When I wasn’t writing on this site, I gave myself a silly project. “How the Beatles Destroyed Rock ‘n’ Roll,” a book I’d borrowed from a(n actual musician) friend eight years earlier, finally came off the shelf. It worked its magic, and I began doubting the pop canon, wondering why we’d collectively agreed to let Jan Wenner and some boomer TV programmers decide what music was important. (Not the point of the book, but one I took from it.) Elijah Wald focused on what was truly popular through the history of recorded music, and what was buried when critical sophisticates rewrote those histories.
Interesting way to roll around in the past. I decided to make playlists that ran through the most popular songs of their years, in a semi-chronological order, to give a sense of how a few people living through that period could have heard it. (Most people don’t hear a hit song the day it’s released.) So: If a song came out in January, but hit number one in June, I’d plunk it in the middle of the playlist. If it came out in January, and was popular but never a number one hit. I’d put it near the front. If a song came out in 1964 but never charted before appearing in a movie I’d put it in 1984.
This wasn’t what Wald had done, and I departed from him again by basing the lists on multiple pop charts. Every song that hit number 1 on the Billboard chart made it in, so long as it was available on Spotify. So did every number 1 on the cheerily segregated Hot R&B/Hip-Hop chart, formerly known as the Hot R&B Singles chart, formerly known as the Hot Soul chart, formerly known as the Race Records chart. You want to get nuts? So did every number 1 on the Hot Country Songs chart. And so did the number 1s on the UK Singles chart, though I could see why other people might stop before they got there.
Why did I do this? My own musical taste had changed drastically over the years, and I wanted to see what I’d never given a chance but might enjoy. I’m also just old enough to be astounded by the universal availability of so much popular music. If you ever had to search the stacks at Jeremiah’s to get the import of The Fall album that wasn’t going to be released in the US, imagine knowing that your children (or, realistically, an older you) could play that album instantly, wherever we wanted.
Does it sound fun? Well, shut up, it was. You can stream the lists whenever you feel like it, on Spotify, starting with 1917. (No Billboard charts then, but I did other research to figure out what was selling in pre-chart years.)
What did I learn? A few things, and I’ll probably add to this list.
I’d missed a lot of amazing stuff. My cultural background: Suburban white kid, into heavy metal and musicals at first, evolved into Buzz Bin alt rock fan, got into prog and hip-hop through friends online, got into power pop in college. Followed college rock developments via Pitchfork. In 2019, after traveling through Portugal with a friend who played jazz incessantly, jazz clicked for me and became half or more of what I listen to.
That left a lot unheard. When I added Barry White’s “Practice What You Preach,” I stopped cold and played it three more times. Listen to that melody line on the electric bass, the time signature changes in his singing. This was nowhere in the rock crit canon, so I’d missed a song that hit the R&B #1 and still gets played at parties. “K.I.S.S.I.N.G.” came completely out of nowhere with a perfect guitar lick, the kind that people rediscovered for wedding floor-fillers a few years ago then, incredibly, ignored again.
Disco was more good than bad. A dumb tweet I wrote on that point, after compiling the 70s and early 80s lists, did numbers; all I’d said was that boomers had lied to us by portraying disco as soulless joke music. The number one R&B hits of that era had an incredible hit rate, with five or six “Second Time Around”s for every “Disco Duck.” (And even “Disco Duck” has a few good hooks.)
Early rock feels more alive than anything after 1980. You might even push that timeline up, and you wouldn’t be saying anything that Rhino didn’t with its last big box set. Early rock was ragged and giddy with big choruses you could dance to. The rock I grew up on had strong melodies — R.E.M. was the first band I “discovered” in sync with MTV — but the early rock that hadn’t replaced and absorbed pop yet was a hundred times better than I remembered. Listen to the 1955 playlist, which opens with Rodgers and Hammerstein, dips into doo-wop and vocal pop, then springs to life with “Bo Diddley.” Nursery rhyme melodies, literally, and beat nobody ever played before Clifton James played it — so much pure fun. I’ve talked to plenty of musicians who began playing music in the early 1960s about why they found this stuff exciting, and when I put it into a time and place, I get it.
Rock played a smaller role in mass culture than I’d thought. Rock is more mythologized than most music it grew up next to, so I hadn’t appreciated how small some of rock’s icons were at the times when they were most active. You can probably name six or seven songs by The Doors, so did you know that “People Are Strange” never cracked the top 10? If you were listening to the pop radio when that peaked, you were much more likely to hear “To Sir, With Love” by Lulu. This was never truer than in the 90s: The Buzz Bin stuff that my peer group listened to was far less popular than "Don't Let Go (Love)" by En Vogue, a song I’d flip off if it came on MTV when I was waiting for the school bus.
Playlists, by nature, can be tweaked and re-ordered, and I’m still doing some of that while I look for meaning in all this. You can poke around, too. Just click the link, and sit in judgment of me, and the people who made pop culture.
Big Mama Thorton's "Hound Dog" is better than Elvis. By a lot. (1953)
That was too much fun. Now I just have to listen to 99+ days of Dave's Spotify lists. Happy holidays to you Dave. "Honey - by Rudy Vallee right now...."