Friday, February 27, 2009

Pokin' the Bottom of the Top 100


Think of this post as a guilty pleasure, except with less pleasure. We're obscurity hunting.


The rules are simple enough -- pick a song that finished in the bottom five of the Billboard Top 100 for five random years. The memorable songs for each year tend to be in the top 40, of course. But when you get to the bottom five, chances are you'll find a song that:


A) Someone liked; and

B) Sometimes that might be you.


The five random years are: 1967, 1970, 1975, 1983 and 1991.


Believe it or not, the #1 song for 1967 was Lulu's "To Sir With Love." Actually, one of the songs on the bottom of the Top 100 was awfully good that year. It is one of my favorite songs by the Who, an eternal classic, that found itself just ahead of Petula Clark's "Don't Sleep in the Subway" that year at #98. Feel the power, the menace and the vision of




For 1970, the #1 was Simon and Garfunkel's "Bridge Over Troubled Water." It was a long way from Art Garfunkel's angelic tenor to the bottom of the chart that year. There, at #98, you found the King of the Blues, B. B. King, with a number that in its own way is probably as enduring.




Let's be honest -- as years in music go, 1975 was pretty poor. The #1 was those 55-gallon drums of saccharine, The Captain & Tenille, with "Love Will Keep Us Together." That song makes my teeth hurt. Down at the bottom, there was some really weird stuff, like the #100 entry from the immortal Disco Tex, reminding you that "nobody cares how you wear your hair, darlin'":




Guess you had to be there.


When I think back to 1983, I remember Michael Jackson, but the #1 song of the year was the equally huge "Every Breath You Take," by the Police. Down at the bottom of the chart at #99 was one of Joe Jackson's finer efforts, actually recorded in late 1982 but one that you heard all the time the next year, especially on my college campus. It takes me right back.




1991 was actually a pretty good year in music, I think -- I wrote an earlier post about it. It was also the year that Mrs. D and I got married. The #1 for the year was Bryan Adams's "Everything I Do I Do It For You," the very model of modern power ballad and as insipid as they all are. You had better choices at the bottom of the chart, including the mightily amusing dance jam "Groove Is in the Heart" from Deee-Lite at #91, and at the bottom, R.E.M.'s "Shiny Happy People," here shown in a Sesame Street version called
that used to delight my son back in the day.


The moral of the story? Sometimes it's better to look at the bottom.


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