In The Number Ones, I’m reviewing every single #1 single in the history of the Billboard Hot 100, starting with the chart’s beginning, in 1958, and working my way up into the present. Book Bonus Beat: The Number Ones: Twenty Chart-Topping Hits That Reveal the History of Pop Music.
Funny story: Late one night, Bradley Cooper and Lady Gaga are hanging out in a supermarket parking lot. They only just met earlier that night. Cooper ducked into a dive bar to get even drunker than he already was, and he saw Gaga sing “La Vie En Rose.” They got to talking, and then they went out for more drinks at an after-hours cop bar. One of the cops bothered Cooper for a picture, and Gaga punched the cop in the face, so they had to run out of there. They went to the supermarket so that Cooper could tape some frozen peas to Gaga’s hand. Then they’re out in the parking lot, and Cooper is telling sad stories about his life, and Gaga starts singing about him. Then she connects that to a song she already started writing, and she wails at the sky about how she’s off the deep end, watch while she dives in, she’ll never reach the ground.
Bradley Cooper is like, “Holy shit,” and then he whispers that Lady Gaga might be a songwriter. He has his driver take Lady Gaga back to her father Andrew Dice Clay’s house, and he calls out to her so that she’ll turn around and he can take another look at her. It’s so good.
Cooper has to leave because he’s playing a concert that night, but he really wants Lady Gaga to come. He sends his driver to wait outside her house and then outside her job in a kitchen. Her boss pisses her off, so she’s like, “Fine, I’m going!” She and her best friend Anthony Ramos get on a private jet, and they’re like, “Whoa, what is happening,” and then someone whisks them to the side of the stage where Cooper is performing. Cooper finishes the not-great rock song that’s he’s playing, and then he rushes over to her and tells her that he came up with an arrangement for that song she wrote and she should come sing it, and she’s like, “No, I can’t!” But then Cooper starts singing it anyway, so she comes out and sings it with him, and she’s like, “Whaaa huaaaa haaaa aaaaah!” and everyone loves it. Cell-phone footage goes viral, and a star is born.
That’s not really how the song “Shallow” came into being. The real story isn’t that exciting. It’s still pretty good, as the backstories in this column go, but it’s way more conventional. It’s a story about a pop star and some of her pro collaborators coming up with a song for a movie — nothing too earthshaking. The movie version of the story is better, even if it doesn’t entirely make sense. Like, what — this guy remembered every word of what she sang in that parking lot when he was drunk as shit, and then he built a fully functional country-rock power ballad out of it and performed it less than 24 hours later? And she just magically knew where to add her bits, without any warning or rehearsal or vocal warm-up? But when that scene comes up in the 2018 film A Star Is Born, the most recent remake of the three previous Star Is Born movies, you never question it. You’re too caught up in the story of these fucked-up, talented people finding each other and changing each other’s lives.
“Shallow” is perfect for that. It’s the kind of song that theatrically sweeps practical considerations aside, that demands you buy into its grand fantasy. A Star Is Born isn’t a musical in the classic sense, where the characters just randomly start singing their feelings at the drop of a hat. These characters are musicians, and there’s always a reason for them to sing a song. But the “Shallow” scene, one of the best cinematic moments of the past decade, has the logic of the Hollywood musical. These people are better at speaking through music than through words, so that’s how they reach out to each other. The song is good enough that it captures all the feelings that the moment puts onscreen — the fear, the excitement, the vulnerability, the euphoria. I can’t imagine “Shallow” even existing, let alone becoming a chart-topping hit, without the context of A Star Is Born. Within that movie, though, it becomes an immortal moment — one powerful enough to turn a non-singing actor into one of the lead artists on a #1 hit.
Who is Jackson Maine supposed to be, anyway? This was a big question in the music-critic community after A Star Is Born hit theaters in October 2018. Bradley Cooper’s character is a gravelly, permanently drunk country-rocker who plays at festivals like Coachella and who is evidently famous enough that drag queens and supermarket cashiers are starstruck when he appears in their presence. In 2018, there weren’t really any guys like that. Bradley Cooper looks and sounds a bit like Eddie Vedder, but the movie has no Pearl Jam equivalent; the members of his backing band might as well be set dressing. You could maybe see him as a Black Key or a King Of Leon, but even those guys were past their pop moment back then. In the years since A Star Is Born, though, the rootsy-grizzled singer-songwriter type has come back into vogue, and now we’ve got Jackson Maines running all over the place. Zach Bryan isn’t exactly the same as Jackson Maine, but he’s close enough, and he’ll eventually appear in this column for a song that, now that I think about it, has plenty in common with “Shallow.”
Maybe Bradley Cooper knew, on some innate level, that the Jackson Maine archetype would come back around. Maybe that’s the kind of social-antenna sensitivity that helps you become a movie star. It’s so weird to be talking about Bradley Cooper in this column because Bradley Cooper is not a musician — not in his everyday life, anyway. This isn’t a situation like John Travolta, another guy who showed up in this column because of a soundtrack duet with an established pop star. Travolta at least had some history as an aspiring singer before that moment. Bradley Cooper didn’t have that. He was always just an actor. I can’t even think of any big scenes where Cooper sings that aren’t in A Star Is Born. But Cooper has a #1 hit, so it’s time for this column to give his little capsule biography, as if he were a real-deal pop star.
Bradley Charles Cooper grew up in the Philadelphia suburbs. (When Cooper was born, the #1 song in America was Elton John’s version of “Lucy In The Sky With Diamonds.”) Cooper’s father was a stockbroker, and his mother was a newscaster on the local NBC affiliate. Cooper loved movies as a kid, and he studied English in college, first at Villanova and then at Georgetown. He made his acting debut in 1999, making out with Sarah Jessica Parker on an episode of Sex And The City. He studied acting while working as a hotel doorman in New York, and you can still find videos of stupidly handsome young Cooper asking earnest questions of movie stars on episodes of Inside The Actors Studio.
Despite the stupidly-handsome factor, young Bradley Cooper had trouble landing roles. His cinematic debut was in the ensemble cast of 2001’s Wet Hot American Summer, a no-shit classic movie, but it didn’t lead him straight to stardom. Instead, he got cast as Jennifer Garner’s best friend on Alias, and he was on that show for all five of its seasons. Cooper seriously considered quitting acting as his character became less and less essential to the show’s plot. (That’s what he says, anyway. I’ve never watched Alias.) But Cooper kept taking small film roles when he was on Alias, and he finally started to break through as Owen Wilson’s dickhead romantic rival in the 2005 surprise hit Wedding Crashers. He’s really funny in that one. He plays a great dickhead.
On the back of Wedding Crashers, Bradley Cooper was cast as Anthony Bourdain on a TV version of Bourdain’s memoir Kitchen Confidential. Fox canceled it after four episodes. For the next few years, Cooper continued to play slightly more prominent supporting roles in movies that nobody cares about — Failure To Launch, The Rocker, Yes Man, He’s Just Not That Into You. He got his first lead role as a serial killer in The Midnight Meat Train, a 2007 horror flick with an excellent title, but that one just barely even got released. This is not the typical career arc for giant movie stars. They typically don’t bum around in nothing roles for a decade before finally breaking through. But Hollywood was apparently lousy with handsome guys, and people just didn’t see the megawatt leading man staring them right in the face.
Cooper was in his mid-thirties by the time he finally scored his breakthrough. He played the lead in Todd Phillips’ 2009 comedy The Hangover, a mid-budget hard-R romp that turned into a societal phenomenon and made stars of pretty much everyone involved. I haven’t seen The Hangover since it was first in theaters, and I’m guessing that it wouldn’t hit anywhere near as hard today. But I think that was the first movie that my wife and I saw in the theater after our daughter was born. We got my mother-in-law to stay with the baby for a couple of hours, and we laughed so hard that it hurt. Cooper didn’t even get most of the big laughs — they went to Zach Galifianakis — but he proved that he could carry a gigantic movie.
There were two Hangover sequels after that, and both of them were butt, but both of them made money. Cooper continued to show up in movies that didn’t connect — he was Face in the A-Team motion picture adaptation, for instance — but his presence meant something. He leveled up again when he played the lead in Limitless, the insanely watchable 2011 hit about the guy who takes a pill that makes you smart. He got his first Oscar nomination for David O. Russell’s Silver Linings Playbook, and then he got another one for working with Russell again on American Hustle a year later. Starting in 2014, Cooper played the voice of Rocket Racoon in the Guardians Of The Galaxy films, which means that I probably step on a Lego representation of Cooper’s character at least once every two months. He’s got those sharp little ears; it sucks. That’s not Bradley Cooper’s fault, though.
In pretty much all of those movies, Cooper’s characters were still dickheads, but he was able to hit all sorts of dickhead notes and textures. When the film called for it, he could be the most sympathetic dickhead you ever saw. Cooper was the star and the producer of Clint Eastwood’s American Sniper, which became the biggest box-office hit of 2015, at least in the US. That film and its success say fascinating things about the American psyche at work, and Cooper’s performance grounds the whole thing. For that, he was nominated for Best Actor and Best Picture, despite the one infamous scene where he had to act alongside a doll and pretend it was a real baby.
The 2018 version of A Star Is Born was going to be a Clint Eastwood film, too. Hollywood seems to come back to A Star Is Born once a generation. The iterations of that movie are all different, but they all follow the same basic arc: A famous guy falls in love with a not-famous girl, brings her to fame, and then falls apart when she eclipses him. It’s a sturdy backbone for a romantic weepie. The previous version of A Star Is Born was the Barbra Streisand/Kris Kristofferson one from 1976, and that one also sent a soundtrack song to #1. A fourth take of A Star Is Born was in development since the ’90s, and tons of different actors and pop stars were rumored to be in talk for the roles. Eventually, an Eastwood version went into pre-production, at least to the point where the Hollywood trades were running stories that Cooper and Beyoncé were in talks to star. That would’ve been something.
Eventually, Eastwood walked away from A Star Is Born, and Cooper decided that he wanted to try directing it himself. Warner Bros. had to buy the remake rights from Streisand’s notorious ex Jon Peters, who’d produced the previous version. Later on, Cooper played Peters as a preening psychopath in Paul Thomas Anderson’s Licorice Pizza. At first, Beyoncé was still supposed to be his co-star, at least up until she had to drop out because of pregnancy. Cooper considered a list of other pop stars, and the story goes that he went up to Lady Gaga after she played a cancer benefit. Gaga heard Cooper singing at a party, and she didn’t know that he had any musical inclinations whatsoever. Nobody did.
Lady Gaga radiated total theater-kid energy from the very moment that she showed up on the cultural radar, so it wasn’t a surprise that she wanted to get into acting. She was an extra on The Sopranos before she was famous, but she didn’t make the leap for a while. In 2013, she had a bit part in the intentionally cheesy sequel Machete Kills. After that, she did a few seasons of American Horror Story, and she won a Golden Globe for one of them. But Gaga was still primarily a pop star, even though she struggled in that role. Gaga scored a dizzy succession of blockbuster hits in the first few years of her career, but then she made a couple of under-performing albums in a row, going for over-the-top artifice on 2013’s Artpop and then making a big deal out of her rootsy country moves on 2016’s Joanne, which still mostly sounds like a big pop album. There was a standards record with Tony Bennett somewhere in there, too. Joanne didn’t spawn any big hits until Gaga played a pretty great Super Bowl Halftime Show in 2017, whereupon her ballad “Million Reasons” jumped up to #4. (It’s a 7.)
Gaga had an eight-year gap between #1 hits. When she landed the Star Is Born role, Gaga hadn’t been to the top of the Hot 100 since “Born This Way” in 2011. Her star was no longer being born. To get back on top, Gaga had to do something dramatic, and A Star Is Born is nothing if not dramatic. The entire idea of the 2018 Star Is Born seemed like folly — an actor directing himself for the first time, playing alongside a fading pop star who’d never really been tested as an actor. But holy shit. That movie fucking rips. You could tell that it was going to be something special as soon as the first trailer dropped. We don’t get enough clear-cut cases of movie magic at work anymore, but A Star Is Born qualifies on pretty much every level.
Bradley Cooper started shooting A Star Is Born at Coachella in 2017. Lady Gaga headlined that festival as a last-second replacement for the pregnant Beyoncé. (Gaga really made the most of Beyoncé’s pregnancy.) One of the benefits of casting a giant international pop star is the ability to shoot dramatic scenes onstage at giant festivals like Coachella, Stagecoach, and Glastonbury. The concert scenes feel real because the are real, more or less. Cooper apparently got voice, guitar, and piano lessons for a year to play Jackson Maine. For most of us, that would not be enough time to convincingly transform into a mega-successful grizzled-road-dog type, but Cooper pulled it off. He also landed on a directorial style — montages, lingering close-ups, natural light — that transformed his broad-archetype characters into people that felt tangible. It’s a supremely confident directorial debut. It still might not be as impressive as what Lady Gaga does in A Star Is Born.
Gaga’s character Ally doesn’t seem to have much in common with the real Gaga, but Gaga captures the confusion and exhilaration and nerves of singing in front of people for the first time, and she sings like a force of nature. Whenever Cooper and Gaga are onscreen, they look like they want to eat each other up. The first half-hour or so — the lead-up to the moment when Gaga sings “Shallow” in front of everyone — is a dizzy ride. Things get way sadder after that, but the feeling of that first half-hour lingers. The way the movie depicts Gaga’s sudden ascent to fame captures a feeling of fantasy becoming reality, the same grand wish fulfillment that you might find in a Disney princess cartoon. It also reminds me of American Idol — the foundational myth that you can put an everyday person up onstage turn them into an icon. It makes that stuff feel real.
Lots of famous collaborators, like Diane Warren and Julia Michaels, came in to help out on the Star Is Born songs. Cooper got Willie Nelson’s son Lukas and his band the Promise Of The Real to help record most of the tracks, many of them live, and they play Cooper’s backing band in the film. I wish I could say that I like the soundtrack as much as the movie, but I don’t. Bradley Cooper and Lady Gaga helped write most of the songs from the soundtrack, and that’s one area where Cooper did not suddenly ascend to a world-class skill level. The soundtrack has tons of boring blues-rock vamps and even-more-boring ballads, and the Gaga pop songs are dumb enough that people wondered whether Gaga was expressing her distaste for the actual pop music that she’d made for her whole career. Since then, Gaga has again proven that she does not have any distaste for actual pop music, as if anyone needed the reassurance. Those songs just weren’t that good. One Star Is Born song that I do really like, however, is “Maybe It’s Time,” the one that Jason Isbell wrote for Cooper. (Isbell doesn’t have any Hot 100 hits, but future Number Ones artist Morgan Wallen’s 2019 cover of his “Cover Me Up” peaked at #52.) Another Star Is Born song I really like is “Shallow.”
Lady Gaga wrote a bunch of her Star Is Born songs, including “Shallow,” while she was working on her Joanne album, and she did it with a bunch of the same collaborators. One of her co-writers on “Shallow” is former Number Ones artist Mark Ronson, who co-produced the track with the veteran Americana producer Ben Rice. Another co-writer is Andrew Wyatt, the Miike Snow frontman who’s been in this column for his work on Bruno Mars’ “Grenade” and “When I Was Your Man.” Ronson and Wyatt are regular collaborators; they just got a bunch more award nominations for doing the Barbie soundtrack together two years ago. There’s another co-writer, too: Anthony Rossomando, a former member of the Libertines side project Dirty Pretty Things. Bradley Cooper did not help write “Shallow,” though I guess you could argue that he helped create the circumstances that made “Shallow” possible.
When Gaga first got to working on “Shallow,” she didn’t realize that it would be a duet, or that it would play a pivotal role in the story of A Star Is Born. She thought it might be an end-credits ballad. But as the song developed, it turned into a conversation between the two characters. Cooper and Gaga didn’t record “Shallow” live, though most versions of the song have added-in crowd noise. Lukas Nelson plays guitar on “Shallow,” and the other Promise Of The Real guys also play on it. “Shallow” opens with Bradley Cooper doing his shockingly effective hangdog-belter thing over a lonely acoustic guitar. But just like his character, he’s smart enough to mostly stand aside when Lady Gaga arrives. She goes deep into the bluesy-rocker thing that she’d hinted at on previous records. When the song reaches its first chorus and Gaga ramps things up, she suddenly sounds like Ann Wilson from Heart. She’s got some great power ballads in her catalog, but I’m not sure she ever did better wailing than she does on “Shallow.”
“Shallow” has a funny structure. It keeps building and building, and Gaga gets louder and louder. Whenever the track reaches one crescendo, it seems like it should ebb back, but that doesn’t really happen. Instead, it keeps getting bigger and louder until it’s over. Lots of classic power ballads follow the same basic progression, but most of them leave room for you to take a breath. “Shallow” compresses all that into three and a half minutes, and it doesn’t need more time than that to take you on a ride. It’s hard to judge “Shallow” as a song by itself, since it’s so bound up with the imagery of the movie and the on-fire feeling of its one big scene. But maybe the best thing about “Shallow” is that it sounds like a story unto itself. Much like the movie, it gives you the spectacle of two desperate people falling in love. Even when you know things are about to go bad, it’s easy to get caught up in that.
Lots of people got caught up in it. The public first heard “Shallow” when a chunk of the song appeared in the first Star Is Born trailer. Much like the bit where Cooper just wanted to get another look at Gaga, it became a meme before people had even heard the whole track. The “Shallow” single came out in September 2018, a few weeks before the movie hit theaters. The song quickly made its way to #5 on the Hot 100, but it took a long time before it climbed higher. The movie was an instant hit. It was made for a reported $36 million, and it earned more than ten times that amount in theaters around the world. At the domestic box office, A Star Is Born was the #11 movie of 2018 — just behind Bohemian Rhapsody, just ahead of Solo: A Star Wars Story. A Star Is Born even outearned the first Venom, which came out on the same day and had a bigger opening weekend. A Star Is Born might’ve been a remake, but it served as a welcome reminder that people sometimes like to see movies about human beings rather than space-monsters — a lesson that Hollywood is re-learning with Sinners right now. The soundtrack also went double platinum, despite way too many dialog clips. I don’t know why anyone would want to hear Cooper and Gaga’s bathtub fight again, but that’s on there.
Critics rolled out the red carpet for A Star Is Born, and it got tons of award nominations. At the Grammys, “Shallow” was up for Record and Song Of The Year, though it lost both of those. The movie racked up eight Oscar nominations, including Best Picture, Actor, and Actress. (No Best Director for Bradley Cooper, though.) It probably should’ve won a bunch of them, but that was a goofball Oscar year. Green Book got Best Picture. Rami Malek got Best Actor for Bohemian Rhapsody. Olivia Colman got Best Actress for The Favourite — not a goofball win, but I still think it should’ve been Gaga. In the end, A Star Is Born only won one Oscar, for Best Original Song. That was a lay-up. It’s so rare to get a piece of music that’s actually good, that fits the Academy’s general definition of prestige, and that actually moves its film forward. “Shallow” also might’ve had the best moment of the whole telecast.
There was no announcement that Bradley Cooper and Lady Gaga would sing “Shallow” together at the Oscars, though Cooper did appear at Gaga’s Vegas residency a few weeks before the awards to give the song its first proper performance. Nobody at the Oscars even introduced Cooper and Gaga’s performance. They just walked up out of the audience together and started singing while fixing each other with stares that would melt iron girders. Cooper didn’t do his Jackson Maine voice, and he showed that he can sing out of character, too. But maybe he was in character in a different way. The show’s producers aired the full performance as one unbroken shot, with the camera slowly orbiting the two of them. Their chemistry was crazy. By the end of the song, they were curled up together on the piano bench, and they looked like you couldn’t pull them apart.
People went wild for that performance. Internet culture writers picked it apart like it was the Zapruder film. Cooper’s date to the show was his then-girlfriend, the model Irina Shayk. They had a kid together and everything, but people couldn’t stop speculating that Cooper and Gaga were deep in a torrid affair. There was no real evidence for that — just the way that they looked at each other. Cooper and Shayk did break up a few months later, though that doesn’t confirm anyone’s suspicions. The performance went mega-viral, sort of like the Jackson Maine/Ally version did in the movie, and “Shallow” finally ascended to #1 for a single week. It had nothing to do with the other tracks that were dominating the Hot 100 at the time — the moody trap-adjacent streaming songs. But when everything lined up just right, an old-school ’70s-into-’80s power-ballad rager could still triumph.
A couple of other Star Is Born singles also charted, though none of them did anywhere near as well as “Shallow.” “Always Remember Us This Way,” another Lady Gaga power ballad, peaked at #41. The not-great Cooper/Gaga duet “I’ll Never Love Again” reached #36, which means Bradley Cooper has two charting singles, even though he’s not on that second song very much. Cooper hasn’t released any more music since then. After A Star Is Born, Cooper did a few cameo-style supporting roles, voiced Rocket Racoon in a few more Marvel pictures, and played the lead in Guillermo Del Toro’s pretty-great Nightmare Alley remake. His big follow-up, as both star and director, was Maestro, the Leonard Bernstein biopic that he made for Netflix. He apparently studied conducting for years to make that one.
Maestro is a showy and impressive movie, but I can’t say it made a huge impression on me. It also had none of the zeitgeist-grabbing power of A Star Is Born. Maestro got a bunch of Oscar nominations, including Best Actor for Cooper, but it didn’t win anything. Cooper lost Best Actor to Cillian Murphy for Oppenheimer; he never stood a chance. He still has zero Oscars, despite a ton of nominations. Next up, he’s reportedly directing the divorce comedy Is This Thing On? He’s given himself a supporting role, hopefully as a dickhead, but the stars are Will Arnett and Laura Dern. I will definitely watch that. Cooper is one of the defining Hollywood leading men of his era, and it’s fun to watch him evolve into a try-hard director. In a career like that, a #1 single is just a footnote.
It’s not a footnote for Lady Gaga. A Star Is Born was such an impressive acting showcase for Gaga that her follow-up was inevitably going to disappoint. I thought she was pretty fun in Ridley Scott’s gleefully trashy House Of Gucci, which played as a competition to see which of Hollywood’s most celebrated actors could do the most ridiculous Italian accent. (Jared Leto won.) After that, she was in the flaming disaster Joker: Folie À Deux. I haven’t seen that one; the near-unanimous verdict that it sucks butts is good enough for me. I thought the first Joker was ass, and that’s the one that lots of people claimed to like. As I understand it, the sequel is a musical, but the twist is that the characters are bad at singing. Why would you hire Lady Gaga to be bad at singing? (Bradley Cooper got yet another Oscar nomination for producing the first Joker with his Hangover director Todd Phillips, but he didn’t have anything to do with the sequel. His hands are clean on that one.) The Lady Gaga movie-star experiment can get back on track as soon as she makes another great film, but she’s not quite there yet. As a pop star, however, she’s thriving. She’ll be back in this column again soon.
GRADE: 9/10
BONUS BEATS: Here’s Phoebe Bridgers and Conor Oberst’s short-lived duo Better Oblivion Community Center causing general hysteria by covering “Shallow” at a 2019 show in Brooklyn:
(Conor Oberst doesn’t have any Hot 100 hits with Bright Eyes or any of his other projects, but Phoebe Bridgers reached #57 in 2020, when she teamed up with Maggie Rogers for a Bandcamp-only cover of the Goo Goo Dolls’ “Iris.” Bridgers also reached #40 as a guest on future Number Ones artist SZA’s “Ghost In The Machine” in 2022.)
BONUS BONUS BEATS: At the SNL50 concert a few months ago, there was a fake-out bit where Lady Gaga and Andy Samberg were going to sing “Shallow” together, but Samberg sang it really badly, so they went into “Dick In A Box” instead. This led directly into a Lonely Island medley, which is right here:
(The Lonely Island’s highest-charting single is the 2010 Akon collab “I Just Had Sex,” which Bad Bunny delivered so operatically in that medley. It peaked at #30.)
The Number Ones: Twenty Chart-Topping Hits That Reveal The History Of Pop Music is out now via Hachette Books. Tell me something, girl: Are you happy in this modern world? Or do you need more? Have you considered buying a copy of my book here?
