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.
Selena Gomez is not a singer. I mean, she sings. She sings a lot. Gomez’s singing career stretches back 17 years — more than half of her life. By some metrics, she’s among the most successful singers of her generation. She’s got a generous handful of top-10 hits, and she’s got her name on a few serious bangers. She gets some criticism for her breathy, whispery vocal tone, but she knows how to communicate an emotion and deliver a hook, which is really all that a pop star has to do. If you look at Gomez’s Wikipedia page, “singer” is the second of her five listed careers, right after “actress.” When I say that Selena Gomez is not a singer, I don’t really mean that as criticism. As a singer, Gomez is completely fine. Singing just isn’t the main thing that she does.
There is no main thing that Selena Gomez does. She is a celebrity, which is not the kind of career path that Wikipedia really recognizes. She’s a professionally charming human being. In the realm of professionally charming human beings, you don’t get much bigger than Gomez. She has found ways to spread her charm across tons of different media and to make a vast fortune off of it. On Instagram, Gomez is the most-followed woman in the world; only Lionel Messi, Cristiano Ronaldo, and Instagram itself have more followers. People across the planet are deeply invested in Gomez’s personal narrative — her health struggles, her relationship issues, her successes, her failures. She is a gigantic global brand unto herself, and music is somewhat incidental to that brand.
By the time she scored her only #1 hit in the waning days of 2019, Selena Gomez was 27 years old, and she’d been massively famous for more than a decade — first in the world of Disney-kid culture and then in larger cross-generational realms. She had her devoted core of scary, intense fans, like every other massively famous person of her generation, and then she had a much larger group of people who had generally positive feelings about her. I was one of those people, and I still am. Selena Gomez seems cool. She does good work. I can’t say that she’s a big part of my life, but I like having her around.
“Lose You To Love Me,” Gomez’s one Hot 100 chart-topper, depends heavily on her personal narrative. It’s a therapy-speak power ballad, a nebulously empowering number about suffering through a breakup and coming out stronger and more fulfilled on the other side. Lots of pop songs work like that, but the really good ones escape the boundaries of their context. You might know that a song is a commentary on the singer’s life, but the song hopefully transcends its backstory and becomes the sort of thing that you can use for your own purposes. I’m sure that many people have found something bigger in “Lose You To Love Me,” but I never have. It’s not one of the really good pop songs. It’s just there.
When I say that Selena Gomez is not a singer, one of the things I mean is that she has no real signature style, no sound. You wouldn’t hear someone else’s single and think, “Hmm, that person seems to be going for a Selena Gomez sort of thing.” There is no Selena Gomez sort of thing. (Earlier this year, Benny Blanco said that Gomez “kind of created this whole whisper-pop melancholy type of thing.” I get why he made that claim, and I think it’s nice that he said it, but I disagree.) Gomez is a being of the song machine, and her sound moves to fit the mold her her collaborators and the style of the moment in which she’s working. Sometimes, that leads to very cool things. She’s got good taste and presence. I don’t think she’s got any classic songs, but she’s got plenty that I’d be happy to hear at any given moment. “Lose You To Love Me” happened to come out at a time when the pop audience wanted big, soul-baring ballads about personal growth. That’s not my favorite mode, and it doesn’t suit Gomez’s skill set especially well, but it’s what finally pushed her over the top. As someone who has vaguely positive feelings toward Selena Gomez, I’m happy for her. Too bad the song is nothing special.
Selena Gomez has had many famous collaborators over the years, and the first of them was a kindly purple felt dinosaur. Gomez was 10 years old when she was cast on Barney & Friends, a hugely successful television franchise that mostly exists, at least in my experience, as something for older siblings to bitterly mock. Selena Marie Gomez comes from the Dallas suburb of Grand Prairie. (When she was born, Sir Mix-A-Lot’s “Baby Got Back” was the #1 song in America.) Gomez’s Italian-American mother, who was 16 when she was born, was a part-time actress in local commercials and stage productions. I cannot figure out what her Mexican-American father did for a living. Gomez’s parents named her after Selena Quintanilla, the great Tejano singer who was murdered three years after Gomez was born. (That Selena’s only Hot 100 hit, 1995’s “Dreaming Of You,” peaked at #22.)
Gomez’s parents divorced when she was a small child, and she was mostly homeschooled as a kid. She got interested in acting through her mother, and she first auditioned for Barney in 1999, when she was seven. One of the other girls at that audition was Demi Lovato, another person who would find grown-up pop stardom after coming up through the Disney system. Gomez and Lovato have been friends ever since. (Lovato’s highest-charting single, 2017’s “Sorry Not Sorry,” peaked at #6. It’s a 6.) Neither of them got cast on Barney at first, but the show was produced in Dallas, so Gomez kept coming back. In 2002, Gomez was cast as a Barney friend named Gianna, and she kept that role for two years. The Barney gig involved singing and acting, and it taught Gomez how to exist on camera. I only made it about 30 seconds into this video of Selena Gomez Barney highlights, but that’s not really a reflection of her acting chops. Barney kids only ever come off as Barney kids, and I never really need to watch another minute of Barney in my life.
After Selena Gomez aged out of her Barney gig, she got small roles in a Spy Kids sequel and a Walker: Texas Ranger TV movie. In 2006, she started showing up in guest roles on Disney sitcoms, and she got a whole arc on Hannah Montana in 2007. Later that year, Gomez locked down the lead role of the Disney show Wizards Of Waverly Place, a sitcom about a family of sorcerers. I was an adult man with no children when all of this was happening, so I only have the dimmest general awareness of the whole phenomenon, but it was a phenomenon. Wizards Of Waverly Place won Emmys and pulled big ratings, and Disney stamped Gomez’s face on a whole lot of merchandise. Gomez sang the pretty-catchy theme song, and she quickly joined the company’s Hollywood Records/Radio Disney ecosystem.
While Selena Gomez was on Wizards Of Waverly Place, she also starred in the 2008 straight-to-DVD sequel Another Princess Story. As a singer, her first proper single was “Tell Me Something I Don’t Know,” a song from that soundtrack. It was also her first Hot 100 hit; it peaked at #58. A year later, she and her old friend Demi Lovato made it to #82 with “One And The Same,” a song from a Disney Channel movie called Princess Protection Program. But the big development in that moment was the formation of a group called Selena Gomez & The Scene. Gomez didn’t like the idea of being a solo artist. She wanted to be in a band, so Disney just pretty much formed a band around her. It didn’t make much difference. Selena Gomez & The Scene made the same kind of ultra-glossy guitar-crunch pop as all the other Disney stars of her era. Back then, every mega-famous person who came out of the Disney system had to get a start like that.
Selena Gomez & The Scene’s debut album Kiss & Tell came out in 2009 and went platinum 14 years later. Unlike fellow Disney star Miley Cyrus, Gomez wasn’t scoring big crossover hits when she was still in that early career moment. “Naturally,” the biggest hit from Kiss & Tell, peaked at #29. In the next two years, Gomez and her group cranked out another two albums, and their singles didn’t generally do much better than that. The group’s music progressed in a more EDM-adjacent direction during that stretch, and they had their greatest chart success right before breaking up. Their highest-charting single is “Who Says,” from their final LP When The Sun Goes Down, which peaked at #21. These days, their most-loved track is the appealingly ridiculous “Love You Like A Love Song,” which came out on the same album and peaked at #22. It’s a completely generic take on the dance-pop of 2011, but it’s a pretty good one. That’s pretty much the Selena Gomez proposition. None of her music is going to be especially distinct, but it’s often just a little bit better than it has to be.
By the time she dropped “Love You Like A Love Song,” Selena Gomez was dating Justin Bieber, someone who’s been in this column a bunch of times and who will be back many more. Gomez and Bieber were a tempestuous off-and-on couple for years, and a lot of his most famous songs seem to be about her. Around the same time, Gomez became Taylor Swift’s most visible friend. She existed in the pop-star world without quite reaching pop-star status herself. In 2012, Gomez started to finally move outside the Disney universe. The Scene broke up. Wizards Of Waverly Place finished its run. At the same time, Gomez starred in Harmony Korine’s utterly deranged cult hit Spring Breakers. She’s the good girl of the movie, and she disappears before things truly get nuts, electing not to serve as one of the pink ski-masked bikini girls in the shootout at Gucci Mane’s drug-kingpin lair. Still, she sent a clear signal that she was done with her child-star days. That same year, though, Gomez also played Dracula’s daughter in the animated movie Hotel Transylvania, a huge hit that spawned a franchise. Even when she was doing her dramatically sexy grown-up statement thing, she didn’t quite abandon her roots as a children’s entertainer.
A couple of months after Spring Breakers hit theaters, Selena Gomez released “Come And Get It,” her first single after the end of the Scene. It’s a track that Rihanna rejected, and it sounds like a track that Rihanna rejected. But this was the peak Rihanna moment, so even her obvious rejects could take off. “Come And Get It” became Gomez’s first proper crossover hit, climbing all the way to #6. (It’s a 4.) Her solo debut Stars Dance didn’t have any other proper hits, and I don’t remember anyone taking it the slightest bit seriously. But the album still debuted at #1 and eventually went gold. Partway through the tour behind the album, Gomez canceled her remaining dates and checked into a treatment center. Soon afterward, she revealed that she had lupus. The disease would have a huge impact on her life in the years ahead.
After the lupus diagnosis, Selena Gomez kept taking acting roles, though none of them resonated much, other than maybe her quick cameo as herself in The Big Short. Gomez also finished up her contractual obligations to Disney’s Hollywood label, ending things with a 2014 greatest-hits album and reaching #6 with “The Heart Wants What It Wants,” a song that could be read as a meta-commentary on her relationship with Justin Bieber. (It’s a 5.) Gomez signed a new deal with Interscope, and she made high-profile guest appearances on tracks from German DJ Zedd and former Number Ones artist Charlie Puth. In summer 2015, Gomez released the silky, minimal A$AP Rocky collab “Good For You,” the song where she really came into her own as a pop star.
If there is such a thing as a Selena Gomez sound, then it’s what she established on “Good For You” — the melancholy whisper-pop thing that Benny Blanco identified. On that track, Gomez stops trying to sing like an ultra-conventional pop star, instead, going for a sleepy, husky murmur that suits her natural range nicely. Gomez’s approach on “Good For You” was a glossed-up take in the intimate, personal pop music that people like Lorde and Lana Del Rey were making around the same time, which is why I’m pushing back on the idea that she invented it. But a record like “Good For You” did show how that sound still worked when it went through the song-machine filter. On “Good For You,” two of Gomez’s co-writers were Julia Michaels and Justin Tranter, the hitmaking songwriters who have already been in this column for their work on Justin Bieber’s “Sorry,” a song that seems to be about Gomez. Those two quickly became Gomez’s main collaborators, and the three of them had a lot of success working together. (“Good For You” peaked at #5; it’s an 8.)
Revival, Selena Gomez’s first album for Interscope, spawned a few more hits after “Good For You.” Gomez followed that single with “Same Old Love,” which was largely written by former Number Ones artist Charli XCX and which sounds like it. You can make fun of Gomez for swagger-jacking Charli if you want, but Charli is still singing about going Spring Breakers while Gomez was an actual Spring Breaker. (“Same Old Love” peaked at #5. It’s a 7.) After that, Gomez reached #7 with “Hands To Myself,” another track that she co-wrote with Julia Michaels and Justin Tranter. Max Martin co-produced that track with two of his proteges, the Swedish pop functionaries Mattias Per Larsson and Robin Lennart Fredriksson, known by the punny professional name Mattman & Robin. Their work on “Hands To Myself” is almost comically minimal, just bips and boops, and it makes for a pretty fun and inventive pop song. (It’s another 7.)
Gomez launched a global arena tour behind Revival, but she once again had to cancel it, this time because her lupus was causing her serious mental health problems. As she went public with her struggles, Gomez became a commendable public health advocate. Gomez finally broke up with Justin Bieber around the same time, and she had a high-profile but short-lived fling with the Weeknd, another artist who’s been in this column a bunch of times and who will be back plenty more. She kept working, too. In 2017, Gomez scored another big hit when she appeared on the Norwegian DJ Kygo’s dance-folk jam “It Ain’t Me,” which reached #10. (It’s an 8.) She also released “Bad Liar,” probably my favorite song of hers. “Bad Liar” is obvious rock-critic bait, since it’s built on a sample of the Talking Heads’ “Psycho Killer,” but I swear the song is great even outside of that. “Bad Liar” is a fleeting indication that Gomez could be a glorious pop weirdo if she wanted, but she hasn’t really made another song like that since then. In any case, “Bad Liar” wasn’t a huge hit, so it didn’t point to some new career direction for Gomez. (The song peaked at #20, which is at least a lot better than the Talking Heads did when “Psycho Killer” peaked at #92 in 1977.)
For a while, this was pretty much how things went for Selena Gomez. She was ultra-mega famous, and she spent a lot of her time around other people who were ultra-mega famous. She did some good work in a bunch of different fields. Some of that work was successful, as when Gomez was a producer on the Netflix teen-drama hit Thirteen Reasons Why. Some were less successful, as when she starred in A Rainy Day In New York, a late-period Woody Allen film that only barely got a release after people figured out that it wasn’t cool to keep letting Woody Allen make movies. As for the pop-star side of her career, Gomez went more than four years between albums. She kept guesting on other people’s tracks, and some of those tracks, like the DJ Snake Latin dance-pop posse cut “Taki Taki,” were quite successful. (That one peaked at #11, and it kicks ass.) Gomez released singles of her own, too, and some of them also did pretty well. But she seemed to just be throwing stuff at the wall. There wasn’t any grander vision, at least until “Lose You To Love Me.”
“Lose You To Love Me” is a song built on Selena Gomez’s public narrative. Shortly after she and Justin Bieber broke up for the last time, Bieber married the model Hailey Baldwin. “Lose You To Love Me” is all about looking back on a past relationship and realizing that you were unhappy and that you’re better off on your own. Gomez co-wrote the song with her longtime collaborators Julia Michaels and Justin Tranter, and it’s kind of funny that those guys reached #1 with a Bieber song about Gomez and with a Gomez song about Bieber. The lyrics are pretty much all self-help aphorisms: “We’d always go into it blindly/ I needed to lose you to find me/ This dancing was killing me softly/ I needed to hate you to love me.” I’m sure that’s a message that some people needed to hear, but it’s also a message that we have heard over and over again. Some artists, like Gomez’s friend Taylor Swift, are great at translating those therapeutic personal experiences into songs that register as something larger. That’s not what I get from “Lose You To Love Me.” Instead, it just felt like one more entry in the increasingly crowded empowerment canon.
Selena Gomez recorded “Lose You To Love Me” with her “Hands To Myself” collaborators Mattman & Robin. Finneas O’Connell, who was just in this column for his work on his sister Billie Eilish’s “Bad Guy,” has a credit for additional production; he says he added “wind tones” and “weird shimmery textural sounds.” There are a lot of those on the song, and there’s not much else. “Lose You To Love Me” is as minimal as a power ballad could possibly be. There aren’t many actual instruments on the track — a piano, some keyboard plinky-plinks, a few hits of sub-bass. Instead, it tries to built toward a crashing crescendo with atmospheric effects. There’s reverb. There’s echo. There are wind tones. The idea, I guess, is to mirror the raging storm of emotions that you might feel when you figure out that you had to lose someone else to love yourself. Those effects are deployed by people who know what they’re doing, but they mostly just flatten things out for me. They keep the minimalism from landing.
Selena Gomez’s delivery on “Lose You To Love Me” is a variation on the Lana Del Rey close-mic’ed torch-ballad style. Gomez’s acting chops serve the song (and its black-and-white close-up video) pretty well. She can’t hit giant power-notes the way some of her Disney peers can; she could never, for instance, equal the impact of Miley Cyrus on the “Wrecking Ball” chorus. Instead, she finds a conversational rhythm on her verses: “You promised the world, and I fell for it.” A choir of reverb-drenched backup singers — really Mattman, Robin, Julia Michaels, and Justin Tranter — arrives to give support. The combination of classic moody balladry and atmospheric effects is the same kind of thing that a cult-pop singer like Lykke Li might go for, but “Lose You To Love Me” doesn’t have that same sense of mystery. Instead, it shoots for grandeur, doing its best to turn a small, personal story into something epic. It’s a perfectly sturdy piece of studio pop, but I just don’t get any emotional catharsis from it. It’s too inert for that.
“Lose You To Love Me” happened to come out at a time when people were, for whatever reason, fiending for big, sweeping ballads about romantic devastation. Selena Gomez released the single in the middle of the week, and it debuted at #15. A week later, it rose all the way to #1, interrupting the reign of another ballad, Lewis Capaldi’s “Someone You Loved.” Despite that initial burst, “Lose You To Love Me” didn’t have legs. The song only had a week at #1, and it stalled out at triple platinum. A day after releasing “Lose You To Love Me,” Gomez dropped the dance-flavored track “Look At Her Now,” I guess intending to use to second song to tell a different side of the same story. The second song peaked at #27. Gomez’s album Rare came out early in 2020, and she never toured behind it for obvious reasons. It’s not a very compelling record, and it didn’t have any more significant hits.
Selena Gomez had other stuff going on, anyway. Later in 2020, her HBO cooking show debuted, and that’s apparently been a big success. She collaborated with the K-pop girl group BlackPink on their single “Ice Cream,” a #13 hit. A little while ago, one of my daughter’s friends showed her the “Ice Cream” video, and she said she was surprised to see Gomez show up in it. That’s because my kid doesn’t think of Selena Gomez as a singer. She mostly knows her for Only Murders In The Building, the Hulu comedy-mystery that debuted in 2021. On that show, Gomez stars alongside witty-patter legends Steve Martin and Martin Short, and she totally holds her own with those guys. It’s truly amazing how winning she can be, and she does it without giving off any pop-star vibes whatsoever.
But Selena Gomez persists as a pop star, at least on a part-time basis. In 2021, she released Revelación, her first and thus far only Spanish-language album. Its biggest hit, the Rauw Alejandro duet “Baila Conmigo,” peaked at #74. A year later, Gomez appeared on a remix of “Calm Dowm,” a huge international hit from the Nigerian singer Rema. Gomez didn’t add much to the slinky, mellow “Calm Down” on a musical level, but her presence supercharged a song that was already hugely popular. The Gomez-assisted version of “Calm Down” hung around the Hot 100 for an eternity, finally peaking at #3 in 2023. “Calm Down” is now Selena Gomez’s most-streamed song on Spotify. By some metrics, it’s also the most globally popular Afrobeats song in the genre’s entire history. It’s a total anomaly for everyone involved, but it’s a monster. (It’s also a 7.)
Last year, Selena Gomez starred in Emilia Pérez, a ridiculous movie that became an awards contender and an online punching bag. It’s a bad movie, and she’s bad in it, but I still kind of like that she was down to do something as absurd as that. At Cannes, Gomez shared the Best Actress award with the film’s other two stars. Before the Oscar campaign and the [gesturing broadly] everything else, Gomez’s involvement was the most interesting thing about Emilia Pérez, at least to me. Earlier this year, I watched her lose two awards back-to-back, for both Emilia Pérez and Only Murders In The Building, in the opening moments of the Golden Globes. She was never a threat to win either of them, but she’s in those conversations now. I’d argue that she’s taken more seriously as an actor than as a singer, and it seems like she’s more interested in that side of things, as well.
Late last year, Selena Gomez announced that she’s engaged to her aforementioned past collaborator Benny Blanco, a producer who has been in this column tons of times. From what I’ve seen online, a lot of her fans are furious at him for not having a more defined jawline or something. Earlier this year, Gomez and Blanco released a cute little collaborative album called I Said I Love You First. It’s a knowingly minor work, and it wasn’t supposed to conquer the world. That’s good, since it didn’t. On the Hot 100, the biggest hit from that album was the Gracie Abrams duet “Call Me When You Break Up,” which is barely two minutes long and which peaked at #46. The LP still debuted at #2. It’s not a flop by any means.
These days, Selena Gomez is sitting on a colossal pile of money, mostly because of Rare Beauty, the company that she launched in 2020. She’s an executive producer of Disney+’s new Wizards Of Waverly Place reboot, and she does the nostalgic-cameo thing in a couple of episodes. Only Murders In The Building is still going. I don’t know what it would take for Selena Gomez to have another major chart moment. Honestly, she doesn’t seem to want pop stardom that much. She’s got too much else going on. Fair enough. It’s hard to be a singer when you’re a million other things, as well.
GRADE: 5/10
BONUS BEATS: The UK band Bombay Bicycle Club played a loping midtempo cover “Lose You To love Me” on a 2020 visit to the BBC Live Lounge, and then that cover became a pretty regular part of their live show. Here’s the Live Lounge version:
BONUS BONUS BEATS: Here’s Hannah Einbinder and Poppy Liu bumping “Lose You To Love Me” and sharing a cute moment on a 2021 Hacks episode:
@hellosky Talking? Not when a Selena Gomez chorus is coming up. #hacks #comedy #hannaheinbinder #poppyliu original sound – Sky
The Number Ones: Twenty Chart-Topping Hits That Reveal The History Of Pop Music is out now via Hachette Books. To buy buy yeah! To buy buy yeah! I need to to go here and buy it!
