What’s the most popular song to never be used in an AMV?

I’d been hoping to use this week to actually work on a new AMV of my own or at least pursue some other creative endeavor, but since my brain is stuck in a funk I figured I’d pivot in a completely different direction and use my time and energy to find some agonizingly trivial and tedious matter to occupy myself with instead. The title of this blog post says it all, so if that doesn’t sound like a good time then get out while you still can. Even as I’m writing this, I don’t actually know if this ends with me actually solving this mystery, so apologies in advance if you’re preparing yourself for an answer that we never quite settle on.

This question has been slowly brewing in my mind for quite a while, but was specifically inspired in no small part by katranat’s blog entry “AMV’s and old sources – What’s the oldest song used in an AMV?” I’ve been into AMVs for–oh geez–twenty years or so at this point, which I’m not mentioning to brand myself as some kind of expert, only to establish the fact that I’ve always been fascinated with the weird odds and ends of it–the trends in the sort of videos that people make, the motivations behind why anyone does this stuff in the first place, who those creators are and how that cohort has changed over time, etc.–and that these particular fascinations have played an outsized role in keeping me invested in AMVs long beyond the traditional “lifespan of an AMV editor” (or fan, for that matter). I’m not an academic, though I might accidentally slip into adapting that sort of language or a really watered down version of it, but just humor me and trust that I’m not trying to fool you or anyone else here. I love thinking about this kind of stuff, that’s all. But back to katranat’s question: what would motivate someone to edit with a song that, at the time the AMV was created, was 75 years old? The editor leaves no explanation or clues. Why did they choose such a relatively obscure song? For every song that could be described as popular, there are thousands or even millions that aren’t, so there are surely just as many reasons behind someone’s decision to choose one of the unloved, unheard or mostly forgotten tunes of the past and present. But what about the popular songs that editors usually reach for instead?

Or, much less discussed, what about the popular songs they don’t choose to edit with? Is it possible to identify the most popular song that has never provided the soundtrack to an AMV?

In this case, I am referring specifically to individual studio recordings, nearly all of which would go on to be sold as physical media, broadcast on radio or television, or streamed online or available elsewhere to listen to somewhere on the Internet. So while there are “songs” such as religious hymns, folk songs or national anthems known by millions or even billions of people, I am not speaking of those kind of songs: lyrics, notation or melodies informally passed down that might be performed by anyone in a variety of settings. Instead, I am considering a “song” to be an individual recording: an unchanging, permanent record of a single individual or group interpreting and performing a piece. Not “Happy Birthday” or “Jingle Bells,” but “You Oughta Know,” “The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald,” “Da Funk,” “Take Five,” “Dear Future Husband,” etc. This might sound like an obvious definition, but that’s a convention that we tend to take for granted these days, and still a relatively new one in the grand scheme of history. You could make an AMV set to “Mary Had a Little Lamb” or “Amazing Grace,” super-famous songs for sure, but ones without a definitive recording that defines their existence. You could do your best version of “Everybody Wants to Rule the World,” but no matter how perfect it is, it won’t be the song that everyone knows. Have I beat this point into the ground yet?

Of course, there’s no universal or agreed upon metric for deciding how well-known or famous a song is. The only place I know where to start would be consulting the Billboard charts. This is a flawed method for the following reasons:

• This would not include songs that may have charted before the debut of the Hot 100 in August of 1958.
• Arbitrary roles of what constitutes a “single” have repeatedly excluded countless very popular songs from appearing on the chart.
• The chart has always been reactive to change, never proactive, and has struggled to catch up to trends in how music reaches listeners (not really a statement I can verify with hard data, so just ignore this opinion if you wish).
• The chart is based on airplay, sales and streaming in the United States, not the entire world. Additional research could be done to survey charts Internationally, but I simply don’t have time for this.
• Related to the above consideration, as open-minded as I try to be, I still have a very narrow view of what’s “popular,” which I try to justify here by noting that America is the largest audience for recorded music in the world (citation needed) and that songs generally don’t take the entire rest of the world by storm while completely being shut out of American culture (again, citation strongly needed).

Searches for AMVs were conducted on YouTube and animemusicvideos.org for every number 1 hit on the Billboard Hot 100 chart. Fortunately, animemusicvideos.org has a uniform system of cataloging artists and songs for all of the AMVs entered into its database. This made searching for individual songs, particularly those released before 2010 or so, a relatively easy task. For more recent hits, as well as older songs not found in the database of the Org, I searched YouTube for artist and song combinations before adding “AMV” on to the end of my query. The sheer volume of AMVs uploaded to the megasite allowed me to find hundreds of AMVs never uploaded to the Org. But the chaotic nature of the search results (often yielding exactly what I was searching for but buried deep beneath lots of unrelated results), incorrectly tagged AMVs, AMVs made with cover songs and all manner of other unpredictable issues related to the website and its users, often made digging through its depths a true test of patience and sanity. If you’re looking for AMVs set to Ed Sheeran or Ariana Grande, you’ll be set for days with practically no effort whatsoever. If you’re searching for some of the less-remembered hits from the 60s and 70s, there’s just no telling what you’ll find or how long it will take you to find it.

For fun, because I’m a masochist and possibly autistic–I’m not using the A-word as a slur or disparaging it, honestly this project is just the latest in a hundred little episodes over the years that have lead me to wonder just what in the world is going on in my brain, wondering what makes me do this kind of thing, wondering if I’m somewhere on the spectrum but knowing it’s probably impossible to tell, and even if I could find out, wondering if any amount of proof truly would satisfy me or be the answer I’m seeking?–I compiled every Billboard Hot 100 number one hit into a graph, green and red blocks indicating songs that I was able to find AMVs for, black and white indicating songs that (apparently) have never had any AMVs made for them at all. I only made this chart to see what it would look like if it existed (a further explanation of the personal rules I had for it can be found here):

_{I don’t like to caption images on this blog but I’m making an exception here to say that you should probably click on this to enlarge it if you want it to be even remotely readable.}

(Throughout the early years of the chart, songs would almost never reclaim the number one spot after falling off. It is now a regular occurrence that made compiling the last decade of this visual aid an intensely tedious experience. Also: beginning in 2019 with Mariah Carey’s “All I Want For Christmas Is You” now taking up an annual residency that lasts anywhere from one to four weeks at the very end of the year, usually then yielding the spot to a previous number one in the early weeks of the new year, completely broke my system for making this. However, this anomaly doesn’t really effect my goal, which was to illustrate the presence of songs that have AMVs and song that do not. Now that it’s done I don’t really care about it, but there it is: the past 65 years of popular music in the USA.)

Unsurprisingly, the earliest years of the chart see just as many number one hits that have never had any AMVs made for/with them as those that have. I guess it’s kind of obvious why this is, but I shouldn’t set out to write this and assume that any of this is common knowledge. So, obvious theory: most AMV editors are young and they prefer editing to new music, so even in the earliest days of this hobby, the era of Malt Shop Memories was always going to be left in the dust. What I found interesting about exploring the earliest years of this chart was the idea that a song like this had ever taken up the same cultural relevancy as something like the latest Olivia Rodrigo single. Or maybe it’s apples and oranges and not really a fair comparison at all? Regardless, there are tons of songs that were verifiably the most popular tune in the entire land for at least a week: since August of 1958, there have been 1,150 different songs to reach the number one spot. By my extremely unofficial count, 224 of these songs (19.47% of the whole bunch) have never been featured in an AMV.

A few observations from this assignment:

• I considered AMVs made with both anime and Western animation, as well as video games. I did not consider live action edits like this amazing Star Trek: The Next Generation video.
• I decided not to count “slideshow”-style videos, whether they were made with random anime-style artwork or actual anime screenshots. The latter has a much better case for being considered as meeting the criteria for what makes an AMV, but allowing those to make the cut would then have to open the door for videos containing a mixture of screenshots and all manner of other still images, so I decided to draw the line here. If you’re editing with (mostly) gifs, you’re fine.
• AMVs had to be made with the original version of the song as it was released at the time it charted. Cover versions of recordings that went to number one are different recordings altogether and cannot count for our purposes. Even if it’s a recording that sounds remarkably like the original, if it’s not the genuine article then I just can’t bring myself to count it here.
• If there is no AMV made to the original version of the song, but a remix of the original version of the song, it can count. Most of these special cases did not concern official or even unofficial remixes, like I expected, but slightly pitch-shifted “nightcore” versions of songs (or their “slowed + reverb” cousins). There are far, far more of these than I ever expected, and there’s so much more to this world than the hyperactive dance pop that I always thought it was confined to. Who ever expected this?
• With that in mind, videos that are nothing but a looping gif or looping scenes are not AMVs, I’m sorry.
• There is a point where a song can be altered to the point of no return and its essence is forever lost. And yes, I found it. Sorry if I’m being too conservative here but on February 17, 1962, a new song reached number one on the Billboard Hot 100 chart and I guarantee you, it was NOT this one!
• There has never been an AMV made with the 1994 Jamaican dancehall hit “Here Comes the Hotstepper.” Yes, one of the most famous AMVs ever made features a track that is clearly sampling the original, not to mention borrowing its title at the same time. But for all practical and meaningful purposes, I maintain that the track heard in that AMV is a completely separate and completely different entity than its source material.
• A handful of songs were only represented in “AMV Hell”-style MEPs, ones made by a group of editors or a “blipvert”-style edit made by a single person. These were not the sort of AMVs that I set out to find, but I went ahead counted them anyway. I wasn’t going to discount AMVs that didn’t include the complete song, and I wasn’t going to start doing so just because it happened to be part of a larger work.
• If it weren’t for the efforts of two editors in particular, the above chart would have had many more holes in it, especially in the 1950s and 1960s. I did not keep track of how many AMVs I found edited by Kyle Lodge or Magical_Alice, but in many cases they created the only AMVs I was able to find for several songs. “Game of Love” (not the Jenny Rom/”Attack of the Otaku” version!), “So Much in Love,” “It’s Now or Never,” “One Bad Apple,” “Easier Said Than Done,” and many more (if only I’d actually kept track of which AMVs either of them had made, this mini-list would be much longer). Yes, I know these are not the hottest songs of 2023, but that’s not what this entry is going to be about.
• I realized that actually checking for 21st century hits that had never had any AMVs made for them was probably a waste of time. Of course any song that had been remotely popular during the YouTube era would have inspired someone to make an AMV with it. And this, unsurprisingly, turned out to be the case. But in the case of “Bump, Bump, Bump,” which spent one week at the number one spot in early 2003 (the waning days of the pre-YouTube era, for whatever it’s worth), I was not able to find a single AMV that anyone had ever made with the song. Surprisingly, there are other B2K AMVs, including at least three made with their song “Girlfriend” (which peaked at #30 on the charts in 2003) and two made with their debut single “Uh Huh” (peaking at #37 in 2001), but the group’s most successful single has somehow never received the treatment, and more than twenty years later this doesn’t exactly have an air of inevitability to it any longer. It is the most recent Billboard Hot 100 number one hit that I was unable to find a single AMV for.
• I have not been able to find any currently existing AMVs made with 1979’s “Heartache Tonight” by The Eagles. However, in the description for this AMV, the creator claims to have originally used the song in the original cut of the video. After being muted or completely blocked on YouTube due to a copyright claim, they switched the audio to “My Immortal” by Evanescence, and for the past fourteen years that’s how it’s been available to watch on the world’s largest video-sharing platform, in all its de-synced and spectacularly ironic glory. We may never see the original version of the video with the song that the editor intended to use, but I’m taking the creator’s word for it that it did exist. So yes, I’m counting it.

Taking the 224 chart-topping hits that I could not find AMVs for into consideration, I now propose an arbitrary shortlist of the biggest and most significant songs that no AMVs currently exist for. This is my opinion, which I hope I can justify on a case-by-case basis. For added fun and suspense, yes, it’s another countdown:

10. Chic – “Good Times”

This song was never meant to be included on this list, but the last-minute discovery of an existing AMV for Nancy and Frank Sinatra’s “Somethin’ Stupid” left me in need of a replacement, and “Good Times” was my go-to choice waiting in the wings. While the eligibility of this 44 year-old song for such a dubious honor is not a huge surprise in the grand scheme of things, I don’t believe it’s wrong to describe “Good Times” as one of those songs that everyone knows. Maybe it’s not a well-known cultural touchstone for younger Zoomers, a pretty significant possibility that I’d be irresponsible to casually brush off, but it’s hard to deny how effectively the song has seeped into the lives of everyone who’s, say, at least out of high school. Among the 224 number one songs that have never been featured in an AMV, this one is hardly alone in its status as one of those songs that “everyone knows.” But almost none of those hits feel like a tool designed for a specific purpose in the same way that “Good Times” does. AMV editors eat this stuff up, right? Or so I thought. If nothing else, it’s instantly recognizable, and triggering that sense of recognition plays just as big of a role in hooking viewers as any editor’s creative decisions. Sad but true, I fear, and probably old news to anyone who’s been doing this stuff for more than a minute.

Solely by virtue of appearing for whole 10 seconds in an “AMV Hell” knock-off MEP, Chic’s other #1 hit, “Le Freak,” just barely avoided appearing on this list as well. YouTube user BigStone777 did use “Le Freak” in an ACMV (animated cartoon music video?) with clips from the animated sci-fi series Final Space. I am describing BS777 as a “user” and not an “editor” as the clips are comprised of a completely unedited scene set to a totally a different song. While Chic would never enjoy a future filled with AMV editor-approved tributes, guitarist Nile Rodgers could conceivably spend hours listening to his sparkling licks in endless AMVs made to both Daft Punk’s “Lose Yourself to Dance” and “Get Lucky.”

9. Debby Boone – “You Light Up My Life”

Holding the number one spot for a whole ten weeks back in late 1977, “You Light Up My Life” is the single biggest Billboard Hot 100 chart hit to have never received the AMV treatment. So that ought to be the answer to our question, right? If the entire premise of this entry was to examine the Billboard charts, focus solely on songs that reached number one and extrapolate some meaningful conclusion from all of that information, surely now we can relish the satisfaction of actually reaching one of those rare certainties that most of these futile quests never arrive at. Yet I refuse to accept that this song represents the end of our journey.

Leaving my own feelings about the song aside, I can’t think of a single instance where I have ever heard “You Light Up My Life” played in public, in a restaurant or grocery store or dentist’s office or anywhere else. Supposedly it’s a staple of wedding receptions, but I have never danced to it or heard it played at any I’ve been to. I have also never heard it on the radio, not even the Lite FM stations that I have occasionally been a captive listener to in several agonizingly long situations over the years. One can imagine it landing on some Guardians of the Galaxy-like soundtrack or showing up in a movie scene where its schmaltz suddenly takes on some magical sentimental quality that a younger audience has never encountered before and suddenly can’t resist. Yet this has never happened! The cultural footprint of this song in 2023 is almost nonexistent, and I have no memory of that ever not being the case. No, my subjective experience of this song is not completely reliable or representative of everyone else’s. But I’m trying to keep this grounded in the culture of AMVs, and if I can’t comment on that with any sense of reliability, then there’s really nothing I can say about anything in this world. So you’ve gotta let me have this!

There could have been a time in the early days of this hobby where someone, somewhere, had a copy of this song queued up to drop into their timeline or to dub over their tediously-composed, dual VCR-edited AMV, but never finished the task at hand. Maybe someone submitted a “You Light Up My Life” AMV to a convention twenty, thirty or forty years ago but never preserved a copy for posterity. Perhaps there is a “You Light Up My Life” AMV hidden deep in the depths of YouTube, unlabeled and somehow undetectable by the programs created to automatically detect and identify songs. Maybe someone uploaded their “You Light Up My Life” AMV to animemusicvideos.org but tagged it with the wrong artist and the wrong song title. You can drive yourself crazy imagining all the “You Light Up My Life” AMVs that could be hiding on derelict hard drives, dusty old VHS tapes, behind your refrigerator… they could be anywhere! You could do the same with “Carnival of Light” AMVs if you wanted, too. This song does not represent the single biggest musical hole in the world of AMVs, but it leads me to one of the conclusions I was sure I’d hold off on until the end of this: you can prove that an AMV exists, but you can’t quite prove that one doesn’t exist. I’m probably going to repeat this later.

I couldn’t really care less if there aren’t any “You Light Up My Life” AMVs. If I ever come across one, I’m definitely going to watch it, but I won’t lose sleep over the fact that that’s probably never going to happen. If this song hadn’t held off “Nobody Does it Better” from the top of the charts for three weeks, plus seven more in change, I doubt I’d be mentioning it here. But I figure that all of that time at the top has to count for something, so here it is.

8. Starland Vocal Band – “Afternoon Delight”

I don’t care for this song. That’s not a hot take or anything, as I know I first learned about it in some “worst songs of all time”-style list, which of course I cannot find now that I need to cite it. (Did this introduction program me to judge it too harshly at an impressionable age? A fair question, I guess.) If that’s hyperbole, then it’s certainly still one of those songs that best epitomizes the least endurable qualities of 1970s pop. It’s not good. I don’t like it! But what I hate even more is the existence of several “Afternoon Delight” AMVs featuring the Anchorman version of the song, while not a single one exists for the original. I thought it was a well-known song, or at least one that’s overflowing with a specific flavor of ironic and silly naughtiness, the kind of thing that AMV editors usually can’t resist. Yes, I do understand why a song that sounds like this is not the chosen soundtrack for any editor who is trying to build a large audience or simply edit for themselves with music they personally enjoy most. But if there’s ever been any refuge for “bad” songs, it’s this hobby, so the absence of “Afternoon Delight” in the realm of anime music videos just feels really weird to me. I’m not saying this is a problem we need to solve right now, I’m just throwing it out there.

7. The Tornados – “Telstar”

Instrumental pop/rock recordings have to have an immediate and infectious appeal to capture listeners and rise to the rare status of a “hit,” and that rare handful that have actually done that hold a special status that more popular songs with vocals almost inevitably lose over time. I imagine that even if you’ve never heard “Telstar,” it would still convey a familiar impression and evoke the same aspirational and futuristic feelings as it did over 60 years ago. Yes, this would still work today to soundtrack any space-themed AMV, but not only does no one even touch it today, no one bothered with it twenty years ago when it ought to have been in the prime of its retro appeal (being as “old” as songs from 1983 are to us today, just chew on that if you want to feel old… or young, idk).

Wouldn’t this be the perfect compliment to a retro Astro Boy AMV? A goofy Space Dandy video? Some mindless nonsense like Rocket Girls? The possibilities are endless! We’ve had AMVs made to “Green Onions,” “Sleep Walk,” “Children” and “Classical Gas,” but never this. This is yet another case where I’m surprised… but also not surprised. I get it. But the more time you spend digging into the depths of songs that people actually have edited AMVs with, oddities like this begin to look less like understandable omissions and more like disappointingly overlooked opportunities.

6. Bee Gees – “Jive Talkin'”

It can be easy to take these guys for granted despite their ridiculous run throughout the 70s that absolutely dominated the charts. The trio racked up nine number one hits in the US throughout their career, five of which I’ve been able to find AMVs made for. (If this seems disappointing, consider the solo career of Andy Gibb, who hit the number one spot with three different hits but has never had a single AMV made with any of his songs: if this isn’t the definition of a “successful” yet ultimately unfulfilling career, then I don’t know what is.) Of the four Bee Gees hits to reach number one on the Billboard Hot 100 that have never appeared in an AMV, “Jive Talkin'” somehow feels like the most inexplicable case.

1975 was a ridiculous mess of a year for number one hits, with 35 unique songs reaching the top of the charts, a record that still stands. (Sixteen of those songs have never appeared in an AMV, a pathetic indictment on the legacy of this year if there ever was one.) Was this busy turnover the sign of a rich and ever-changing musical landscape? Could it be argued that this is preferable to a pop landscape like the one of 2005, in which only eight different songs topped the chart? Or is it confirmation that the music assembly line of the time had somehow lost the ability to produce any songs with staying power? ‘Jive Talkin'” knocked “One of These Nights” off the top spot (another song that no one’s ever edited an AMV with) and was displaced two weeks later by “Fallin’ In Love” (again, zero AMVs to speak of). “Jive Talkin'” has always struck me as a monument of mid 70s music, a song that epitomizes the era in a way that few others do, so to see it’s never once been touched by AMV editors feels like a mistake. It’s ridiculous to expect a dozen “Jive Talkin'” AMVs, but how could there never have been a single one? I realize that going to bat for it now will only make me sound more ridiculously out of touch than I already am, but its absolute absence from this hobby and the hundreds of thousands, if not millions of works that it’s produced, strikes me as borderline impossible. Yet here we are.

5. Paul McCartney and Michael Jackson – “Say, Say, Say”

After visiting a fortune teller and learning that his recent 1982 duet with Stevie Wonder, the chart-topping “Ebony and Ivory,” would fail to attract the affection of even a single AMV editor in the decades to come, a furious Paul McCartney would return to the studio, determined to achieve his true goal. “Say, Say, Say,” his duet with the hottest pop star in the entire world, an artist burning bright in what would be the hottest year of his entire career, seemed like the perfect recipe to rectify this failure. Yet somehow, 40 years later, the song has only inspired videos made with looping clips, a static desktop background-style “video” and an AMV made with a Euro-house remix that completely erases McCartney from the song altogether. Devastated from this disappointment, McCartney slowly retreated from public life and has lived in near-total seclusion for years.

4. Snow – “Informer”

I don’t even know where to start with this one other than to admit that, searching for “Informer” on animemusicvideos.org, I expected to find dozens of results. Not finding a single one was the single most revelatory moment of this entire project. Maybe I didn’t really understand this hobby. Maybe I don’t understand anything at all! Maybe it’s obvious to you that my “Informer” AMV watch party was always going to be a disaster, yet I was as certain as I’ve ever been that it was going to be hours of fun.

AMV editors love one hit wonders, the dumber the better, and I’m not saying this song is dumb but it’s been a punching bag for a very long time and some of those reasons aren’t unearned. It’s also a lot better than any of the haters will tell you but that’s a battle that no one is fighting any longer so… who cares, I guess! But no, “Informer” does not have what “Barbie Girl” has, what “Blue (Da Ba Dee)” or “I’m Too Sexy” have. There are reasons that each one of those songs have had dozens, perhaps hundreds of AMVs made with them and reasons why “Informer” has not. Plus, rap was never really popular in AMVs until a little over a decade ago, certainly not in the early 2000s when I assumed that some imaginary group of people would been editing with this song, ironically or not. Reggae AMVs are such a niche concern that no one has even begun to study them until recently!

Only a handful of other songs would reach number one after “Informer” but never find their way into an AMV, including…

3. TLC – “Creep”

“Creep” is the first song I always think of when I remember TLC. It’s not even close. But yet again my perception of reality turns out to be myopic and skewed. Spotify listeners play “Waterfalls” more than twice as much as they play “Creep.” “No Scrubs” laps “Creep” more than five times over in total plays. All three songs reached number one on the Hot 100. Only “Creep” has no AMV to show for itself. Searching for it means digging through other results for “Creep,” not only the one you expect but now suddenly a new one that’s waltzed right in out of nowhere and eaten TLC’s lunch. There is a looped scene video and what I guess we would call a “visualizer” but we’re not going to count those. I don’t have much else to say about this, which is a shame since I’ve only managed to undermine my own case for the song by explaining how relatively unpopular it is. But it’s a certified classic and the fact that we’ve just skipped it is a pretty dire indictment on the entire hobby and what it’s actually contributing to this hot and stinking world.

2. Sly & the Family Stone – “Everyday People” / “Thank You (Falenttinme Be Mice Elf Agin)” / “Family Affair” / EVERY SONG THEY EVER RECORDED

This entry probably started brewing in my mind about nine years ago when I decided to look up The Doobie Brothers and see how many AMVs I could find that were made with their songs. I wasn’t even a fan of the group, but it occurred to me that I’d never seen a Doobie Brothers AMV before and something about that seemed really weird. What if The Doobie Brothers were the most popular band or recording artist without a single AMV to their name? For a while, that was possibly the case, although about three years ago someone finally made one, even if there wasn’t much editing involved in the process. Ah yes, the JoJo effect (I’m not complaining, by the way).

Sly & the Family Stone isn’t a band I’ve ever really listened to, have enjoyed in small doses but always meant to properly check out as soon as I get through the hundred plus-long list of other artists who I’ve never given a fair listen to. Three of their singles reached number one on the Billboard Hot 100 chart between 1969 and 1971. I was unable to find a single AMV made for any one of them. For that matter, I can’t find evidence that any one of their songs has ever been featured in an AMV! I’m sure you could explain why that’s perfectly reasonable and expected–their songs of celebration and revolution and organic funk might be the complete antipode of the languid vibes and solipsistic indulgence that’s never been more in style than today–but that’s not the point. They’re a popular group and that’s a fact.

Sitting down to write this entry, my goal was to pin down individual songs, and never to single out an entire artist’s discography for inclusion, no matter how necessary I feel it might be to do so in special cases. Now that I’m through with that, I can get back to writing about individual songs and certainly not some cluster of…

1. The Beatles – “Can’t Buy Me Love” / “Love Me Do” / “I Feel Fine” / “Eight Days a Week“

I visited my first anime convention in 2004. Most of the single day I spent there is a total blur in my mind, but I have nothing but vivid memories of waiting in line for the AMV contest, finally being ushered in to the dark and absolutely packed room once enough people had trickled out of the showing for us to be allowed in, and suddenly being in the midst of a few hundred other fans who were experiencing the hobby in its absolute purest form. Perhaps it’s wishful thinking to assume that every person in the room felt as ecstatic about what was happening as I remember feeling, but I guarantee you that everyone there was present in the moment and had their eyes glued to the screen. After all, there wasn’t a smartphone in the room or in the entire building. YouTube would not exist for another year. This was the end of an era and while I’m certain that I’m embellishing some of my memories about the experience, I’m thankful that I had a chance to just be a witness to it before it was gone.

What does that have to do with this entry? The AMV I remember most from that contest was dwchang’s “Here Comes the Sun,” a Ghibli AMV set to the original Beatles song. It’s a beautiful video. I would love to share it with you but it’s no longer on YouTube. So, uh… watch this instead, I guess. YouTube keeps recommending it to me, I’m sure it’s great.

Attending the same contest well over a decade later in 2018, I encountered a mysterious Your Name AMV made by an editor whose name I didn’t recognize (LapuLapu, although I seem to recall the video being credited to his real name, which I won’t list here as I suspect that could have been a mistake). “Diamond Sky” was set to The Beatles’ “A Day in the Life,” and while it was previously available for viewing on both YouTube and Vimeo, the uploads have long since been removed due to copyright claims. I was able to rip it before it inevitably disappeared, so I can still watch it whenever I want to. But you can’t!

One Beatles AMV that hasn’t been removed from YouTube for copyright claims is another “Here Comes the Sun” AMV, this one set to scenes from Weathering With You, edited by the fantastic Moezychan. This is, of course, because the audio has been removed! There are still ways to watch the video as its creator intended, which anyone who follows links I post should be able to discover, but that’s a hoop most viewers just don’t want to jump through. And that really stinks! Are most Beatles AMVs destined to be muted, hidden or completely deleted by YouTube? How many have disappeared over the years that we never got a chance to watch? Whether they were knocked out in a matter of minutes or tediously composed over the course of several months, it’s possible that dozens, maybe even hundreds of Beatles AMVs, never survived the upload process before being flagged in the process, or that they somehow managed to be published, only to suddenly be taken down hours, days or even weeks later. Maybe the true scale of this problem is beyond my wildest imagination. Could there be thousands of orphaned Beatles AMVs that the world never even got a chance to watch?

Maybe we can’t truly know if there have ever been any AMVs made to “Eight Days a Week,” “Love Me Do,” “I Feel Fine” or “Can’t Buy Me Love.” You can prove that an AMV exists, but despite the thousands of words that you’ve read to arrive at this point, maybe you can’t truly prove that an AMV doesn’t exist. It’s easy enough to speculate that surely someone, somewhere must have made AMVs to these songs. Keep in mind that these four songs are the Beatles’ number one hits that, to our knowledge, were never featured in an AMV. Sixteen others were! Batting .800 with such a large sample size is a ridiculous feat, and I feel like it’s a sign that without meddlesome outside forces doing whatever they could to funnel AMV editors away from The Fab Four, the remaining gaps in their discography eventually would have been filled. Even “Polythene Pam”? Yes, even “Polythene Pam,” I hope.

These songs are just a few of the biggest hits that no one has ever edited an AMV with, more of a “tip of the iceberg” sampling than a definitive answer to the question at the top of this entry. I’m confident that if I’d explored all the songs that peaked at #2 on the Hot 100, I’d have come up with a list of songs that would be just as big or noteworthy as the random batch that I settled on above. The biggest hits of 2021, 2001, 2000, 1966, 1965 and 1963 never even reached #1. “Gangnam Style” would have hit number one in 2012 but was held back for a whole seven weeks by a Maroon 5 song that nobody reading this will ever be able to name. I guess this was as good a place to start as anywhere, but maybe the answer won’t be found in the songs that reached number one. Maybe it won’t be found on any of these charts. Maybe it’s some jazz standard that everyone knows but can’t name. Maybe it’s some country classic that we all take for granted but will never truly forget. Maybe it’s… oh dear, some television theme that I’m not even considering until right now.

This ought to be a multi-part entry, since there’s still so much ground left to cover and so many possibilities that I’ve yet to consider but have a feeling will eventually present themselves when I’m not in the process of trying to write this. If I can find a new batch of possible contenders for this dubious honor, then I’ll definitely get around to writing it sooner or later. In the meantime, feel free to poke holes in my list by linking me to the AMVs that I wasn’t able to find and was certain didn’t exist. Or better yet, make your own!