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…)

Popularity: 11% [?]

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…)

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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…)

Popularity: 100% [?]

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…)

Popularity: 32% [?]

You’d think that slogging through the detritus of the 1960s would be a more delicate maneuver than slinging the shite of the ’50s. You’d be mistaken.

The Sixties were the baby boom’s golden era, a decade whose music will be revered above every other until … well, until the boomers either shut up or die off. (Not that I’m encouraging the latter, of course; some of my best friends and relatives are boomers, and I hope they’ll stick around until they’ve completely drained the Social Security trust fund.) Nevertheless, the British Invasion, the folk revival, Motown and Stax, the blues revival, psychedelia, countrypolitan, acid-rock — all these glorious movements contributed a fair amount of crap to the popular canon, and an alarming percentage of that pabulum found its way to the top of Billboard’s Hot 100.

It would be easy to focus on the early ‘60s, to beat up exclusively on Steve Lawrence and Bobby Vinton and Lawrence Welk and other such anachronistic reminders of the pre-rock era. But what fun is that? C’mon, it’s the Sixties — let’s hit some moving targets! (more…)

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Welcome to the first installment of an occasional series that dares you to wallow in the very worst of the very best — or best-selling, at least — singles from what Casey Kasem used to call the “rock era.” We begin in 1955, generally considered the dawn of the era because it’s the year when Bill Haley & His Comets topped the charts with “Rock Around the Clock.” (Bill Haley invented rock’n'roll about as much as Abner Doubleday invented baseball, but we’ll leave that alone.) Future editions of this series will cover each decade, straight through the noughties — though I’m not convinced that I’m the best person to judge the relative merits of “Laffy Taffy” and “Buy U a Drank (Shawty Snappin’).”

From the 1960s forward, we’ll focus exclusively on Billboard’s Hot 100 chart, which for four decades did a very good job synthesizing the most popular singles in the nation. I would argue that it no longer does that job nearly as well, primarily because the radio industry has splintered since the early ’90s and because the multitude of formats in which fans can purchase/steal music makes precise sales calculations nearly impossible.

The Hot 100 chart didn’t debut until August 1958; before then, Billboard published four different pop charts — “Best Sellers in Stores,” “Most Played by Jockeys,” “Most Played in Jukeboxes,” and a “Top 100.” Today, chart guru Joel Whitburn considers none of those charts to be a definitive ranking of a particular week’s hits, though Fred Bronson has used the Best Sellers list as the basis for the first 39 entries in his Billboard Book of Number One Hits. Whitburn’s Top Pop Singles books, on the other hand, list 58 #1 singles between “Rock Around the Clock” and the advent of the Hot 100; I’m siding with Joel here, if for no other reason than I really, really want to rip on Perry Como. Here goes: (more…)

Popularity: 22% [?]