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.
A billboard truck pulled up outside Caesar’s Palace, broadcasting its message to anyone who might’ve stumbled out of the casino at that moment, as well as the various photographers and videographers who have assembled to document this particular publicity stunt. The truck’s message was written in gleaming white, against a royal blue background: “#1 Vision Of Love.” Behind it, there was another billboard truck just like it, except this one said, “#2 Love Takes Time.” A long line of these trucks — 18 of them, to be exact — stretched on down the road. Every truck was stamped with a different Mariah Carey song that reached #1 on the Billboard Hot 100. Those trucks, all lined up, were there to announce Number 1 To Infinity, a new Mariah Carey concert residency at Caesar’s, and to remind the world of the star’s near-unprecedented level of chart success. But something was missing.
Those trucks all arrived outside Caesar’s Palace in May 2015. At that moment, Mariah Carey wasn’t really a factor on the Billboard Hot 100 anymore, but her legacy was undeniable. Carey’s 18 chart-toppers spanned 18 years, from 1990’s “Vision Of Love” to 2008’s “Touch My Body.” Carey went through tons of different aesthetic periods in that 18-year stretch. She had imperial stretches, flop eras, triumphant comebacks. The evening that the trucks pulled up, she had the longest-running #1 hit of all time — “One Sweet Day,” the Boyz II Men collaboration that held down the top spot for 16 weeks between 1995 and 1996. She had more #1 hits than anyone other than the Beatles. Those 18 chart-toppers were all collected on a career-spanning compilation, also called #1 To Infinity. “Infinity,” the bonus track on that compilation, peaked at #82 — one more sign that Mariah Carey couldn’t command the Hot 100 at will anymore.
Outside of Caesar’s Palace, a classic pink convertible followed those 18 trucks. When it pulled up to the casino entrance, Mariah Carey herself stepped out. A bunch of little kids did some choreographed dancing, as fans surrounded the sparkly-gowned singer. Fake Roman gladiators carried her into the casino as she lounged on a red velvet throne. The gaudiness of that display was perfect, and it must’ve felt like a fitting career victory lap at the time. But Mariah Carey wasn’t done with the #1 spot. She had another hit hiding in plain sight, and that song would come to eclipse all of her others, to the point that it now threatens to overshadow a legendary career.
When the trucks pulled up, that final hit had finally started to make regular appearances on the Hot 100, a chart where it didn’t appear when Carey first released the song in 1994. After Carey’s Caesar’s Palace residency ended and her next one began, that song finally ascended to the top of the Hot 100, giving Carey her 19th chart-topper and putting her just one behind the Beatles on the all-time list. That song then returned to the #1 spot every year, adding a few more weeks to its total. As I write this column, the song has racked up more weeks at #1 than “One Sweet Day” before it. Barring a Billboard rule change, it’s practically inevitable that this single will soon break the all-time longevity record, once again making Mariah Carey the artist with the longest-reigning #1 hit in history.
The song in question is “All I Want For Christmas Is You,” the only true holiday standard to emerge since the years after World War II. Thanks to Billboard rule changes and other headwinds of history, “All I Want For Christmas Is You” finally reached #1 a quarter-century after its release. For all we know, it’ll continue to dominate the chart every December for another quarter-century after that. At least for a couple of months a year, it’s a forever song. It’s ridiculous for me to write a column about this particular song in July, and it’s ridiculous for you to read it. But Mariah Carey wrote and recorded “All I Want For Christmas Is You” in August, so we’re all just going to have to be ridiculous here. An achievement of this magnitude demands ridiculousness. Even if you don’t love the song, even if you never want to hear it again, you must respect its omnipresence.
Every year, Mariah Carey earns a few million more dollars thanks to “All I Want For Christmas Is You.” Given all the terrible ways that people earn baffling passive incomes, this is about the nicest way she could’ve done it — by writing and recording a song that will always evoke the glow of wintertime togetherness for countless people around the planet. She deserves whatever riches this song brings her. Give this lady another billboard truck.
Mariah Carey did not want to make a Christmas album in 1994. She was young. Her career was just starting off. She had big ideas about where she wanted things to go, and those ideas didn’t necessarily align with anything as uncool or old-fashioned as a Christmas record. She was already three LPs into her career, and eight of her singles had already topped the Hot 100, but she’d only just celebrated her 25th birthday. Well, she’d celebrated a birthday. Even then, she didn’t like to talk about her age, or for that matter to acknowledge the passage of time in any way. In any case, her intentions didn’t matter. Tommy Mottola, the record exec who had signed and then married Carey, was still in control of her career. Mottola decreed that Carey would make a Christmas album, so that’s what she did. Years later, she told The New York Times, “I’m not one to be giving all sorts of credit to record company executives, but I do think it turned out to be a brilliant business move.”
Merry Christmas, Mariah Carey’s first album of holiday music, came out in October 1994, a little more than a year after she released her Music Box LP. Nobody really treated the album like a big deal, and Billboard only announced its existence a month before its release. Merry Christmas is mostly just Mariah Carey singing the holiday classics — actual religious songs like “Silent Night” and silly uptempo fare like “Santa Claus Is Comin’ To Town.” Unlike so many of her ’90s R&B contemporaries, Carey didn’t grow up singing in church, but she came to imitate gospel inflections by studying the pop records she loved. On some of the tracks from Merry Christmas, she went back to the source, working with gospel-trained backup singers and giving her own convincing rendition of some genre hallmarks. Along the way, Carey and her regular collaborator Walter Afanasieff came up with three brand-new originals, and one of them was “All I Want For Christmas Is You.”
Even when it was new, “All I Want For Christmas Is You” was a nostalgic song. When they wrote and recorded it, Carey and Afanasieff called back directly to the bouncy, joyous holiday songs that Phil Spector produced in the early ’60s, the last time that anyone was really recording holiday standards. That means the sound was more than 30 years old — older than Carey herself. Spector himself wasn’t working at the time, but he was alive and not yet in prison for murder. The way Carey tells it, she was sitting at her Casio keyboard when the melody and the opening lyrics came to her. She’s always claimed that the song was mostly her creation and downplayed Afanasieff’s contributions, though Afanasieff is credited as her co-writer and co-producer. In any case, nobody’s too mad about those attributions because everyone continues to make too much money off of the song. In 2019, Afanasieff told the Times, “I can say that my ex-wives, my children, and my grandchildren are enjoying a lot of nice things because of that song.”
People weren’t really trying to recapture the classic Phil Spector sound in the ’90s, and the crazy thing about “All I Want For Christmas Is You” is that Mariah Carey and Walter Afanasieff actually accomplished it. The song has the direct, sunny simplicity of something like Darlene Love’s eternal classic “Christmas (Baby Please Come Home),” one of the songs that Carey covered on Merry Christmas. (“Christmas (Baby Please Come Home)” came out in 1963, and it’s another track that didn’t reach the Hot 100 when it first came out and made its chart impact much later. At this point, it has peaked at #15, and I wouldn’t be shocked if it gets higher some day.) Like “Christmas (Baby Please Come Home)” and about a million other songs, “All I Want For Christmas Is You” is all about longing for another person during the holidays. But where the ache of that longing is a big part of the Darlene Love song, “All I Want For Christmas Is You” is all explosive joy — the type of feeling that you broadcast when you don’t want to let the longing overwhelm you.
The way that Mariah Carey tells it, her own longing was baked into “All I Want For Christmas Is You.” Carey’s childhood Christmases were not great times. In her memoir, she writes, “I always wanted Christmas to be perfect, and I always looked forward to the holidays, but I had this incredibly dysfunctional family that would ruin it every year. I was like, ‘When I grow up, I am never going to let that happen. I am going to make Christmas perfect every year.'” That’s the attitude that she brought to “All I Want For Christmas Is You.” I think that narrative is a little pat and self-serving, but there’s something convincing about it, too. Maybe you can only make a song like “All I Want For Christmas Is You” if you’re driven by that kind of need to reshape your own experiences, to evoke a feeling that you didn’t know when you were a kid.
I’ve seen some writers claiming that “All I Want For Christmas Is You” is layered, even subversive, because it’s about not wanting consumer goods. If you really think that, I would like to direct you to every other popular entertainment about Christmas in the history of American culture. That is always the message. We have somehow built a consumer economy around this one time of year when the consumer economy is supposed to be beside the point. Countless products are premised upon the idea that products aren’t the point of the holiday. It’s not clever to point the contradiction out. This is just what a Christmas song is supposed to do — to bulldoze beyond cynicism and to insist upon its own virtuous devotion. Mariah Carey deserves credit for cutting that message down to its simplest elements: “Make my wish come true/ All I want for Christmas is you.” All the other lyrics, the ones about toys and Christmas trees and Santa, are just there for color, for scene-setting. The song is just about needing to be with one particular person, the same impulse that drives the entire history of popular music.
Mariah Carey and Walter Afanasieff captured the Phil Spector sound and feeling without access to Spector’s army of brilliant session musicians. In fact, virtually the entire song is just Afanasieff on his own state-of-the-art 1994 computer. Session ace Dann Huff played guitar on “All I Want For Christmas Is You,” and the background vocals come from a trio of gospel singers that included the legendary Kelly Price. (Price has been in this column for singing on Carey’s “Always Be My Baby” and Biggie Smalls’ “Mo Money Mo Problems.” Her highest-charting single as lead artist is the 1998 R. Kelly/Ronald Isley collab “Friend Of Mine (Remix),” which peaked at #12, and she’s a featured guest on Whitney Houston’s “Heartbreak Hotel,” which reached #2 that same year. It’s an 8.) Carey doubles her voice on “All I Want For Christmas Is You,” but it’s important that she doesn’t sing all her backup parts, the way she does on so many of her other hits. Those backup singers help make the song earthier, less dreamy, more immediate.
Other than those contributions, most of the “All I Want For Christmas Is You” backing track — the tinkly music-box chimes, the old-time rock ‘n’ roll piano runs, the church bells and sleigh bells — are just Walter Afanasieff’s programming. Carey and Afanasieff tried recording the song with a live band, but they didn’t like the way it turned out. Instead, the final version is all synthetic, and you can tell. It works in the song’s favor — rich melodic layers rendered in cheap, ultra-dated electronic form, all there to back up Carey’s insanely flexible and powerful voice. Maybe Christmas music is supposed to be sort of cheap. Maybe it’s part of the magic — the songs that come out of all-day sessions marathon sessions and then become part of our shared cultural experience for decades. Supposedly, it only took Carey and Afanasieff 15 minutes to write “All I Want For Christmas Is You.” That’s perfect. That’s how it’s supposed to go. Nobody overthought anything.
Couldn’t be me. I overthink the shit out of every single entry in this column. It’s my job. So to overthink things a little further: The joy conveyed on “All I Want For Christmas Is You” is so exuberant, so all-consuming, that it seems cartoonish, inhuman. That’s what’s great about it. On paper, it’s a song about yearning. Merely by stating that she wants something, the narrator implies that she does not already have it. But Mariah Carey yawps out the song with feverish self-assurance, as if she’s drunk on the knowledge that she’s already getting all she wants for Christmas. It’s not necessarily a sexual thing, though it does seem to be romantic. (She does talk about her “baby,” so I guess it could be a song for a child, or a pet? But that’s reaching.) When she goes into those delirious, near-wordless runs, she takes that feeling beyond language, into sheer abstraction. That persistent endorphin-rush attack is the reason that it’s fun to hear mash-ups like this one, the ones that combine “All I Want For Christmas” with a song as cartoonishly sad as Radiohead’s “Creep.” It’s the highs and lows of the human experience, all in one package. (“Creep” is Radiohead’s highest-charting Hot 100 hit, and it peaked at #34 in 1993.)
The composer and onetime comments-section staple Vivek Maddala once wrote a Stereogum column breaking down all the music theory behind “All I Want For Christmas Is You,” but I am nowhere near sophisticated enough to understand it. “All I Want For Christmas Is You” nods to things like The Nutcracker, as well as the ’60s pop classics that it evokes, but its magic isn’t built on reference. I can’t remember the first time I heard “All I Want For Christmas Is You” because the song simply sounds eternal. Even in 1994, it felt like it had been around forever.
Columbia never released a commercial single version of “All I Want For Christmas Is You” in the US, so the song didn’t come near the Hot 100 for years. This was the way that record labels did business in the ’90s. Mariah Carey did release singles, and those singles generally did huge chart numbers. But there was no incentive to drop an “All I Want For Christmas Is You” single. At the time, holiday songs just didn’t do well on the Hot 100. For the first few decades of the Hot 100, only one Christmas song went all the way to the top: the Chipmunks and David Seville’s 1958 novelty “The Chipmunk Song (Christmas Don’t Be Late).” Singles took a while to climb the chart, and by the time a Christmas song really got going, Christmas would be over. “All I Want For Christmas” did make it to #12 on the Radio Songs chart, a pretty good indication of how far it might’ve gone on the Hot 100. But Columbia’s main objective was to get people to buy the Merry Christmas CD, and they were hugely successful at that. By the end of 1994, Merry Christmas was triple platinum. It’s now platinum nine times over.
Mariah Carey didn’t have to do much to promote Merry Christmas when it first arrived. She played one show at a church in New York, and she made a low-budget “All I Want For Christmas Is You” video where she ran around in the snow. It looks like it’s shot on Super 8, and Tommy Mottola plays Santa. I was 15 years old when “All I Want For Christmas Is You” came out, and I wasn’t paying any attention to Christmas music. I’m sure I heard “All I Want For Christmas Is You” back then and that I just didn’t think about the song at all. But “All I Want For Christmas Is You” stuck around, to the point where I can now superimpose the track on Christmas memories from a time when the song didn’t exist. That’s what happens when you write a new song that sounds like it’s been around forever. People can convince themselves that it’s eternal.
The song’s familiarity is key to its power. It starts out soft and slow, with Mariah Carey wailing out her melismatic runs tenderly and soulfully. Then the sparkling pianos and sleigh bells and programmed drum-hits come in, and everything explodes. From that point on, Carey belts out the whole song like she’s in some euphoric fugue state. There’s so much technique in the way that Carey sings — so many melodic dips and dives, so many impossible high notes — but she makes it all sound effortless and instinctive. You can read all sorts of subtext into the song’s unfulfilled desires, but Carey sings it as if she’s already got her baby with her and she’s never going to see another dark day again in her life. She really drives everything home in the climactic moments where she whoops out the word “baby!” and then again on the fadeout, when all of her ad-libs sound like fireworks going off. It’s hard to even write about a song as instantly familiar and comforting as this. It just sounds like Christmas, and I love Christmas.
There was never some magical moment when I realized that “All I Want For You” had become a classic Christmas song. It just kept coming back every year. Mariah Carey must’ve known, since she kept returning to the song and tweaking it over the years. In 2000, for instance, she enlisted her regular collaborator Jermaine Dupri to do a So So Def remix, welding the track to an Afrika Bambaataa sample and adding in a verse from kiddie-rap sensation Lil Bow Wow. (Bow Wow’s highest-charting single, the 2005 Ciara collab “Like You,” peaked at #3. It’s a 3.) She recorded a “festive” version of the song for her second holiday album, 2010’s Merry Christmas II You. In 2011, past and future Number Ones artist Justin Bieber recorded a cover of “All I Want For Christmas Is You” as a duet with Carey, and that one, the “SuperFestive!” version, peaked at #86. Carey turned “All I Want For Christmas Is You” into a children’s book in 2015 and a straight-to-DVD animated movie in 2017. The song was a big moneymaker before it finally arrived on the Hot 100 in a real way.
“All I Want For Christmas Is You” made its first Hot 100 appearance just after Christmas 1999, when Billboard started letting album tracks onto the Hot 100 as long as they got enough radio play; that was enough to bring the song to #83. But because of the rules about recurrent singles, iTunes downloads never pushed the song any higher on the charts. That changed when Mariah Carey’s rival-turned-collaborator Whitney Houston passed away in 2012. The sudden boom of interest in her back catalog caused Billboard to change that recurrent rule. As a result, the big chart was suddenly open to Christmas songs, which had previously been segregated off on the Holiday Songs chart, which “All I Want For Christmas Is You” always dominated. Thanks in part to a viral Tonight Show classroom-instrument performance, “All I Want For Christmas Is You” reached a new high of #29 that year. (Shout out to my guy Chris Molanphy’s Slate column on “All I Want For Christmas Is You,” which maps out the timeline beautifully.)
Every year thereafter, “All I Want For Christmas Is You” seemed to climb a little higher on the Hot 100. In 2018, the song finally broke into the top 10 and went all the way to #3, with a bunch of other, older Christmas standards in tow. At that point, it was practically inevitable that “All I Want For Christmas Is You” would eventually elbow its way to the top, and that’s exactly what happened in 2019. Mariah Carey could practically smell that 19th #1 hit, so the song got a grand marketing campaign. On the morning of November 1, at 3AM, Carey posted a video of herself falling asleep in a Tina Turner wig just before midnight. When the clock strikes 12, we hear the music-box chimes of “All I Want For Christmas Is You,” and Carey, now magically wearing Christmas pajamas, jumps on her phone to tell Santa Claus that “It’s tiiiiime!” Since then, she’s made an annual tradition of the “It’s time!” video, and they’ve become increasingly elaborate.
In 2019, Mariah Carey made a glitzy new video for “All I Want For Christmas Is You” with director Joseph Kahn, doing a whole storyline where a little kid sees a Macy’s window display of Carey and imagines it coming to life and whisking her away to a Christmas wonderland. Then there was another video, where a parade of celebrities lip-synced the song. Carey sang the song on James Corden’s Late Late Show, one of the many times she’s done it on TV over the years. She released physical singles on CD and cassette. She did Christmas shows and press interviews. All of this was a naked attempt to push the song up the charts, and nobody even seemed to mind. The feelgood story of a 25-year-old classic finally reaching #1 outweighed any craven hypercapitalism, and craven hypercapitalism has always been part the Mariah Carey proposition anyway.
The campaign worked. “All I Want For Christmas” finally went all the way to #1, giving Carey the thing that she obviously really wanted for Christmas. Those efforts rebranded Carey as the Queen Of Christmas, a phrase that she has tried and failed to trademark. A different legal battle broke Carey’s way. Shortly before she released her own “All I Want For Christmas Is You,” a group called Vince Vance & The Valiants released a different song, a minor country hit with the same title and concept. That song’s writers tried to sue Carey, and their lawsuit has been thrown out twice. Nobody is getting Mariah Carey’s money.
Since 2019, “All I Want For Christmas Is You” has returned to #1 every holiday season. Its persistence has lost its novelty, and it has become tiresome. Mariah Carey still promotes the single every year, and she went on an entire Christmas arena tour last year. But it’s not like she has to do anything. The song just keeps coming back on its own. If anything, it’s more inescapable now than it was in the ’90s, when it was new. These days, you can pretty much block out the entire month of December, since that’s when Christmas songs — most of which are way older than “All I Want For Christmas Is You” — utterly dominate the entire Hot 100, crowding out anything new. Eventually, this column will look at a much older Christmas song that temporarily pushed Carey’s classic out of the dominant spot. But “All I Want For Christmas Is You” reclaimed its throne, and nothing else has seriously challenged its supremacy.
In 2021, the third year of “All I Want For Christmas Is You” at #1, my Stereogum colleague Chris DeVille wrote a column about the question of whether Mariah Carey’s song would be the final Christmas standard. That question is still open, but a couple of songs released this century have finally emerged as leading contenders. This past year, the same songs crowded up the top 10 as always — “Jingle Bell Rock,” “Last Christmas,” “Have A Holly Jolly Christmas.” But a couple of newer ones finally snuck their way into the top 10. Ariana Grande’s “Santa Tell Me,” from 2014, reached #5, while Kelly Clarkson’s “Underneath The Tree,” from 2013, made it to #9. (They’re both 9s.) Tellingly, these are both big-voiced pop singers doing bright, uptempo Christmas numbers that evoke the old Phil Spector aesthetic. Where Mariah Carey echoed that sound with “All I Want For Christmas Is You,” both Ariana Grande and Kelly Clarkson are doing their best to echo Mariah Carey. If you’re trying to make a big Christmas song today, Carey is now the blueprint. Even then, the songs have to stick around for a decade before they get a shot on the big chart.
At this point, “All I Want For Christmas Is You” is its own self-sustaining nostalgia machine. In 1994, the song called back to the early ’60s. When you hear it today, it calls back to 1994 and to every Christmas since then. It will keep doing the same thing until everyone gets sick of the song, and even that might not be enough. Today, “All I Want For Christmas Is You” is platinum 16 times over. On Spotify, it has well over two billion streams — nearly three times as many as “We Belong Together,” Carey’s #2 Spotify hit. The renewed chart success of “All I Want For Christmas Is You” has not extended to the rest of Carey’s catalog or to her newer songs. When her hyped-up new single “Type Dangerous” came out last month, it debuted at #95 and then fell off the Hot 100 immediately. Over the past few years, every new Mariah Carey single has suffered a similar fate. But that ultimately doesn’t matter. She’s the Queen Of Christmas. If some other Mariah Carey song, new or old, wins the TikTok lottery and blows up — always a distinct possibility — she will catch the Beatles.
I’m sick of “All I Want For Christmas Is You” now. That’s partly a function of what I do for a living. Every year, I get excited about a whole lot of new music, and then this song from my youth returns to commercially disembowel every artist who was born after the song came out. This says nothing good about the ongoing vitality of popular music, which is sort of my whole deal. But that’s not Mariah Carey’s fault. If anything, she did her job too well. She made a Christmas song so big and bright and boisterous that nobody else can outdo her. That’s a fitting capstone on an absolutely remarkable pop career, the kind of run that we will never see again.
“All I Want For Christmas Is You” has another long-tail effect that I haven’t mentioned yet. For the past two years, Mariah Carey has been nominated for the Rock And Roll Hall Of Fame, an institution that had never previously recognized her. Both times, she didn’t make it in. Hall Of Fame voters decided that it had to be Bad Company’s year instead. Now: I do not believe in the Rock And Roll Hall Of Fame. I think this fucking thing shouldn’t exist, that its attempt to canonize and enshroud past generations’ makers of youthquakes retroactively saps their accomplishments of any vitality that they might’ve once had. But if we’re going to do this fucking Hall Of Fame thing at all, then you would think history’s most successful non-Beatle singles artist would deserve a look. At the most basic possible level, “All I Want For Christmas Is You” is a rock ‘n’ roll song. It’s so rock ‘n’ roll that it might as well have a honking saxophone solo. Depending on how you look at things, it might be the most popular rock ‘n’ roll song of all time.
GRADE: 10/10
BONUS BEATS: One of the reasons that “All I Want For Christmas” endured over the years is the song’s use in Love Actually, a corny British ensemble-cast rom-com from 2003 that has itself become a holiday perennial. In a climactic scene, the child actress Olivia Olson sings the song at an implausibly flashy school assembly before a curtain raises to reveal Hugh Grant making out with Martine McCutcheon. Here’s that scene:
BONUS BONUS BEATS: About a billion people have recorded covers of “All I Want For Christmas Is You” over the years, and that’s also helped keep the song in people’s brains. Here, for instance, is the version that My Chemical Romance recorded for a 2004 KROQ compilation:
(My Chemical Romance’s highest-charting single, 2006’s “Welcome To The Black Parade,” peaked at #9. It’s a 9.)
BONUS BONUS BONUS BEATS: Here’s the twee, cutesy version of “All I Want For Christmas Is You” that She & Him released in 2016:
BONUS BONUS BONUS BONUS BEATS: Here’s RXKNephew and Chris Dillinger rapping over the “All I Want For Christmas Is You” instrumental on the perfectly deranged 2023 track “Happy Holidays”:
BONUS BONUS BONUS BONUS BONUS BEATS: It has recently come to my attention that IDLES, the British post-punk band, habitually lead fans in near-atonal “All I Want For Christmas Is You” singalongs at their shows all year round. I just saw IDLES for the first time at Primavera — fun set — but they didn’t do that one there. I was not disappointed. It was a music festival in June; it would’ve been weird. Presumably, this is only a headlining-gig proposition. Here’s one such spectacle, from a Seattle show last year:
The Number Ones: Twenty Chart-Topping Hits That Reveal The History Of Pop Music is out now via Hachette Books. It’s all you want for Christmas, or for Labor Day or whatever. Buy it here.
