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

jrralls wrote:

Which band do you first remember having a backlash against (whether you were part of the backlash or not)?

I love how you ask these very YouTube "answer with a comment below!" kind of questions.

Wow, yet another #honorablementionhippiesong ! Was not expecting this. It's not going to make my official list of hippie songs because it's past the cut-off point, but if it were made 20 years earlier it totally would. It's talking about sowing the seeds of love with a very groovy funk (listen to the 3:30 mark and tell me that's not total hippie sound), it's talking all lovey dovey stuff while protesting THE GOVERNMENT, man (Thatcher - "Politician granny with your high ideals, have you no idea how the majority feels?"), and it just checks all the boxes for a 964-1972 Hippie song, only it was released in 1989.

So apparently Weird Al has never had a single song in the top 100.

jrralls wrote:

So apparently Weird Al has never had a single song in the top 100.

From a recent Billboard article

Yankovic boasts four top 40 Hot 100 hits, and he makes this exclusive list by having spaced them out one per decade. After "Eat It," "Smells Like Nirvana" climbed to No. 35 in 1992; "White & Nerdy," his riff on Chamillionaire's "Ridin'," featuring Krayzie Bone (a two-week Hot 100 No. 1), became Yankovic's lone top 10, hitting No. 9 in 2006; and "Word Crimes," which spoofs Robin Thicke's 12-week 2013 No. 1 "Blurred Lines," featuring T.I. and Pharrell, debuted at its No. 39 peak in 2014.

Yet, he's one of the musicians I respect most. His albums are extremely listenable; his original songs (not parodies) are usually the best ones. I could live without the polkas, though.

Ego Man wrote:
jrralls wrote:

So apparently Weird Al has never had a single song in the top 100.

From a recent Billboard article

Yankovic boasts four top 40 Hot 100 hits, and he makes this exclusive list by having spaced them out one per decade. After "Eat It," "Smells Like Nirvana" climbed to No. 35 in 1992; "White & Nerdy," his riff on Chamillionaire's "Ridin'," featuring Krayzie Bone (a two-week Hot 100 No. 1), became Yankovic's lone top 10, hitting No. 9 in 2006; and "Word Crimes," which spoofs Robin Thicke's 12-week 2013 No. 1 "Blurred Lines," featuring T.I. and Pharrell, debuted at its No. 39 peak in 2014.

Reaching the Top 40 100 hits is not the same as reaching the YEAR END top 100 list, which is what I'm examining.

Malor wrote:

Yet, he's one of the musicians I respect most. His albums are extremely listenable; his original songs (not parodies) are usually the best ones. I could live without the polkas, though.

Welcome to the Jungle is another contender for being part of a rather small sub-set of songs, but if you make it into that sub-set, your song will remain relevant because it will be played at least once and probably multiple times per day per venue, before somewhere around 4,000 live crowds in every state in the US and it'll be played for decades and decades.

A very very consistent pattern is that every single year, of every single decade, there are at least a dozen slow "Love is Nice!" songs on the billboard top 100. This one has 2 million views on youtube so it's not forgotten by my standards, but looking at the ghost town that is it's wiki page: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shower... it's not like anyone has any special fondness for it either. AND YET! In 1989 Shower Me with Your Love came in higher on the year end top 100 list than REM's Stand, Aerosmieth's Love in an Elevator, Guns N' Roses Paradise City, and Michael Jackson's Smooth Criminal. I'm not going to point this out every time it happens (because it happens A LOT) but take it as a given that there are many slow "Love is Nice" songs that beat out whatever is "remembered" as being played in any given year.

This song is STRONGLY associated with Get a Life, a Chris Elliot fox comedy from the early 90's, for me. I'm sure it's probably horrible but 12 year old me thought it was the funniest thing ever. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eQKj...

From wikipedia: ""They threw these super bubblegummy songs at me, and I said, 'I'll raise you and see you one.' And I wrote the most inane lyrics that I could possibly write. Now, it was a very intentional thing to do that. I really like most of those songs, in fact."[7] Guitarist Peter Buck described "Stand" as "without a doubt, [...] the stupidest song we've ever written. That's not necessarily a bad thing though", comparing the song to "Louie Louie" by the Kingsmen in terms of 'stupid' lyrical content."

The LAST New Wave big hit?

Honestly, I'm not sure a single person watching this in 1989 thought, "You know, I bet this Alice Cooper fellow will be hail and hearty and still have a punishingly hard and long touring schedule in 2018 when he is 70 years old."

Coming in at #93, this is Michael Jackson's lowest ranking top 100 hit. Now, OK, that's a bit of a cheat because obviously not all of his songs even hit the top 100, but still, while Smooth Criminal is regarded as one of his top 10 hits today (https://www.rollingstone.com/music/p... ) that was NOT the case when it first came out. It was just another of his hits, and not even a big one, by his standards. And you know, I honestly think a huge part for its growth over time was the Alien Ant Farm cover of it in 2001.

I feel like this song had some sort of post-1989 lasting power, but doing an IMDB search, it hasn't really appeared in that much media, and nothing real memorable to cement it in mine or anyone else's memory. It's pretty bog-standard adult contemporary song in the pretty common theme of , "Things-Sure-Ain't-What-They-Used-To-Be" so anyone have any ideas on why I think it's more popular than it's #99 ranking in 1989 would suggest? #thingsureaintwhattheyusedtobe

I want to say it's because it's not a bog standard TSAWTWTB song, in that the music was so effective in evoking a feeling of loss, and the lyrics are less about how thing used to be good and more about how things were never what they seemed. Like that line: "And we've been poisoned by these fairy tales." I feel like it came out during a time when the popular culture was acting like The Good Old Days Are Back Again, and it dared to run against that current.

...but it's probably because it gets jumbled up in the musical memory with every time they played a Bruce Hornsby and the Range song, so. : D

edit: looking around on Wikipedia:

In 1989 Hornsby co-wrote and played piano on Don Henley's hit "The End of the Innocence"

yup, that's probably why!

I've reached the end of the 1980's and I'm sad to see it go. I can't say for sure, but I doubt that there will be as many songs in the 1990's that I just flat out love as much as I do a number of 80's songs. Time will tell. But now that I have listened to every single top 100 hit of the decade what do I think of how the decade is musically remembered?

Well, the 50's are remembered for the birth of Rock and Roll but that was really a tiny tiny sliver of music which was excursively at the end of the decade. The Sixties had far more early rock songs than the 50's but are remembered for Hippie Music, another tiny sliver that mainly appeared at the end. And the 70's are remembered for disco which was, again, something that was small and only appeared at the end of the decade.

The Eighties though are a more mixed bag, I'd say they are remembered for New Wave, bubbly pop songs, and some hair rock songs, and honestly? The Zeitgeist f*cking nailed that one. Yea yea, like every decade there are a ton of slow love songs each and every year that beat out the songs people remember, but given THAT the cultural memory of music in the 80's aligns far far more with what people were actually listing to year in, year out, than any other decade so far. #allpopsongs

jrralls wrote:

#forgottensong ! Finding top 100 eighties songs that make my standard for a forgotten song (less than 1M views on youtube) has been hard but this one counts! At 725k it's below the limit but what is even more bizarre is that it stars and is sung by Bruce Willis! Like Eddie Murphy, 1987 was apparently a time when big movies stars could have a top 100 song just because they were big movie stars. I don't think that is remotely possible today

I have a sneaking suspicion that the 700k views is because there's no official version of this video on YouTube. It's not being promoted by Vevo or some record company, so no one is watching it plus I bet there was a different version of the song that had more views but got pulled.

The reason I feel this way is because this song is routinely talked about as a one hit wonder, especially because it's from an actor.

You may enjoy this: https://pudding.cool/2017/03/music-h...

Plays the #1 song from any given week. It's an interesting experience as the songs drop in and out.

garion333 wrote:

You may enjoy this: https://pudding.cool/2017/03/music-h...

Plays the #1 song from any given week. It's an interesting experience as the songs drop in and out.

VERY cool, thanks!

garion333 wrote:
jrralls wrote:

#forgottensong ! Finding top 100 eighties songs that make my standard for a forgotten song (less than 1M views on youtube) has been hard but this one counts! At 725k it's below the limit but what is even more bizarre is that it stars and is sung by Bruce Willis! Like Eddie Murphy, 1987 was apparently a time when big movies stars could have a top 100 song just because they were big movie stars. I don't think that is remotely possible today

I have a sneaking suspicion that the 700k views is because there's no official version of this video on YouTube. It's not being promoted by Vevo or some record company, so no one is watching it plus I bet there was a different version of the song that had more views but got pulled. .

Eh... I honestly can't see anyone carrying enough about it to do that, but I could be wrong.

Pump Up the Jam may be the first female hip-hop song to make the year end top 100. Obviously any genre is going to bleed over to other genre's but while this has a strong dance pop feel to it, it's not devoid of hip-hop either so I'm going to call it a #songofthefuture

Um.... so jailbait songs were a thing. There were multiple songs about romance (or feelings of romance) towards girls (and it was always girls) under the age of 18 that made the year end top 100 list. AND it wasn't exclusive to any one decade, they came at a decent enough regularly interval at least up to 1990 (this song) but I can't think of any modern-ish ones. Did we just kind of move past that as a culture?

So 1990-Me was fully 100% pop-cultural conscious at this point in that I had a vague sense of entertainment as a business and that some songs/movies/tv shows were more popular than others. And with my 6th grade class mates? This song was HUGE! Everyone was talking about it, probably because we were still all watching cartoons but it was really rare for animation to appear in a music video like this.

Also, MC Skat Kat is culturally coded to be a hip hop star and breaks into rap at the 2:04 mark; more evidence indicating 1989-1990 as the time that rap really broke into the mainstream.

Finally, if you never saw the video but just listened to this orally, this song is a duet between a white woman and a black man* and is about how two people with difference can love each other; as such I don't think it's a stretch to call this an implicit (but not explicit) interracial romance song. Have there been any big hit WF-BM or WM-BF duet love songs in the 21st century?

* (actually two, but ignore that)

Around the 21 second and 2:04 mark? Yea, there has been rap in the top 100 before, but none as "hard" as this. #songofthefuture

As I've mentioned before, the 50's music we usually think of as FIFTIES music was almost exclusively late in the decade, ditto for the 60's and the 70's. But quintessential Eighties music started early and that trend continues into the Nineties too. And this song, WHO BOY, this song is not just a Nineties Song, it may be THE Nineties song, the song that people making period films use anytime they want to unequivocally set the audience up for a very very specific moment in time.

It's treated as a joke song now, two things;
1) It wasn't when it came out. It was commercially popular, but also received pretty good critical reception and was nominated for a Grammy in the category Best Rap Performance (losing to "Can't Touch This")
2) I wonder if it's joke status will eventually fade and it's decade signifier status will outlast its contemporaries. A quick search of IMBD shows that it's used far far FAR more often than Wilson Phillips #1 hit of 1990 "Hold On" http://www.imdb.com/name/nm1674684/?... vs http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0406678/?...

In the 2090's when someone is making a 1990's period film/tv/vr experience/whatever, I can honestly see them using this song without a hint of irony - at that point it'll just be a song strongly associated with the 1990's and nothing else.

No no no, you got it all wrong. Its not the same as "Under Pressure".
There song goes:
doon doon doon doodun doondoon
Ours goes:
du doon doon doon doodun doondoon


I think Erasure was the flip flop band. Because you were obviously gay if you liked them because they were gay . (no I am not kidding; if you want to see how far we've come since then; people knew "gay" wasn't contagious but those wives tales were very present in culture and exploded in influence during the GRID/AIDS epidemic)

I was really into this song when it came out, but I don't think I ever really fully memorized the lyrics. The events of the song cover 1949-1989. A hypothetical sequel to the song covering the same amount of time would cover the events of 1989- 2029 - not that far off anymore, honestly.

Love Shack: Honorable mention Hippie Song?

Forgotten song! By, like a lot. Came in at #79 in 1990 but the official music video only has 41k hits on it. There is another version posted 8 years ago that only has 200k hits on it, so yea this song is down the memory hole. It makes sense though, Milli Vanilli is a joke these days and only the big hits of a joke artist are going to stick around, and this wasn't one of them.

OK, another #forgotten song. Has anybody here ever even heard of Dino?