This week, Billboard is publishing a series of lists and articles celebrating the music of 20 years ago. Our 2005 Week continues here with a look back at the Billboard Hot 100 chart’s top songs from that year, to go with the list of staff favorites our editorial team published earlier this week.
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Fifteen years into her Billboard chart career, Mariah Carey was still achieving firsts.
In 2005, the superstar’s smash “We Belong Together” spent 14 weeks at No. 1 on the Billboard Hot 100 songs chart, between that June and September, and went on to top the year-end survey – Carey’s first title to rule the annual recap.
Carey had dominated the 1990s like no act in any previous decade, becoming the first artist to lead the Hot 100 in every year of a decade (1990-99; she expanded her record chart-topping streak to 11 years, through 2000). By 2005, she was back in familiar triumphant territory thanks to the sultry second single from her album The Emancipation of Mimi. The set debuted at No. 1 on the Billboard 200 in April 2005 and logged 74 weeks on the chart, the most for an album of hers since Daydream a decade earlier.
“My real fans have always been with me through great times and not-so-great times,” Carey shared in the 2005 year-end Billboard print issue. “That’s why I think we have a really close, special connection.”
Carey’s command was just one of the highlights on the 2005 year-end Hot 100. Elsewhere, 50 Cent boasts four entries in the top 20; Carrie Underwood places with her American Idol coronation ballad, “Inside Your Heaven”; and hits dot the ranking from the debut solo albums from No Doubt’s Gwen Stefani and Matchbox Twenty’s Rob Thomas.
As Billboard celebrates 2005 Week, revisit the 2005 year-end Hot 100 chart, as originally revealed in the Dec. 24, 2005, publication. The recap is based on performance on the weekly Hot 100 charts dated Dec. 4, 2004, through Nov. 26, 2005. (You can also check out every year-end Hot 100 Songs chart since 2006 here.)
