2001-06-06 - 11:57 p.m.

Out of Touch

As I mentioned earlier I am a fan of the Billboard charts and popular music in general. Billboard magazine is always interesting reading, but it is expensive - as in $7.95 an issue expensive.

Last year, partly due to the fact that I was out of town over the Xmas holidays, I missed Billboard's annual year-end issue, which had all their top awards and surveys for 2000. At the time I was apathetic - I had a lot of other things on my mind. Nevertheless this was the first Billboard year-end issue that I'd missed since the early 80s or late 70s. Part of it was that I really felt that popular music had nothing interesting to offer me: more dreadful rap and country music, more clones of Britney Spears and 'NSYNC. To my ears it now seems that everything that is "new" is just a copy of something that's been done before, and done better. Same old, same old.

Is this really what's happening, or am I just bitter that pop radio is not playing music for people my age anymore?

I remember reading a quote once: "What most people call thinking is really just re-arranging their prejudices." Is that really what I'm doing by dismissing popular music? Perhaps I should give a good listen to what's out there before I turn off my radio forever.

About a year ago I wrote a meditation on popular music. What is it about early June that has me thinking this way? Well, that's when I get the Billboard Music Yearbook from Record Research. In the mail today I got the Yearbook for 2000. It's an expensive little paperback ($35) but it's cheaper than buying six issues of Billboard.

I sat down and took a look at the top songs in the Pop charts. Number one for the year was "Independent Women" by Destiny's Child, followed closely by "Maria, Maria" by Santana. Top album, depending on how you look at it, is either "Supernatural" by Santana or "No Strings Attached" by 'NSYNC, with "The Marshall Mathers LP" by Eminem close behind.

Looking down the songs that made the charts last year, I was troubled at how few of them I recognized. Of the 321 songs that made the top 100 I only owned eight.

Well, the point of my life is not to subsidize the record industry. However, my CD purchases have dropped way off in the last year and a half. I've been too busy to listen to the radio, and besides it annoys the hell out of me. Forgetting all arguments about whether modern pop music is bad or good, there definitely seems to be a smaller percentage of music I tend to like. Couple that with the high repetition on most top 40 stations and the irritating commercials, the radio becomes just about unlistenable.

But looking at the yearbook, an idea occurred to me: what was keeping me from listening to every single one of those songs? Thanks to mp3 technology I could probably hunt down most of those songs pretty quickly. This would avoid me listening to hundreds of maddeningly repetitive hours of pop radio, and enable me to pick out what I like among what's new.

This is even better than when I did listen to pop radio a lot. It always seemed to me that there were dozens of songs in the top 100 that I never heard, but now I can listen to every single one of them on my mp3 player while I am working at my computer.

Probably I will discover that there are a lot of crappy songs out there that I would have been better off not hearing. Still, it's worth it to find the good ones.

Like a lot of things, it's an experiment. I'll let you all know how it turns out.