accurate R&B chart.
For the rest of the 90s, rap became so omnipresent on Hot R&B Singles—with
2Pac,
Notorious B.I.G.,
Puff Daddy, Ma$e, and
Missy Elliott scoring hits—that in 1999
Billboard finally added hip-hop to the name of the chart,
redubbing it Hot R&B/Hip-Hop Singles & Tracks (a mouthful of a name that was mercifully shortened to Hot R&B/Hip-Hop Songs in 2005).
Of course, hip-hop wasn’t only dominating the R&B chart in the 90s—it was steadily taking over the Top 40, too. As early as 1993, black music was already so dominant on the Hot 100 that all but two of
Billboard’s
top 25 pop singles of the year were crossover tracks from the Hot R&B Songs chart (the only exceptions that year: one track each by
UB40 and
Soul Asylum). There were periods in the late 1990s and early 2000s where the Top 10 of the
Hot 100 and
R&B chart looked very similar. But that was largely because so many R&B and hip-hop tracks were legitimately crossing over to the pop charts—phenomena that SoundScan and BDS tracked accurately.
there was and still is a "black chart"
