Listening to the Billboard Top 100 Charts (1946 - Present)

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Everyday I have around a total of 2 hours of commuting. It is what it is, and I've always enjoyed audio books, but to spice it up I've also been listening to the top 100 songs of every year from 1946 to present in chronological order. Observations to follow.

1955's Rock Around the Clock is a true watershed song. It deserves every single movie appearance where it singles, "This is to signal that the cultural '1950's' that people think as "The Fifties" is starting." Before that, there honestly wasn't a single song that felt the least bit modern, but Rock Around the Clock is the definite evolutionary ancestor of the rock/pop of 2016 in a way that no other song before it was. Second observation - 1964 is the first year where I started hearing significant number of songs that are part of the current pop cultural scene. Not a huge part, but you could hear some of the songs in non-period films and not blink in way that is not true for most of the big hits before 1964.

Listening to every top 100 song Part 2: The 1960's. Just finished listening to every top 100 song from 1960 to 1969. It mainly reinforced previously held thoughts;
1) The last years of a decade are overwhelmingly more important in that' decade's cultural legacy while the early years are usually put down the memory hole. What we think of "60's" music is overwhelmingly music from 1968 to 1969. Oh, you can see flashes of it as early as 1963 or so, but the bulk of the early 60's music (and even many of the popular songs in 1969 as well) sound more like what we think of as Fifties-music than "Sixties" music.
2) I think whether a song stands the test of time and is still played 40 + years after it was released has a fair amount of luck involved in it. Does a producer of some tv or movie show like that song? Do they think it will be a good fit for their entertainment and will it therefore get re-used and replayed past it's first run? That is a very contingent decision and I heard a couple of songs that I thought could have easily been used to show, "Hey, this is the 60's! See how 60's this is!" but because some producer didn't love that song when they were 12 it got forgotten while another is forever identified with its time and place. And it's popularity in the year it was released does appear to be a factor, but not the only factor.
3) Oddly enough, I'm a man of my time. The closer we get to modern music, the higher % of songs I seem to genuinely enjoy listening to.

Part 3: The 1970's
I'm an Old Elvis Fan! His early stuff just doesn't do anything for me and honestly I feel like Elvis is a bit of a Zombie Pop Culture phenomenon but some of his later stuff I genuinely enjoy in and off itself and have added it to my "Play in the Future" list.

Really interesting to encounter songs that were originally performed by someone else, but who I completely associate with a different performer. Bridge over Troubled Water, to me, is an Aretha Franklin song (and youtube view totals confirm that is how most people think of it) but this version definitely has its charms too.

This song is, so far, the only number 1 song that I have never heard of and completely don't recognize. I'm not a fan and I honestly don't see why it was a number one hit, and I'm pretty sure that no other number 1 song has gone down the memory hole as much as this one has.

Most songs I can see how they influence future music down the line but this seems to be a kind of offshoot that didn't grow very much. Not bad, just not something that I see as being a genre today, at least in the pop cultural zietgiest.

This song was in the top 100 songs of 1973. I .... jeeze personification of the 1970's, I know you did a lot of drugs but I didn't know you did THIS much drugs!

For my entire life I thought this was "Man on the Run" not "Band on the Run"

This may be my favorite song of the 1970s.

I could be mistaken here, but as far as I can tell from listening to every top 100 song, this is the first top 100 song to have a swear word in it ("sh*t" - 3:08).

Despite coming out in 1978, I maintain that "Hot Blooded" is the very first "80's" song. If you didn't know, wouldn't you swear this was an 80's hit?

Listening to every song year by year really gave me a sense of what it must have been like to live through the disco craze, because man; no disco, no disco, one disco song, TONS OF DISCO! Then no disco. I can't think of any other genre of music that burned so brightly and so quickly.

jrralls wrote:

This song is, so far, the only number 1 song that I have never heard of and completely don't recognize. I'm not a fan and I honestly don't see why it was a number one hit, and I'm pretty sure that no other number 1 song has gone down the memory hole as much as this one has.

Wikipedia helps on this one:

Flack's slower and more sensual version [from 1969] was used by Clint Eastwood in his 1971 directorial film debut, Play Misty for Me, during a lovemaking scene. With the new exposure, Atlantic Records cut the song down to four minutes and released it to radio. It became a very successful single in the United States where it reached No. 1 on the Billboard Hot 100 and easy listening charts in April 1972 for six week runs on each list.

So, the tldr is that a movie made it famous!

Loving these posts. Good stuff.

How are you going about listening to them? Making your own playlists or is there Top 100 playlists on Spotify you're using?

Just caught up here.

Old Elvis is best Elvis.

But swriouslyx this is an awesome enough idea to experience music history that I want to do the same.

Interesting idea. Sounds like something I'd "almost" want to give a try, but I know there'd be songs I'd want to skip having lived through the eras where they were popular already (Celine Dion, Whitney Houston and Black Eyed Peas, I'm looking at you).

And I don't think I could make it though the 2000s. I'm not saying there wasn't good music made in the 2000s but almost none of what was good became popular.

I do this all the time when I visit my parents house. I fire up youtube and do a musical journey of my youth: depeche mode, the smiths, abc, tears for fears, duran duran, inxs, u2, etc.

"The First Time Ever I Saw Your Face" is an incredibly beautiful song. You could release it today and it would be a smash. It could easily fit in with Adele's oeuvre.

I haven't taken a look at that list but I can't help feeling that there is a lot of great Ray Charles and Stevie Wonder and the like in the early and mid 60's.

Plus, hello, Beatles!
63' Please Please Me: Love Me Do, I Saw Her Standing There, Do You Want to Know a Secret, Please Please Me, Twist and Shout, etc.
64' Hard Days Night: do I need to continue the list?
The Help? movie was in 65'

jrralls wrote:

Really interesting to encounter songs that were originally performed by someone else, but who I completely associate with a different performer. Bridge over Troubled Water, to me, is an Aretha Franklin song (and youtube view totals confirm that is how most people think of it) but this version definitely has its charms too.

This baffles me . "Bridge Over Trouble Water" to me is barely behind "Sound of Silence" as the quintessential Simon & Garfunkel song. I don't think I even knew Aretha Franklin covered it.

And Joe Tex's "I Gotcha" was on the Reservoir Dogs soundtrack, so got a lot of play when I was in college in the 90s. At least in my dorm.

"Clowns to the left of me, jokers to the right, here I am stuck in the middle with you."

What a cool project! I hope its been fun.

One thing I did recently was create a playlist of the top 20 Billboard songs the week I was born. Just for kicks. There were some real dead birds (I'm looking at you Osmonds and Partridge Family) and a few pretty cool ones(Marvin Gaye, CCR, J. Joplin). Now I do this for friends too, it was fun.

jrralls wrote:

Despite coming out in 1978, I maintain that "Hot Blooded" is the very first "80's" song. If you didn't know, wouldn't you swear this was an 80's hit?

Absolutely. I'm no musician, so I can't speak nearly as intelligently as many of you on the subject, but I think you might be able to argue that song defined a lot of the common ground for popular 80s music.

That era had a very distinctive sound to it, although in retrospect, I think it probably wasn't nearly as good as a lot of 70s music. The advent of music videos started the shift away from talent and toward presentation. I still like listening to 80s music more, but I suspect that's mostly from familiarity, not quality.

This is a really interesting project and I very much appreciate this thread. I'd like to go through and listen to the top songs as well.

It does, however, point out how peoples' cultural experiences can be vastly different and how easily quality products can vanish down the memory hole.

As FeralMonkey pointed out, I'm at a total loss for how Bridge Over Troubled Water could be associated with anything other than Simon & Garfunkel. I get how Disturbed's excellent cover of Sound of Silence may have introduced that song to a bunch of new listeners, but Bridge is still one of the quintessential Simon & Garfunkel songs.

I wonder if First Time Ever I Saw Your Face is making a comeback. For me, it's indelibly associated with "Play Misty for Me" and it was one of those songs I heard frequently growing up. It was just recently covered by Miley Cyrus and I recently heard an wonderful cover of it by George Michael used in some show recently. To my mind, the George Michael version is the only one that really rivals Roberta Flack's version.

Malor wrote:

I still like listening to 80s music more, but I suspect that's mostly from familiarity, not quality.

*glove slap* Pistols at dawn!

Though with some notable exceptions you aren't off the mark with some qualifications. The most popular songs may not be the best music but the artists and their gem filled b-sides and albums tell a different story.

Even some one of my favorite bands, Depeche Mode, has some songs that I loved that now I just can't appreciate as much any more since the synth and samples are too Casio pop overload. Some songs can overcome this like "Everything Counts". And some songs like "Stripped" smash through the archetype.

You can slow down the tempo and remake Tears for Fears's "Mad World" all you want for the feels but the original is still the best and that whole album is an undiscovered masterpiece. Also, on the CD version is an unreleased song that is one of my favorites "The Way You Are".

The Thompson Twins had one album that was so good, "Into the Gap" that they proceeded to make knock off versions for their next few albums and they started to get the reputation for being formulaic. Yet the unreleased songs "Day after Day", "Who Can Stop the Rain" and the later less popular single "Sister of Mercy" are among the best songs they created.

And everyone remembers U2 and forgets or overlooks INXS. Cover to cover with few exceptions, "Shabooh Shabah", "Listen Like Thieves", "Kick" and half of "X" are fantastic.

And then there is Duran Duran and ABC and the Police. Whom you may dismiss should you have listened only to their popular songs. Well even most of their popular songs have lasting musical merit. Many should be haunting for their foretelling of things to come or their reminder that we have been through this before or as a reminder how much we have normalized worldly woes:
"Notorious", "Synchronicity 2", "Valentine's Day", "Message in the Bottle", "Invisible Sun", "That Was Then but This is Now", "Election Day" (I'm including Arcadia's brilliant album "So Red the Rose"), "Spirits in the Material World", and the list goes on.
And then songs like "Lonely in your Nightmare" and "All of My Heart" are just SO beautiful.

Great thread. I'd love to do this myself some time.

Though I disagree on Roberta Flack - First Time I Ever Saw Your Face. It was/is an amazing song.

WOW! Talk about foreshadowing current dilemmas from 30 years ago. Above I referenced the Police song "Invisible Sun". Among many other timeless lyrics is the reference to the Armalite rifle used by paramilitary organizations to cause strife in Ireland (IRA) around the world. The Armalite rifle wreaking havoc in 1981? The AR-15.

garion333 wrote:

So, the tldr is that a movie made it famous!

Yea, but there are plenty of songs that got famous from movies; but most of those didn't reach number 1 and of the ones that did, they still have staying power outside of the film itself.

First Time I Ever Saw Your Face, as far as I can tell, is the only number 1 song that has just completely disappearance down the memory hole.

Is there any way to see how often songs are played on the classic rock radio stations? Some quantifiable way to track how popular an old song is in 2017?

polq37 wrote:

As FeralMonkey pointed out, I'm at a total loss for how Bridge Over Troubled Water could be associated with anything other than Simon & Garfunke

Doing some further digging, I appear to be the outlier there, in terms of view count.

Not sure why.

Musical journeys/histories are incredibly personal. The beauty is none of them are wrong and with the internet you can easily connect with thousands of other people with similar journeys no matter how obscure.
It is truly one of the geniuses of Youtube.

jrralls wrote:
polq37 wrote:

As FeralMonkey pointed out, I'm at a total loss for how Bridge Over Troubled Water could be associated with anything other than Simon & Garfunke

Doing some further digging, I appear to be the outlier there, in terms of view count.

Not sure why.

Yeah, it's perplexing to me as well. Bridge has been covered many a-times, but I've always known where it came from. Hell, I've ever heard the Simon & Garfunkel version on the radio quite a bit. So it's shocking you haven't.

jrralls wrote:
garion333 wrote:

So, the tldr is that a movie made it famous!

Yea, but there are plenty of songs that got famous from movies; but most of those didn't reach number 1 and of the ones that did, they still have staying power outside of the film itself.

First Time I Ever Saw Your Face, as far as I can tell, is the only number 1 song that has just completely disappearance down the memory hole.

Is there any way to see how often songs are played on the classic rock radio stations? Some quantifiable way to track how popular an old song is in 2017?

The "a movie made it famous" bit was in reference to how it became a hit moreso than how it disappeared.

I think her version doesn't get radio play because it's so damn empty sounding. A lot of this bare bones singer/songwriter(-esque) stuff from the 70's doesn't get much airplay unless it's from Cat Stevens.

Maybe it's more simple than that: there's no easy hook to the song and it's basically an easy listening song. Do any of us listen to easy listening stations? Probably not.

Starting the 80's off with a bang, I was really impressed with Pat Benatar's "Heartbreaker." This is hugely an "eighties" song to me and sounds like it's personally stomping the last of the 70's music scene to death with glee. #allpopsongs

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