2000-06-04 - 13:37:28

I love listening to music, and it seems I always have. I have a huge CD collection, in fact that's the first thing people notice when they walk into my house. What can I say? There are worse vices, I suppose.

What kind of music do I like? Well, I could give you a list of artists I've been listening to recently: Aimee Mann, Jill Sobule, Shawn Colvin, Everything But The Girl. Gerry Rafferty, Sheryl Crow, Jen Trynin, Lauren Christy.

Basically, I like Pop music.

When I was a kid one of the things I loved to do was listen to the national top forty countdown. You know, with Casey Kasem. I also have a big pile of Billboard Magazines, going back almost 30 years. The ups and downs of the pop music charts… it just fascinates me. The same way baseball statistics fascinate some people.

Every so often I make a point of listening to the national top forty countdown, still done by Casey Kasem. Although, for some reason, he's now no longer associated with Billboard, and is instead doing the countdown for a magazine named "Radio and Records" which I've never seen. Whatever. It's what's popular.

A couple of weeks ago, I sat through a top forty countdown… oh boy. It seems that Pop music really SUCKS these days! If it isn't same pre-packaged boy band crap, it's some pre-packaged diva girl-singer crap. Or some nasty rap. Or some ghastly European techno-dance crap. Or some "country" music that, twenty years ago, would have been called a "mid-tempo ballad" but what makes it "country" music is that it's sung by a guy with a southern accent and a cowboy hat rather than a sensitive-looking guy with long hair from Southern California. Whatever.

And then there's THIS masterpiece, which I actually recorded and transcribed for your reading pleasure:

The Bad Touch

As sung by the Bloodhound Gang

Sweat baby sweat

Baby sex is a Texas drought

Can you do the type of stuff

That only Prince would sing about

So put your hands down my pants

And I'll bet you'll feel nuts

Yes I'm Siskel, yes I'm Ebert

And you're getting two thumbs up

You've had enough of two-hand touch

You want it rough

You're out of bounds

I want you smothered

Want you covered

Like my Waffle House hash browns

Got me cookin'

Like F/X, never reachin' an apex

[inaudible??]

You are inclined

To make me rise an hour early like Daylight Savings Time

Chorus:

You and me baby ain't nothing but mammals,

So let's do it like they do on the Discovery Channel,

(repeat a bunch of times)

Love, the kind you clean up with a mop and bucket

The lost catacombs of Egypt

Only God knows where we stuck it.

Hieroglyphics, let me be Pacific

I want to be down in your South Seas,

But I got the notion that motion in your ocean

Needs small craft advisories.

So if I capsize in your thighs' high tides

B5 - You sunk my Battleship.

Please turn me on I'm Mr. Coffee with an automatic drip

So show me yours I'll show you mine

[inaudible - they talk too fast!]

So then we'll do it doggie style so we can watch X-Files.

Chorus:

You and me baby ain't nothing but mammals,

So let's do it like they do on the Discovery Channel,

(repeat a whole bunch more times)

Okay, yeah. It IS really funny. "Put your hands down my pants and I'll bet you feel nuts…" that did have me laughing. It's just I have a hard time believing that the actually play this sort of stuff on the radio… you know, kids' morals and everything.

(Ha, ha! Checking out the Bloodhound Gang's CD, it has an incredibly childish name "Hooray for Boobies!" and there's another song on the disc called "A Lap Dance Is Always Better When The Stripper Is Crying." I think this is very funny, but that's because I'm basically a bad person.)

And then I got to thinking…

For starters, I have to realize that what popular today is not being aimed at me, it's being aimed at people half my age and less. It's not about ME any more and that is kind of a bummer.

Also, I'd like to introduce a concept here I call CHRONOCENTRICITY. That is to say, getting fixated on a specific time. This was an idea that some friends of mine came up with a while ago, and it's been a concept that has proven useful over the years.

An example of chronocentricity is a cynical old man who complains that the world is going to hell nowadays, not like when he was a kid. However, when he was a kid, he imagined everyone to be sweet and innocent like himself, but now he knows better, everyone is selfish and jaded, just like him. Another example is imagining that kinky sex started with the Sexual Revolution. Nope! Or imagining that child abuse is something that only started happening recently. Not hardly. In fact, I was reading a while ago that in the mid-1800s child abuse was practically institutionalized with "Christian Orphan Organizations" that were little more than child labor farms.

But I'm straying off subject. The central fact: human nature is pretty constant.

So about pop music - am I being chronocentristic?

Well, yes and no.

Pop music and the styles that are popular have changed a lot over my lifetime, but there is a constant - there has always been… shall we say… regrettable music?

I really consider 1970 to be the golden year for pop music - it's when I first started seriously listening to what was being played on the radio. Obviously a lot of different styles of music have come to the fire since then - disco, punk, new wave, rap, and so on.

Because I love the pop charts, I have bought some of Joel Whitburn's Record Research books. They are very cool, but somewhat expensive. Most of the stuff I'm going to be quoting is from there. (Commercial plug: Joel Whitburn has a website: www.recordresearch.com)

Statistically, there is the big change from 1970 to now. In 1970 there were 634 songs that made the Billboard top100. There were 21 songs that hit #1. The biggest hit of 1970 was Simon & Garfunkel's "Bridge Over Troubled Waters," and it was No. 1 for six weeks. There were a total of 96 songs that made the top 10 that year.

In 1998, which is the most recent year I have the yearbook data for, there were only 346 songs that hit the top 100, there were 15 songs that made it to #1, with the longest being "The Boy Is Mine," by Monica & Brandy, which topped the charts for 13 weeks. That's a whole season, people!

The biggest thing that you notice, statistically, is that songs are sticking around much, much, much longer on the charts. Looking at 1970, your average #1 song stayed on the chart for about 16 weeks. The longevity champ for that year was B.J. Thomas' "Raindrops Keep Fallin' On My Head" which was on the charts for 22 weeks.

Comparing this to 1998 you see a monster difference. The average No. 1 song seems to be on the charts for AT LEAST 23 weeks with some staying on twice that long, or more. "You're Still The One" by Shania Twain was on the charts 42 weeks. Stuff like this was unthinkable back in 1970. "Together Again" by Janet Jackson was on the charts 46 weeks. "Truly Madly Deeply" by Savage Garden was on the charts 52 (!!) weeks and the champ is "Too Close" by Next with 53 weeks. Both those songs were on the chart over a YEAR!!

However, looking farther down the charts there are other songs that stayed on for a year: Faith Hill's "This Kiss" peaked at #7 but stayed on the charts 48 weeks. Third Eye Blind's "How It Going To Be" was on 52 weeks, but only peaked at #9. However the overall champion is Paula Cole's "I Don't Want To Wait", which although it only peaked at #11, it was on the charts 56 frigging weeks, and 46 of those were in the top forty!

I don't know about you, but I think I've heard that song, and several others that I've mentioned, enough times to last me the rest of my life. They've been played so often that they now have a radioactive half-life to my delicate little shell-like ears.

I've spent a little longer than I intended talking about these statistics. What do they mean? What's causing this? To be blunt, I think it's a function of fewer record companies and more corporate control of radio stations. Radio stations are changing their playlists much more slowly than they used to and playing a smaller number of different songs during the course of the day.

And ask yourself this question - when does a record company make more money, when it sells 1 million of 10 different discs by 10 different artists, or when it sells 10 million discs by one artist? The answer is obviously the latter, not the former. Essentially what you hear on the radio is not being dictated by what you WANT to hear, but by what is more convenient and profitable for various corporations.

This sounds like a terrible injustice, not to mention a major annoyance (the radio is driving me CRAZY!) but from what I can tell, it's not all that serious. Just from what I've seen wandering through Diaryland journals, everybody seems to be doing an end-run around how bland and horrible radio is these days. Various journalers are talking about dozens and dozens of bands I've never even heard of and that's a good thing. I think that radio is on its way out anyway - people will be getting their music online more and more.

I think that the underlying debate about MP3s and the Internet is less about copyright and more about corporations trying to constrict the variety of music we listen to. I feel that all the problems that the big labels are having is their own damn fault - they're not offering enough variety and their unit price is WAY too high.

Think about it - I don't believe Metalica is losing all that much money from MP3's downloaded off of Napster, but I do think that their record company is losing lots of bucks to people listening to and craving music that isn't owned by them, or maybe any big record label. I think Metalica are being record company stooges for going along with this, and they probably don't even realize it. Idiots. I hope their CD sales plunge.

Wow - I got carried away by a major rant! We now return to our regularly scheduled broadcast.

The original point that I wanted to make with this entry is that while Pop music now seems to suck, it has sort of ALWAYS sucked! (I guess now it just sucks in a more highly concentrated form!)

For example, try to imagine how miserable you'd be if you lived in 1963 and you hated Surf Music. You live in Maine, and after trudging through the slush to get to your lonely cabin, you turn on the radio only to hear Jan & Dean warbling about "Surf City" where there's "two girls for every boy!" Thereupon you smash your radio with an ax and throw what's left outside into the snow.

There have always been annoying songs and annoying trends in pop music. Another part of chronocentricity is that we conveniently forget horrible stuff that was popular, at the same time that the great and truly classic stuff was popular as well. This makes every era of the past look like a Golden Age, compared to now, when that isn't the case at all, really.

I'm going to go through the book and pick out some prime examples.

1964 is fondly remembered for Beatlemania, the British Invasion and a big bunch of number one hits for the Supremes, but the radio was mainly full of schlocky ballads. "There! I've Said It Again" by Bobby Vinton was the third most popular song for the whole year, behind "I Want To Hold Your Hand" and "Can't Buy Me Love."

"Ringo" a spoken word record by Bonanza's Lorne Greene, was a No. 1 hit, and it actually had nothing at all to do with Mr. Starr - it was about a gunfighter in the Old West. While I'm sure this thrilled all the 10 year old boys wearing plastic cowboy hats, I'm sure adults listening to the radio were less than happy about being subjected to it.

You know, I'll bet that people were really chilled by Barry McGuire's folk rock gloom and doom protest song "Eve of Destruction" in 1966. However, here it is 34 years later and we're all still here. It makes me giggle: The world didn't end after all, nyah, nyah! Less funny is the thought that we still have the same depressing international problems, 34 years later. Hi ho.

The forces of darkness and cynicism were on the run in 1967. Everything was all about love and flower power. "The Rain, The Park and Other Things," "Windy," "San Francisco (Be Sure To Wear Some Flowers In Your Hair)," "Up, Up and Away," "Incense and Peppermints," "All You Need Is Love," these were all songs that were big that year. Of course now we're seeing that the children raised on this peace and love music have turned into the most greedy, self-absorbed generation of horrible parents ever! Holy generation gap, Batman! Of course, the silver lining to this dark cloud is that the gloomy and violent music that some youngsters listen to now will probably have an equally negligible effect on them when they become adults. At least we hope so!

The music that's remembered most fondly from the late 1960s is the Grateful Dead, The Doors, Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin, and so on. However what was topping the charts, for the most part, was syrupy ballads and Bubblegum music. In 1969 "The Love Theme From Romeo and Juliet" by Henry Mancini topped the charts for two weeks. Other big songs: "Sugar, Sugar" by the Archies, "Crimson and Clover" By Tommy James and the Shondells, "Dizzy" by Tommy Roe, "A Boy Named Sue" by Johnny Cash… wait! How'd that get in there?

"Yummy, yummy yummy, I've got love in my tummy…" Okay, what do YOU think he's singing about?

Bubblegum music seems cute and harmless NOW, but a steady diet of it is definitely bad for your mental health, and it was all that was being played on the radio. One good thing: 30 years ago no song was over 3:30 minutes long, so at least the torture was over quickly.

Once we go into the 1970s we come across things that I remember better, although I'd like to forget.

Kid groups were big in 1971. Most people found Hanson hard to take a couple of years ago - imagine that multiplied tenfold! A hundred-fold! "One Bad Apple" was a huge hit for the Osmonds then, just thinking about Donny Osmond's shrill vocals on this song gives me a headache.

Things definitely started to go wrong in 1972. Sammy Davis, Jr. had a No. 1 pop hit with "The Candy Man," Mac Davis sang a song that I'm sure endeared him to budding feminists everywhere: "Baby Don't Get Hooked On Me." Rock legend Chuck Berry finally had his first No. 1 song with the leering "My Ding A Ling." No, he's definitely not singing about his willie, uh-uh. And Michael Jackson had his first solo No. 1 hit with a love song sung to a rat: "Ben."

Also in 1972 we had one of those pop culture moments, which I just kind of look at in awe and say "did that really happen, or did I just imagine it?" However, I have the proof right here in front of me in black and white. There was a top ten hit in 1972 called "Jungle Fever" by a group called Chakachas. What it was, essentially, was the sounds of two people fucking to a salsa beat. That's it! No lyrics or anything. You didn't hear any squishy noises or sounds of bodies slappin', but you did get lots of grunts and groans and cries of ecstasy. The woman was especially vocal in her appreciation: "No! No! NOOOOO! Siiiiiii…"

I thought that this group was from Spain (since they seem to be groaning endearments in Spanish), but my big old chart statistic book says that they were from Belgium (eh?) and the single went gold (500,000 copies sold!), peaking at No. 8. So I DIDN'T imagine it! I kind of wonder how Casey Kasem introduced the song on the countdown with a straight face, I wish I could remember.

Anyway… er, ah! Back to the countdown!

1973: "Tie a Yellow Ribbon 'Round The Old Oak Tree" was almost the biggest songs of the year. It's kind of touching the first time you hear it… by the 50th play (later the same day, probably) it starts to grate a little..

1974: "You're Having My Baby" was a No, 1 hit, a song that seemed to set a lot of people's teeth on edge, including mine. This was ameliorated a little bit by the fact that this year was practically a parade of pop horrors: "Kung Fu Fighting," "The Way We Were," "Seasons In The Sun," "Billy Don't Be A Hero," "The Night Chicago Died," "Cat's In The Cradle", "I Honestly Love You," "Sunshine On My Shoulders," "You're Sixteen, You're Beautiful, and You're Mine," this last sung with leering emphasis by Ringo Starr. I don't get why that song was popular at all. Was it just because he was a Beatle?

Of course, things went from bad to worse in 1975 with the rise of disco. I don't have anything against dance music, per se, but so much of it was so damn DUMB, and most of the music was just sort of bland accompaniment to rhythmic behavior, on the dance floor and off. It wasn't actually meant to be listened to! Some examples: "Do It (Til You're Satisfied)," "Fly Robin Fly," "The Hustle," "A Fifth of Beethoven," "Theme From SWAT," "Disco Lady," "Disco Duck" (Oh dear Lord!) and there's more and more.

I've inadvertently wandered into 1976 with some of those songs, and 1976 was chock full of disco goodness, with the songs being ever more horny and sex-obsessed as the Sexual Revolution finally surged over the flimsy barriers set up by the FCC.

Of course, 1976 had other things that might make you want to drive a spike into your ears: "Afternoon Delight," "Convoy" (10-4 good buddy!) and this was also the peak year for that Plague in Plaid, The Bay City Rollers.

Is this getting tiresome? I think I'm going to stop soon…

Oh dear. In 1977 disco was doing a victory lap, and everybody was scrambling to climb on the bandwagon. Abba had their biggest hit ever with "Dancing Queen," for example. Now many people consider this a classic, and maybe it is, but one of the bad side effects of disco was that it killed Soul music dead. It was practically extinct by this point. However, even the power of disco couldn't save us from a song that was the biggest hit of the entire decade: "You Light Up My Life," a syrupy ballad sung, as it turned out, to Jesus Christ. Don't hear this song on the radio anymore, do we now? I think even God was embarrassed by that one.

1978 was more of the same. I was in college then and I remember clearly the celebration at the college radio station when Gerry Rafferty's album "City To City" knocked the soundtrack to "Saturday Night Fever" out of the top slot on the Billboard album chart, thank goodness. Particularly intolerable were "Le Freak," and "Boogie Oogie Oogie." Aaagh. I'd almost forgotten that Donna Summer did a disco version of "Mac Arthur Park." The Rolling Stones even hopped on the bandwagon and got a #1 hit with "Miss You." Not a bad song, but it added to the feeling of gloom, like living under an oppressive musical dictatorship.

Disco was still producing hits, but it was plainly on its way out in 1979. The biggest hit of the year was the "new wave" song "My Sharona" a pumping four minute ode to sneering misogyny and teenage lust. Er, can we have disco back now? Only kidding! For about ten minutes everyone thought that The Knack were the New Beatles… and then we sobered up. "New Wave" seemed to be punk energy distilled by record companies to make hit singles. One of the great rock voices, Rod Stewart, sold out irredeemably with the huge hit "Da Ya Think I'm Sexy?" and don’t forget "Escape (The Pina Colada Song)"!

1980 seems like a good place to stop. Disco was still around. The bouncy syntho-piping of "Funkytown" was like fingernails on the blackboard to me. When in doubt, the music industry falls back on… syrupy ballads! Kenny Rogers' "Lady" was the biggest hit of the year. To me it sounded like four minutes of tuneless groaning. Air Supply and Christopher Cross seemed to be trying to assign scientific principles to pop blandness. I definitely should stop now, yes.

So what have I proved with this catalogue of musical grievances? Pop music produces some great stuff, key sounds of the moment, but it mainly produces forgettable aural static, or real brain-bowing kitsch. So getting your knickers in a twist over being subjected to Britney Spears for the eighth time that hour is kind of pointless. Today we have the freedom of personal stereos. Turn off the damn radio!