Every #1 Hit From 2014, Ranked Worst to Best

We’ve reached the final leg of this year’s #1 hit rankings. Last week, I tackled 2004 and got to reminisce about one of pop music’s all-time best eras. Now, I am remembering what it was like to be 16 and living through one of the worst periods in mainstream music’s history. 2014, for my money, is just a continuation of the mediocrity that overcame the Hot 100 around the turn of 2010. It’s hard to look at a crop of songs like this and feel anything but dated cringe. But that isn’t to say that all of the music featured in today’s list is bad. In fact, I would classify at least five of the 10 entries as “good”—maybe six, depending on how nostalgic I’m feeling about a certain now-washed rapper who was, at one point in my life, the best MC alive.

2014 was defined by catchy, inoffensive pop songs becoming oversaturated in popular culture’s collective conscience. 10 songs spread out across 52 weeks wouldn’t a bad thing if the songs weren’t so damn unsatisfying. And, much to my own disappointment, the music I thought was overplayed a decade ago have not earned much replay value since. Such is life. Anyway, here is every #1 hit from 2014, ranked from worst to best.

10. MAGIC!: “Rude”

I feel like I memory-holed this song, for good reason. It very well might be the worst song that I’ve ever ranked. The funny thing is that, somehow, the remix version of MAGIC!’s “Rude” is even worse, as it features Kid Ink, Ty Dolla Sign and, on drums, blink-182’s Travis Barker. The track was a major success across the globe, hitting #1 in 26 countries and spending six consecutive weeks atop the Hot 100. I have never been a fan of reggae fusion in any sense, but especially not when it’s done by a band of white idiots like MAGIC!. Being that I was 16 when this record hit #1, I really thought I’d remember it enough to feel some type of way about it. Unfortunately for MAGIC! (but fortunately for me), I simply do not think about “Rude” at all—and, once this list is published, that’s exactly how it’ll continue to be.

9. Meghan Trainor: “All About That Bass”

When you have a year where only 10 songs reach #1, you’re stuck with a few hits that overstayed their welcome, and Meghan Trainor’s “All About That Bass” was one of them. Revisiting this song, I don’t think it’s as bad as retrospect wants it to be—but I remember just how inescapable it was in the fall of 2014. I suppose that is the Achilles heel of most hit songs, that they become obsolete once they’re overplayed, but “All About That Bass” had to contend with being out-of-style and painfully tone-deaf upon its entry into pop’s lexicon a decade ago. It was fawned as an empowering anthem for plus-size women and, at the time of its release, quite a number of media outlets—like Complex, Slant and The Independent—slammed the contradictory Trainor for her “faux empowerment” and body-positivity spun into ridicule of other women. Even The New York Time flamed Trainor for appropriating Black style—commenting on how her pro-curves anthem has “been the cultural preserve of Black music” and that Trainor’s turns it “into a cheeky novelty hit.” For a debut major label single, few releases in the last decade have been as polarizing as Trainor’s, as “All About That Bass” landed on both best-of and worst-of lists in 2014—I think I would have sided more with the latter.

8. Iggy Azalea ft. Charli XCX: “Fancy”

But if we are talking about songs that I do remember being massive, Iggy Azalea’s “Fancy” is certainly one of them. Most folks (myself included) weren’t much aware of Azalea prior to her chart-topping smash. She’d had a single (“Work”) peak at #54 in 2013, but her presence in the zeitgeist was arguably non-existent—at least in America, as she’d had Top 15 success in the UK with “Bounce” and “Change Your Life.” “Fancy” caught on in the States and went on a tear, holding court at #1 for six weeks in the summer. I often forget that Charli XCX was on this single, mostly because the only part of the song that has stuck with me is the “I’m so fancy” hook. Considering how big of a 2024 Charli has had, her tenure on “Fancy” is nothing more than a humble second showing after her work with Icona Pop on “I Love It” sent her into the Top 10 a year earlier. Considering that Charli was barely 14 months removed from the release of her debut album True Romance, I’m willing to look beyond the annoying faults of a polarizing MC like Azalea so I can revel in Charli’s pre-Sucker era.

7. Pharrell: “Happy”

For 10 weeks in 2014, Pharrell’s “Happy” was inescapable—and we were all, and still are, worse off because of it. The problem with “Happy” is that it was overplayed 10 years ago and never quite recovered from that saturation. It was written for the Despicable Me 2 soundtrack but wedged its way onto Pharrell’s pretty boring sophomore album Girl. But, in retrospect, “Happy” came out at the exact right time—throwing it back to the glory days of 1980s and 1990s film songs topping the Hot 100 for weeks on end. It was contagious enough to catch on and spread en masse, and its positioning during the end of spring/dawn of summer helped it become a definitive piece of 2014’s warm months. As far as soul songs go, “Happy” is cool. Pharrell nabbing vocal comparisons to Curtis Mayfield, however, is not cool. Pharrell has made so much more compelling art; in the early 2010s, he was in a heated battle with Justin Timberlake to see who could be the most mid pop star alive. In this game, though, everyone loses.

6. Eminem ft. Rihanna: “The Monster”

When Eminem released The Marshall Mathers LP 2 in late-2013, I was definitely going through a phase with his music. Not to mention, he raps about a character whose name is, quite literally, Matthew Mitchell. You can see the bias, I’m sure. His duet with Rihanna—the fourth single “The Monster”—is one of the few tracks on the record that ever had any merit. “Berzerk” was a re-introduction to “Slim Shady,” while “Rap God” was a novelty hip-hop track with a focus on Eminem machine-gun spitting himself into a world record. But “The Monster,” which is, essentially, a gimmicky continuation of his and Rihanna’s 2010 #1 hit “Love the Way You Lie,” is catchy if not goofy. The melody is an earworm, as Eminem raps about the destructive forces of finding fame while Rihanna sings about inner demons. In 2014, putting two stars like Eminem and Rihanna on a track together was, basically, a #1 hit guarantee. They’ve never made an all-time song together, but they definitely perfected the chemistry needed to top the charts.

5. Taylor Swift: “Shake It Off”

In October 2014, Taylor Swift dropped her then-career-defining album, 1989—kick-starting her very, very big year in pop music. Lead single “Shake It Off” was a runaway success that has gone 50x Platinum and 4x Diamond. And, yet, it was only #1 for four non-consecutive weeks in 2014, interrupted by the putrid “All About That Bass” and its despicably tasteless eight-week reign atop the charts. “Shake It Off” is not a song I return to very much, but if you’ve ever heard an entire stadium sing it in unison, then its timelessness need not be questioned. This was the introduction to Taylor at her best—though the lyrics are rid of meaningful substance, I’d measure it as a worthy teaser to 1989. It sets the tone for much more meaningful work, especially “Bad Blood” and “New Romantics”; you can trace a record like Midnights back to a song like “Shake It Off”—it’s singalong, dancey buzz acting as a splendid precursor to the much more subdued electronic material she’d come up with nearly a decade later.

4. John Legend: “All of Me”

Possibly the end-all-be-all of 2010s ballads, John Legend’s “All of Me” was the track that took him from GOOD Music prodigy to lifelong household name. A dedication to his then-new wife Chrissy Teigen, “All of Me” gets a few bonus points from me for being the song that knocked “Happy” out of the #1 spot on the Hot 100. Otherwise, it’s a sentimental, inoffensive love song written in a newlywed haze—and it sold nearly 5 million copies in the US (and 12.3 million worldwide) in 2014. There are few things in this world more consistent than the combination of John Legend and his piano. His vocals on “All of Me” are passionate and some of the very best of his 20-year career. Not too shabby for a guy who used to do uncredited background vocals for other artists, whose first taste of success came from playing the keys on Lauryn Hill’s “Everything is Everything.” “All of Me” is a good song that’s stood the test of these last 10 years.

3. Pitbull ft. Kesha: “Timber”

The final three entries on this list are canonical Matt Mitchell-certified bangers. If I hear “Timber” during a function, I’m hitting the dancefloor. One of the first pop-star break-outs I remember witnessing and cataloging was Kesha’s. Admittedly, I was exposed to her first by the Key of Awesome’s YouTube channel, as they did a “TiK ToK” parody that racked up quite a few views and infiltrated the early algorithm of my listening habits. Nevertheless, I am a product of that five-year span where Kesha put out tracks like “Your Love is My Drug, “We R Who We R” and “Die Young,” but none really capture that part of my life better than “Timber,” her collaboration with Mr. Worldwide himself, Pitbull. Not many pop hits of that era were putting people on to some sweet harmonica pulls, but, thanks to Paul Harrington and Lee Oskar, that’s exactly what “Timber” did 10 years ago. That “it’s going down, I’m yelling ‘timber’!” chorus is as infectious now as it was then, and the song was the chart-topping capstone for Pitbull’s massive breakthrough—a run of popularity that saw him send singles like “I Know You Want Me (Calle Ocho),” “Hotel Room Service,” “Hey Baby (Drop It to the Floor),” “Give Me Everything” and “Feel This Moment” into the Top 10. “Timber,” however, was a pitch-perfect collision of two very prominent stars from my teenage years—an unforgettable and catchy explosion that is terminally evocative of the period it was made in but still so, so enjoyable.

2. Katy Perry ft. Juicy J: “Dark Horse”

Katy Perry’s recent efforts would have you believe that she has always been mediocre, but I am here to remind you that, once upon a time, she was one of our greatest living pop stars. Her receiving the Vanguard Award at the VMAs this summer was not done in bad taste, as her output between 2008 and 2013 was a masterclass for the ages. I’ll go to bat any day for Teenage Dream, a record I do believe is still the best non-Robyn pop release of 2010. When it came time to follow Teenage Dream up three years later, Perry made a record called Prism. It’s not nearly as monolithic as its predecessor, but it gave fans two of her most iconic tracks: “Roar” and “Unconditionally.” The album’s third single, however, became one of Perry’s signature works. “Dark Horse,” her collaboration with Juicy J, is a great, sexy storm of pop, trap and electronica. It exists in the same lineage as “E.T.,” the more “avant-garde” offering from Teenage Dream, and it establishes Perry’s ability to juxtapose genres in her own work—a formula that hasn’t always worked for her, certainly not in 2024. In a lot of ways, “Dark Horse” was Katy Perry’s last truly enjoyable hit song—her ninth and last #1 single.

1. Taylor Swift: “Blank Space”

The last #1 hit of 2014 and first #1 hit of 2015, Taylor Swift’s “Blank Space” is one of her all-time best songs—and one of her best girl-next-door stories. And let’s be clear: the distance in quality between this song and “Dark Horse” is a laughably wide margin. Swift’s ability to nurture anecdotes of her personal life into digestible, accessible pop flavors has always been her greatest asset, and there are few better instances of that in her 20-year-career than “Blank Space”—a catchy distillation of her love life under a media-made microscope. For me, it’s the definitive 1989 track, one of the best collaborations to ever materialize from her work with Max Martin and Shellback, and just a truly enjoyable four-and-a-half minutes of electro-pop. The “‘cause we’re young and we’re reckless, we’ll take this way too far” chorus is one of Taylor’s strongest—and even the most fantastical images in “Blank Space” rub shoulders with a fascinating sense of brand-new maturity and craft. The cherry lips and crystal skies linger in the shadows of tables turning and a long list of ex-lovers; “Blank Space” marks the end of Taylor’s country singer-songwriter origins and the beginning of her pop stardom in full. Can you believe that her 2015 would be even bigger? Of course you can.