The difference between journalism and history is, of course, time and perspective – as I’ve been reminded over the last few months, as I’ve presumptuously taken it upon myself to identify the Worst Number One Songs of the Rock Era. I’ve had to attack songs from the ’50s and ’60s that I wasn’t around to hear in heavy rotation on Top 40 radio, and therefore can only judge through a historical prism. I’ve been forced to balance my childhood/teenage perspective on the music of the ’70s and ’80s with my current, more jaundiced view – a view that dominated my thoughts on ’90s music.

But now that’s all out the window, as I wade into the (at times kinda filthy) waters of Noughties pop with a firm realization that I am definitively Out Of The Demographic. Though it fluctuates around the edges, the traditional target demo of Top 40 radio is ages 12 to 35; well, I hit my 35th birthday in December 2000 – the Number One song that week appears on this list – and right around that time my (practically) lifelong obsession with pop radio and the Hot 100 was confronted by a simple, yet overpowering question: “What is this crap?”

And just like that, I found myself perilously close to this:

Oh, I’ve done my best to fight it – that whole “Why do kids listen to this type of music?” thing. I’ve tried to keep up, and in fact, in researching this column I was pleasantly surprised to find relatively few songs that I had never heard even once. (Of course, in many cases I had only heard them because I had seen a fresh issue of Billboard, thought “What the heck is that?” and made a quick visit to iTunes or YouTube.) Of course, music fans of all ages, races and tastes are likely to find similar gaps in their knowledge of this decade’s chart-topping songs. As I detailed last week in this space, huge changes at radio and in the marketplace have turned the Hot 100 into something of a warehouse for the biggest hits in various (and often mutually exclusive) radio sub-formats, rather than a distillation of the once-hegemonic Top 40 beast.

Simply put, the Hot 100 no longer reflects the listening experiences of many pop-radio-listening Americans. It leans a bit too heavily on R&B tracks, because the “Rhythmic Top 40” stations on the Hot 100 radio panel tend to give more daily spins to their top tracks than do “Top 40 Mainstream” stations. It leans way too heavily on rap singles, even though many of those singles receive scant airplay on the majority of pop stations, because rap accounts for a disproportionate percentage of the CD singles still being sold. In fact, the Hot 100 has changed so much, and generated so many complaints in recent years, that Billboard saw fit three years ago to create a “Pop 100” chart (and a complementary “Pop 100 Airplay” list) to track activity on what’s left of “mainstream” Top 40.

But you know what? Screw it. If the Hot 100 is still good enough for Fred Bronson and his Billboard Book of Number One Hits, it’s good enough for me – even if it means I had to give multiple spins to a batch of derivative, middling rap hits that likely wouldn’t have come anywhere near the Number One slot if not for their utter prurience. So let’s get on with it, and I’ll try to get through without too many Quincy moments. (more…)

Over the past several months I’ve been engaged in a Vision Quest on this tiny slice of the Internet, attempting to locate and suitably disparage the worst Number One songs of the Rock Era. That quest will reach some sort of fruition next week with a rundown of the worst-bests of our current decade; however, the process of reviewing the top songs of the last two decades has compelled me to focus on the myriad changes that have rocked the music industry – and the pop singles charts – since my brief tenure as a copy editor and writer at Billboard in the early 1990s. In order to understand those changes more clearly, I decided to enlist the guru himself – Geoff Mayfield, Billboard’s Director of Charts and Senior Analyst.

If you’re a chart obsessive like I am – and if you’re still reading this, you probably are – you likely are aware that, beginning around the time I worked at the magazine (really, I swear it’s not my fault), dramatic changes rocked the seemingly well-oiled machine known as Billboard’s Hot 100. The magazine began using computerized analyses of both airplay and sales at that time, in an effort to make the Hot 100 and its other charts more accurate than ever; paradoxically, though, changes in the practices of those who spun, manufactured and sold music conspired at that time to make the magazine’s flagship chart a less-accurate reflection of the public’s musical tastes.

By the end of the ’90s, the chart which had defined American popular music for four decades would be, arguably, a shadow of its former self – victimized by advancing technologies, fragmenting radio formats, declining sales and panicking record companies. These changes manifested themselves in ways that were clear to anyone who followed the charts closely. For one thing, singles began achieving longer stretches at Number One than had previously been the norm; whereas exactly one song (Olivia Newton-John’s “Physical”) had spent as many as 10 weeks atop the Hot 100 between 1958 and 1991, no fewer than 15 have done so since then. Similarly, since 1995 a dozen singles have debuted at Number One; no single had done that in the first 40 years of the rock era.

On the other hand, since the ’90s it has been common for singles to advance all the way to the top of the Hot 100 without receiving airplay on hundreds of the stations that participate in the chart’s radio panel. And, in the development that was perhaps most disturbing to chart-watchers, during the ’90s many of the biggest radio hits – particularly songs by rock-oriented acts – failed to chart at all. (more…)

Man, I’ve got a headache. Maybe it’s a hangover from the most recent installment in this series, when so many readers joined me in sifting through the effluvial of the ’80s that I briefly thought they were clicking over to Popdose to revel in my rapier wit, rather than to hear “Kokomo” one more time. Having been disavowed of this notion by the Pulitzer committee, which dropped me in round one of their deliberations over the coveted “Best Performance by a Wise-Ass Pop Listmaker” medal, I drank through my pain and decided to soldier on to the 1990s.

It was an era when…hmmm… What happened in the ’90s, anyway? I mean, apart from Bill and Hill and Newt and Monica and all that? Isn’t there a VH1 show somewhere that can remind me why this decade is worth discussing? Oh, of course – and the I Love the ’90s web page lists the decade’s pop-culture “highlights” primarily as a series of rivalries: Tonya and Nancy… Amy Fisher and the Buttafuocos… Pee-Wee and his wee-wee… Sharon Stone and her cooter…

Bleah. Of course, the recording industry in the ’90s had its own share of rivalries – Mariah vs. Whitney, Hammer vs. Vanilla Ice, Garth vs. Billy Ray, Biggie vs. 2Pac, Puff Daddy vs. P. Diddy, Britney vs. Xtina, Backstreet vs. N’Sync, Kurt vs. the shotg… sorry. Too soon? (Speaking of “too soon,” it’s worthwhile to note that while ’80s nostalgia was already rampant by the mid-’90s, no such yearning for the halcyon days of Showgirls and 90210 has yet emerged nearly a decade post-millennium.)

For the purposes of this column, at least, the biggest music-biz rivalries of the decade featured Top-40 radio formats diverging and competing for listeners, and major record companies declaring war on… their customers. I’ll go into more detail on these phenomena next week in this space; for now, here’s a brief rundown. On the radio side, a trend toward narrowcasting divided Top 40 radio into multiple mini-formats, with the result that by the late 1990s songs could reach #1 on the Billboard Hot 100 while receiving airplay on only a fraction of the format’s stations. Meanwhile, radio playlists shrank through the early ’90s at the same time that Billboard began tracking airplay electronically rather than relying on radio stations’ own reports; as a result, the biggest hits sat atop the chart for months at a time.

At retail, panicky record labels responded to a sales slowdown by ending the production of singles for many of their biggest rock-oriented acts. Because Billboard was slow to change its Hot 100 eligibility policies to include radio hits that hadn’t been released as commercial singles, the charts of the 1990s failed to properly recognize some of the era’s biggest hits – including the two biggest pop-radio hits of the rock era, the Goo Goo Dolls’ “Iris” and No Doubt’s “Don’t Speak.” Joel Whitburn’s Top Pop Singles books, in their most recent vintages, list those and other radio-only chart-toppers of the ’90s as Number Ones; Fred Bronson’s Billboard Book of Number One Hits, on the other hand, continues to focus solely on the Hot 100. Contradicting my own policy, established in my column on the ’50s, I’ve chosen this time to favor Bronson and remain Hot 100-centric. So sue me.

On that note… as Casey Kasem used to say after one of those wretched Long Distance Dedications: On with the countdown! (more…)

A few weeks ago in this space, I located the origin of my personal anglophilia in the syndicated radio show Rock Over London, which introduced Americans to ‘80s-era British acts both major (Tears for Fears) and minor (that Boy George imitator, Marilyn). For me, the visual equivalent of Rock Over London was the Rock Yearbook series, which was published (in the U.S. at least) by St. Martin’s Press each autumn between 1980 and 1988. Many were the early-December days during college when I would blow off studying for finals to stalk the local bookstores for the latest edition, then immerse myself in the intimate details of Prefab Sprout or the Blow Monkeys’ chart positions instead of re-reading Dostoevsky or sifting through histories of the Boer War.

My grades tended to reflect these priorities, but no matter: The education found in the Yearbooks’ glossy pages eventually proved at least as valuable as the one for which my parents staved off retirement and depleted their bank accounts. For the Rock Yearbooks were a trove of both information and attitude, generously ladled by critics from the British rock rags Melody Maker, New Musical Express, Record Mirror and Smash Hits. These Brits were uniformly snarky, self-indulgent and pleased with themselves, in contrast with an American crit-corps who (for the most part) took themselves and the music way too seriously to revel in the trinket-like gaudiness of ’80s pop.

The thrills of the Rock Yearbooks were manyfold: the Acts of the Year and Quotes of the Year reviews, the Best and Worst Album Covers, the “Thanks…but No Thanks” section (from 1985: “thanks” to the Who “for finally calling it a day,” and “no thanks” to Everything But the Girl – “Why did they always have to look so miserable?”).

But for me, the mother’s milk were the year’s worth of top-20 singles and albums charts – from Billboard in the U.S. and Music Week in the U.K. – and the collected snippets of album reviews culled from the aforementioned British music mags. With the charts, the fun was in the cross-cultural comparisons – how much time passed between a song’s appearance in one country and its debut in the other, for example, or how the U.S. and U.K. charts could be at times quite similar (“I Want to Know What Love Is” dominated both countries simultaneously), at others wildly divergent. Take, for example, these Top 5’s from June 1984: (more…)

Like a lot of music buyers back in the late ’70s and early ’80s – a pre-Compact Disc era when recession, market oversaturation, aversion to disco, and other factors sent record sales plummeting – I tried to make wise decisions with my limited funds. Between a half-decent allowance and the profits earned from selling Cokes at Virginia Tech football games (where a really warm day could bring as much as $40, not bad for a 12-year-old in 1978), I was able to buy a couple singles a week and a couple albums a month. I would try to make sure I didn’t duplicate my efforts; if I was considering buying a single, I wanted to make sure I wouldn’t later buy the same song on an album.

As a result, my collection of singles (long since moved to the garage, the poor things) is mostly a hodgepodge of one-hit wonders and low-charting songs by mid-level artists. Most of them climbed into the Top 40, thereby escaping the fate of appearing in my Popdose colleague Dave Steed’s “Bottom Feeders” series, yet many of them are nearly forgotten now. Except, of course, on those few occasions when I fire up the ol’ turntable and put that plastic ring over the spindle – or when I dip into the “Jon’s Singles” folder in iTunes, where I’ve stashed the digital versions of those haphazardly stored, half-warped 45s of my youth.

This occasional series will give some of these singles a moment in the sun. I don’t promise you’ll like them – in some cases I no longer know what I was thinking when buying them – but nobody ever said nostalgia and quality have to go hand in hand…

Eddie Schwartz, “All Our Tomorrows” (1982)

Jim Bartlett, a part-time DJ and full-time memory bank who maintains the excellent radio-related blog The Hits Just Keep On Comin’, stole my thunder by posting this track just a few weeks ago. I’m doing it anyway, just because it’s the perfect representation of a type of song you almost never hear anymore: midtempo, keyboard-driven pop. (more…)

Something’s come over me as I’ve contemplated this, the fourth edition of what promises to be a six-part series (the invention of time travel seeming unlikely before I conclude, sometime around Memorial Day). My sentimental generosity toward music I once liked, whether I still do or not, has been replaced by a tendency to see the lameness of every single song on the charts. I only want to think about stuff that’s obscure, stuff with mopey vocals and jangly guitars and drone-y synths, songs that make me want to either have sex or kill myself. Plus, I’m starting to grow hair on my balls …

Of course! Adolescence!! That must be it: I spent most of the ’80s in full hormonal rage. The decade began in the middle of my freshman year of high school; Thriller and “Every Breath You Take” accompanied my high school graduation; Live Aid found me sowing summertime-on-campus oats; upon college graduation I still hadn’t found what I was looking for; etc., etc. As a teenage boy — and then as a college-paper rock-crit slacker — it was, of course, incumbent upon me to hate everything commercial and seek out the morose and the morbid. (Not that this always worked out; if my high school friends read this they’ll be happy to point out my Hall & Oates worship or the way I’d sing along with Rick Springfield in the yearbook room.)

My point is, you’ll have to excuse the fact that while it was difficult at times to come up with 10 chart-topping hits that I truly hated from the ’50s, ’60s or ’70s, I had a hard time finding 10 such singles to like from the 1980s. There were 241 number-one hits during those god-forsaken Reagan years, and I wanted to include about 220 of them on this list. In fact, before we launch into the bottom 10 (or so), let’s indulge in a chronological rundown of 30 songs that didn’t quite sink low enough to make the Big List, yet are richly deserving of mention:

“Do That to Me One More Time,” “Call Me,” “Sailing,” “The Tide Is High,” “The One That You Love,” “Abracadabra,” “Who Can It Be Now?”, “Hello,” “Ghostbusters,” “A View to a Kill,” “Miami Vice Theme,” “Separate Lives,” “That’s What Friends Are For,” “On My Own,” “Jacob’s Ladder,” “Who’s That Girl,” “I Think We’re Alone Now,” “Anything for You,” “Hold On to the Nights,” “Don’t Worry Be Happy,” “Love Bites,” “Wild, Wild West,” “Baby I Love Your Way/Freebird Medley,” “Look Away,” “The Living Years,” “Toy Soldiers,” “Batdance,” “Cold Hearted,” “When I See You Smile,” and “We Didn’t Start the Fire.”

In tribute to the MTV decade, get ready for a YouTube fiesta — every one of the following songs poisoned not only our radios, but our TVs as well. (I could swear that one of these tunes, in particular, is actually responsible for blowing out my old Philco in 1988. Guess which one.) (more…)

Having spent the last two columns riffing on the careers of Robbie Williams and Texas, two acts that sped my acclimation to the U.K. during my family’s late-’90s stint as Londoners, I’ve spent the last week exploring the roots of my musical Anglophilia. I eventually traced it to fall of 1982, and the local debut of a syndicated radio show called Rock Over London that got me hooked on British music – and on the notion that if the show introduced me to an artist whose music hadn’t been released yet in the States, I would have a bit of information that my friends didn’t, and therefore (via the transitive property of hoarded knowledge) I would be Cool.

If you’re a Popdose regular of a certain age (ouch!), you’re probably enough of a radio geek that you remember Rock Over London, which debuted sometime during the early ’80s and continued running into the ’90s. It was hosted by Graham Dene, who was then Capital FM’s morning DJ, and it began airing on Rock-105 in southwestern Virginia during that fall of ’82 – just as mainstream American pop and AOR radio (which was all we had in my hometown – we didn’t even have MTV yet) was beginning to realize that there were bands in the U.K. other than the Police.

Rock Over London didn’t offer up the Human League, Soft Cell and Flock of Seagulls hits that had already assaulted the U.S. charts that year; it played new hits by acts you knew, plus it introduced American audiences to artists who had launched in England, but who didn’t yet have contracts to release their music over here. Of course, those acts sometimes included one-hit wonders or Brit novelties like Hayzee Fantayzee, Marilyn or Toyah Willcox (little-known fact: Toyah, who’s also Mrs. Robert Fripp, provided voices for the Teletubbies); however, as bizarre one-offs from England are almost always more interesting than their equivalents from the U.S., I didn’t mind the intrusion.

Besides, Rock Over London quickly proved revelatory during that fall of ’82 when it introduced Americans to Tears for Fears. The hip cachet in going to the local Record Exchange to order an import copy of The Hurting should not be underestimated. “Tears for Fears? Who’s that?” came the response from the college kid behind the counter, and I was triumphant. (Of course, I was retroactively deflated a bit when it was later revealed to me that a truly cool kid at that time needed to own an E.P. called Chronic Town by some Georgia band that I hadn’t yet heard of, and wouldn’t for another eight months.) (more…)

Imagine a band with a sultry female singer, an impressive new-wave pedigree, a sound that expertly blends Motown soul with contemporary pop/rock, and oodles of international success over more than a decade. Sign that band to a nice contract and give them a long-overdue Stateside push. Then explain to them, as their new album sends them to the peak of their global popularity, why the largest market in the world will be forever off-limits.

The story’s a true one. The band is Texas.

While writing last week’s column about Robbie Williams, I found myself musing (and in some cases mourning) over some of my other favorite U.K. acts that, despite longstanding popularity on the other side of the Atlantic, never gained traction in the States. Explaining this phenomenon is sometimes easy, as with Robbie and his inability to convince Americans that a self-deprecating irony lurked just beneath his arrogant surface. Then there’s a band like the Manic Street Preachers. Their story was a little too weird (original lead singer Richie James, a depressive bent on self-mutilation, eventually disappeared and was presumed a suicide); their attitude was too wrapped up in radical British politics and class warfare; and their big U.S. break (opening an Oasis tour) was cut short because the fuckin’ Gallagher brothers couldn’t keep from wringing each other’s necks. By the time they released their highest-selling album in 1998 – a smash that won them Q magazine’s “Biggest Band in the World” prize – their American label, Epic, had dropped them from its roster. (more…)

“England and America are two countries separated by a common language.“
—George Bernard Shaw

In July 1998 my wife, my son, and I moved into a terraced house on a side street in London’s Fulham neighborhood, commencing an adventure in living abroad that we thought would come easily. We were well funded by my wife’s firm, we were within easy walking distance of a plethora of parks and shopping, and we were tremendously excited to be escaping the downward spiral of the Lewinsky scandal in the U.S., not to mention the vapid teen pop and rancid rap-rock that was taking over American radio at the time. As long as we remembered to look right at the intersection, we figured we’d do just fine.

Four months later we were dying to get the hell out of there. Our landlords were pure evil, hovering over us to make sure we didn’t ding their precious furniture; my wife was having trouble adjusting to the ways of business in the U.K.; our son was chafing at his city surroundings and making life miserable for the Czech teenager we’d hired as an au pair; and the coldest, wettest London autumn in a generation had left us drenched, drained, and feeling awfully alone.

Mostly, though, we couldn’t comprehend the Brits. We could understand what they were saying, to be sure; we just couldn’t understand why. We couldn’t figure out the style of humor that made their comedy shows funny, we couldn’t make sense of the nationwide mania for spending days on end watching a lawn-bowling tournament (”the bowls,” as they call it), we couldn’t fathom the fatalism that dominates their class system and their international relations.

We didn’t get why we couldn’t find Oreos or even Q-Tips in the grocery stores. (It was months before we learned that the Brits called Q-Tips “cotton buds” and kept them in a different part of the store than we were used to.) And we definitely couldn’t adjust to the fact that, compared to the States, the pace of life was so much slower in London, even at the height of “Cool Britannia.”

Culture shock had made our life inexplicable. But then, over a period of a couple months, Robbie Williams explained it all for me.

(more…)

It’s time for the third installment in our six-part series (assuming I finish before the end of the decade) documenting the most putrid pabulum of the rock era. And this time it’s personal. As a (slightly) post-boomer, I attacked the ’50s and ’60s with the relative objectivity of someone for whom the songs from those decades were forever oldies. However, I was trusted to hold a round slab of vinyl in my hands for the first time at Christmastime in 1971 (the Jackson 5’s Greatest Hits), and at that point, objectivity flew out the window.

In compiling this list, I took a non-scientific poll with a sample of two: myself in the present, and myself as a 6-to-14-year-old music obsessive. To say that the small sample size skewed the results would be an understatement, so we’ll suffice with a warning: If you’re looking for a list of the songs a right-thinking 50-year-old (or 30- or 20-year-old) would identify as the worst of the ’70s, you’re going to have to look somewhere else. You won’t have any trouble doing so; the Web is chock-a-block with sites identifying songs like “Billy Don’t Be a Hero” and “The Night Chicago Died” among the worst of all time.

There’s even an article on CNN.com titled “1974: Crème de la crème of clunkers,” in which Greil Marcus is quoted as saying, “We could say [1974] was a conspiracy by Malcolm McLaren to set the stage for the Sex Pistols.” Well, I love ya, Greil, but fuck off: My inner 8-year-old child – whose favorite songs are still the awesome “rock” triplets from that year, “Rock the Boat,” “Rock Your Baby,” and “Rock Me Gently” – says 1974 was the Greatest Year in Music History! With that grain of salt, take this: (more…)