9. Britney Spears, "Till The World Ends." The song jumps from #20 to #9 in its second week on the chart. This marks the second time that Spears has had back-to-back top 10 hits. She previously scored in 2008-2009 with "Womanizer" (#1) and "Circus" (#3). Digital sales rank: #5 (158K).
Many people wrote Spears off in 2007 when she was going through a hard time in her personal life. In September of that year, after a much mocked performance at the MTV Video Music Awards, Entertainment Weekly ran a cover story: "Oh, The Horror! Is Britney's Comeback Already Over? Or Does She Have A Prayer?" The headline inside was even worse: "Down For The Count?"
But a funny thing happened on the way to her predicted demise. Spears proceeded to land one of her biggest hits, "Gimme More," which reached #3 in October 2007. And she has since amassed five more top 10 hits: "Womanizer," "Circus," "3," "Hold It Against Me" and now "Till The World Ends."
By contrast, from 1998 to 2006, Spears notched just four top 10 hits: "...Baby One More Time," "(You Drive Me) Crazy," "Oops!...I Did It Again," and "Toxic."
How to explain this? It may be that fans' relationship with Spears deepened when she went through her troubles. They have seen her through highs and lows; triumphs and humiliations. This is a shift from the way things used to be, when stars when to great lengths to sanitize their images. Karen Carpenter never went public with her battle with anorexia, which made her death in 1983 such a shock to fans. Freddie Mercury finally acknowledged that he had AIDS just one day before his death from AIDS-related complications in 1991.