2001-05-30 - 11:34 p.m.

Top Forty Radio

So using my little MP3 player I have set up a playlist of my favorite songs. I then set Winamp on shuffle and it comes up with a random choice among my 250 (or so) favorite songs.

This is one of my problems with listening to the radio - they play the same songs over and over again and make me hate them. Thanks to this there are some songs that have a toxic radioactive half-life of fearful duration. There are some songs that I can hear for the first time in years and STILL be sick of them.

For example - who out there wants to hear Alannis Morissette's "Ironic?"

I didn't think so.

Anyway, I started listening to radio at the very end of the golden age of top forty radio - the very end of the 1960s. For me the perfect year of music was 1970. At one point I was looking at a book of record statistics and I saw that I had over 2/3 of the 630-odd songs that made the Top 100 in that year. It was the time that I discovered music.

For a long time many of the songs of 1970 were among my favorites, but my taste has changed - much of that music now sounds hopelessly quaint and outdated.

But now we venture into hopeless dork territory.

I loved listening to the top 40 (or 30) countdown. It was really exciting hearing how may favorite songs were doing on a week by week basis. I used to listen to Casey Kasem's Top 40 for years and years, carefully writing down the songs as Casey played them in order.

One of the good things about listening to the top 40 is you had four hours of radio where you were guaranteed not to hear the same song twice!

However, things seldom happened as I wanted them to on the countdown, so this lead to me doing my own private countdown of my favorite songs, and doing it just for myself.

I did it from June of 1971 until May of 1981, I think. After I put my favorite songs in order I'd type out the list and put it away. Sometimes the survey was monthly, in other times weekly or biweekly depending on how much free time I had and how much I wanted to do it.

All those surveys of my favorite songs from 20 years ago are in a folder up in the attic somewhere.

Thinking about this I kind of have mixed feelings. It was a pleasant way to pass the time, but it looks like sort of thing a lonely kid who didn't have many friends would do.

Why did I stop in 1981? That was around when I graduated from college. Maybe I was just too busy, and I eventually forgot about it. Maybe I was too depressed to make the effort.

At some point in the late 1970s I stopped listening to top 40 radio. If I wanted to know what the top songs in the country were, I just bought Billboard magazine. And top 40 radio has pretty much disappeared from the American scene. I think there is only one station around here that could really be called "Top 40." All the others are either oldies or some genre like "country" or "easy listening."

And of course top 40 music is not really being made for people my age anyway. It's all about teenagers, same as it ever was.

When I used to do my surveys, I would write down song titles on slips of paper and arrange them, then type up the list. Even when I was doing that, it occurred to me that there must be a better way to do it. When I finally got a computer for my house with a database program, I realized that here was a much more sophisticated way of keeping track of my music. At first I merely put together a file with all my singles and another with all my LPs and CDs, just to keep track of what I had. Then I started rating them, so I could put them in order of how much I liked them. However, liking something is always relative. There are some times when you are not in the mood for certain songs, you get tired of your favorites and so on.

I never put a lot of time into in, but as the years went by the file of songs grew and grew until the total crept past 6000.

So what do I do with this database? Mainly I use it to make tapes that I play in the car. Generally I make tapes from a certain year. However, that may come to an end when I get my next car. I will probably prefer to have a disc player over a tape player. Well, then I guess I'll need a CD burner.

So, what's in my top 100? To know that you'll have to check out my next entry.