Thursday, July 26, 2018

Top 40 and Memory

Memory is a tricky thing and it gets trickier as you age. It's been a good 30 years since I paid much attention to what was going on in Top 40 radio, but in my youth it was important. I recently discovered a cool site, Weekly Top 40, that provides a chronological listing of the Top 40, week by week, going all the way back to 1955. If you want to know what was on the radio at different points in your life, you can find out at the site. For example, the number one song in the land on the day I was born was this surprisingly successful offering:


And the number one song in the land on the day I graduated from high school?


How about college?


I don't if there's a progression there, but it's amusing that in my lifetime we went from the Singing Nun to Madonna. It may not be a window into the soundtrack of your life, but it does remind me of the passage of time and how much things can change in a short period of time. In this era where you can dial up anything you want, any time you want, we don't have a shared experience in the same way we did back then. I don't miss the mediation of the Top 40, but I do wonder if we've lost something in our ability to customize our playlists.

10 comments:

3john2 said...

While the #1 song when you were born and astrology may be equally deterministic in shaping one's life, it is interesting that the song you were born under was from singing nuns, and my song was "Tequila".

Maybe we should be asking, "What's your song?"

(Btw, I'm not fully on-board with the new way of doing music, but after having Pandora, Apple Tunes and Amazon Music over the past couple of years, I find that - in the few times I'm actually listening to the radio in the car - I get very annoyed when a commercial comes on!)

Mr. D said...

Tequila! Nice!

I don’t think what was on the radio has much to say about your life, but it’s interesting context. The Top 40 radio of my infancy was just before the Beatles broke in America. It’s a time that is often derided, but there were some interesting things going on musically at the time. “Louie Louie” by the Kingsmen, “Can I Get a Witness” by Marvin Gaye, “In My Room” by the Beach Boys, “Surfin’ Bird” by the Trashmen, “Anyone Who Had a Heart” by Dionne Warwick — it’s a fascinating mixture of introspection and madness.

I don’t really use streaming – I have a lot of music on MP3 and my car will play music from a flash drive, so I just put a flash drive in the USB port and let it go on shuffle. It’s a complete jumble but it’s music I’ve chosen, so it’s a pleasant thing to have, especially on all the long road trips I make.

3john2 said...

I just signed up for the Amazon Ultimate trial (.99/month) because I could get John Stewart's "The Phoenix Concerts" album in its entirety. Speaking of changes, it was recorded in the late 70's, and the sound is actually exceptional. I listened to the album all the way through a couple of times last week, and what jumps out is how short all the songs are, even "live".

Bike Bubba said...

Apparently it was "Dizzy", by Tommy Roe, whatever that is, for me. Graduated one week late for "With our Without you" by U2, got "You Keep Me Hanging On" by Kim Wilde instead. College? "I don't wanna cry" by Mariah Carey.

I can't hum along with any of these. But give me the Weird Al equivalents or the stuff on the "headbanger's ball", and I'm good.

Mr. D said...

I’ll bet you’ve heard “Dizzy” by Tommy Roe, Bubba. It’s a big ol’ hunk of bubble gum from the era and I would think it’s still in rotation on certain oldies stations. Tommy Roe fits somewhere between Tommy James and Shondells and the 1910 Fruitgum Company – silly, producer-driven music.

W.B. Picklesworth said...

No wonder I didn't listen to the radio in high school or college. It was awful. If I go 20 songs deep into the charts I can find a couple worth listening to.

Gino said...

my 'shared' experience wasnt as deep as others for much of that time. i was listening to the local punk station, and lots of Queen (pre Hot Space album). I never cared about the various music award shows because nobody i listend to ever got to win anything. outside the radio, i had chosen cassettes and vinyl at home.
But i had to leave my car and bedroom on occasion, so i got my share of what everybody else had.

so yeah... there is something to be said about a shared experience... a sense of a common culture among us. we are losing that.

then again... the slow march from a widely agreeable Singing Nun, to a widely agreeable Madonna (who'se video you highlight here is among her sweeter offerings), to what the industry has made widely agreeable today...????

i think it's best that we widely agree less and less than we used to.

Mr. D said...

I hear you, Gino. I don’t necessarily want a “shared experience” either, especially if the shared experience is crap. And a lot of Top 40, historically, has been crap. I couldn’t name five acts in today’s Top 40, I would imagine.

What I’m getting at, I guess, is that the shared experiences used to help us mark the seasons of our lives. If you were alive in 1978, you’d remember “Baker Street” being on the radio in the summer of ’78, or “When Doves Cry” in the summer of ’84. I like the website I’ve recommended because it’s got all the information you need to piece together part of what was going on in those days, should you want to do so.

I’m a regular listener to a radio show on WXRT out of Chicago called “Saturday Morning Flashback,” which airs on Saturday mornings. They will play songs from a particular year, say 1978 or 1984, for those three hours. It’s cool to hear some of the more obscure songs again each week, but it’s not really a reliable document of a particular year, because the DJs at WXRT have a very particular point of view on what the “proper” songs were. They would likely not play your favorites, for example. The raw Top 40 lists tell a broader tale of what was going on.

Gino said...

" And a lot of Top 40, historically, has been crap."

yeah.
not even Queen got their proper acclaim until they dumbed it down a little. familiarize yourself with their first three albums. so richly and delicately layered, so hard an pounding... at the same time. none of what you heard from them on radio was as good.

i guess music is a lot like literature... the crappier it is, the higher it floats.

3john2 said...

...the DJs at WXRT have a very particular point of view on what the “proper” songs were. They would likely not play your favorites, for example."

Just thank God that there are still DJs!