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

"Summer Girls" was a huge dance club hit...
/re Dino
edit: also "I Like It" was big in the clubs

I _think_ this might be the first bilingual song I've heard in the top 100. Oh, there have been numerous foreign language hits before this, any maybe a song or two with a single foreign language sentence or two, but going off memory this is the first song that effortlessly switches between two languages (Spanish and English, of course) and just expects the audience to be able to follow in both. Sign of the growing Bi-Lingual population of America in 1990? #changingpopsongdemographics

I haven't been keeping track, but I'd guess that around 30% of all top 100 songs are about relationships/sex/romance in some way shape or form. So at this point I've listened to around 1,200 or so songs about relationships/sex/romance. And out of all of those songs, in terms of analogies this is the bottom 00.08%. No other song has had a more clumsy, weird, and nonsensical metaphor for relationships/sex/romance than this. I mean, Love is a battlefield? Sure. Love is a mysterious thing? That makes sense. Love is bad medicine? Ok. But Love is TIC TAC TOE?

I remembered Neneh Cherry's Buffalo Stance when everyone thought it was a troll entry and made up. But these last two songs you posted? Never heard of them. And they were hit songs? I'm thinking 1990 may have been a weirder transition year for music than I realize.

Tscott wrote:

I remembered Neneh Cherry's Buffalo Stance when everyone thought it was a troll entry and made up. But these last two songs you posted? Never heard of them. And they were hit songs? I'm thinking 1990 may have been a weirder transition year for music than I realize.

To be fair they are number 99, and number 100 respectively, but still they did make the list whereas probably at least 1000 other songs that year that briefly got into the billboard list did not.

Some songs I associate so strongly with a specific instance in my life that they are inseparable from that instance. This is one of them. In 2000 I broke up with my very first girlfriend, who I had dated from the age of 18 to the age of 21, pretty formative years. We then got back together, briefly, and then she dumped me. I was happy about that because I had thought getting back together was a mistake. But I was only happy about it for about two weeks or so. And then I, with the desperation that only a 21 year old can have, tried to get back together yet again, and she wasn't interested as she had started dating someone else. At which point I created a playlist of break-up songs and played as I wallowed and moped. And then I played it again. And again. AND again. And the one song that always made me cry was this one. And now, 18 years later, I still can't hear this song without picturing myself in my dorm room with the shades drawn experiencing my first real heart ache.

I am not the target audience for this song. At all. Because when I hear lyrics like this,
"From a distance we all have enough
And no one is in need
And there are no guns, no bombs and no disease
No hungry mouths to feed"

When I hear that all I can think of is this;

IMAGE(https://www.smbc-comics.com/comics/20120325.gif)

#forgottensong ! Under 1M views on youtube, and the video has been up since 2009, so that's strong evidence there isn't a lot of interest in this song. I guess I can see that as the song is about a very very specific moment in time (hence the tittle). I think it's pretty clearly about the End of the Cold War and .... I guess no body wants to re-live that specific moment in time and apply it to other times? To be fair, I don't think it really fits any of the zietgiest of the 21st century so far. Can you think of any 21st century moments there would be a broad consensus it could apply to?

I think 9/11 undid that song. It was so full of possibility
Its like "watching the world wake up from history" and then 10 years later going back to sleep again.
The New World Order has gotten us:
propaganda proliferation
militarized police forces
corporate personhood
bubble economies
rise in world wide fascism
cold war re-emergence (or that it never went away)
snowflake religious extremism

I am surprised that is a forgotten song. Seems like it would still be popular today.

Is fun _easy_ light rap still a thing in popular music? I legitimately don't know of any modern day rap songs in the top 100 that sound as light and easy as this, but when I finally get to 2018 I'll probably experience more "new to me" songs than I did in 1968. #songswithoutfutures ?

27 years ago the last REM song hit the year end top 100 list. And yet! They have a podcast dedicated to just talking about them; https://www.theatlantic.com/entertai... even though they also split up 7 years ago. That's.... amazing staying power, really.

LeapingGnome wrote:

I am surprised that is a forgotten song. Seems like it would still be popular today.

BTW, I just heard this song at the restaurant I went to for lunch today.

LeapingGnome wrote:
LeapingGnome wrote:

I am surprised that is a forgotten song. Seems like it would still be popular today.

BTW, I just heard this song at the restaurant I went to for lunch today.

Baader-Meinhof phenomenon strikes again!

How does one define Eighties music? Because this song sounds very very Eighties to me. Obviously decades bleed into one another, but there is something about it that doesn't feel even early Nineties to me.

I'm pretty sure I haven't heard this song in over 20 years but the instant I did I remembered it. And I'm really comfortable not hearing it again for another 20 years.

Vanilla Ice is not, technically, a one-hit wonder. Also, the lyrics at the 2:44 mark ... pretty sure that the first time I've heard Nazi in the top 100 list.

My _sense_ is that the ambient music genre is dead dead dead dead in terms of popular top 100 hits. With youtube, or million different ambient sound apps, I can't see any ambient songs charting ever again.

When this first came on I thought it was Gregorian Monks, who for reasons I have never been able to entirely figure out, had a huge hit in the mid-1990's, seemingly out of no-where https://www.billboard.com/music/monk... in an example of going viral in the pre-internet age. (But they never reached the top 100 list so I won't be talking about them when I get to 1994).

So I've never heard this song before, or if I have, I don't remember it. And the music video . . . wow, that beginning does NOT match the song in tone. I get that it's a song about recovering from being sad and the start of the video is showing how the protagonist ( an apparently late-20's early 30's dude who still dresses like a teenager and lives in his parent's trailer park home) is sad, but well, SPIN magazin said it best, " "Okay, check it out, guys, Nelson kidnap a delicate young flower of a boy and transport him to an astral plane where he has a mystical connection with a Native American who hands the twins a magic feather. Afterwards, the only way the delicate young kid can find salvation and peace is by intently watching our young Fabios play tandem guitar on a stage made of rock, while the drummer from Vinnie Vincent Invasion wears sequined bondage overalls. Can I get a couple hundred thou?"

So.... this sounded very familiar and I double checked, and "Love Takes Time" by Mariah Carey appears in 1991 at #69 on the Billboard top 100 in AND it appears as #76 in 1990. THAT DOES NOT HAPPEN! I have been unable to google the answer, but by shear number of songs released in November/December in one year and that are still big the next year, there should be tons and tons of songs that appear on multiple years of the Billboard Year End Top 100 list. But.... they just don't and I don't know how Billboard ensures that.
Now, the Billboard Top 100 List is a changing methodology. It's supposed to reflect current tastes so as the way we listen to music changed they have changed their methodology to reflect that (digital sales being a factor in 2005 but not in 1995 being an obvious example). But I can't find any web data where I can figure out "This is the methodology in 1996 which stayed until 1999 which stayed this way until 2004 which then..." Maybe it's proprietary? My guess, and it's only that, is that the Billboard Year End Top 100 methodology changed between 1990 and 1991 and that's why we have this song appearing twice. (Google doesn't reveal two versions of the song, which was my other theory). If anyone has any theories or data, please let me know!
Also side note: Mariah Carey is going to be appearing on my play list a lot in the 1990's and then sporadically in the 2000's. I still think of her as a "current" star but it's been 18 years since she was pumping out hit after hit.

So is this a Hippie song?

Because it's a cover of "Signs" by Five Man Electrical Band which was #24 in 1971 but I don't _think_ I included it in the Great Big Hippie Song list. It's talking about long hair and the whole message is about how restrictions, rules, subdividing, etc are "bad, man!" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oeT5...

I should go back and listen to that first Mariah Carey album. I loved it back in 1990-91, but didn’t care for any of her later albums and let her debut release fall by the wayside. Easily been 25 years since I heard that song you posted above.

Tscott wrote:

I should go back and listen to that first Mariah Carey album. I loved it back in 1990-91, but didn’t care for any of her later albums and let her debut release fall by the wayside. Easily been 25 years since I heard that song you posted above.

If you search "Mariah Carey" on youtube and then sort by viewcount, it's something like #35 so it's nowhere near one of her better known things.

jrralls wrote:
Tscott wrote:

I should go back and listen to that first Mariah Carey album. I loved it back in 1990-91, but didn’t care for any of her later albums and let her debut release fall by the wayside. Easily been 25 years since I heard that song you posted above.

If you search "Mariah Carey" on youtube and then sort by viewcount, it's something like #35 so it's nowhere near one of her better known things.

Do you really think you can measure the popularity of something using youtube that existed before youtube? Personally I doubt you could measure the popularity of anything using youtube. All you can do is measure how popular a thing is on youtube which isn't the same thing as being popular.

Baron Of Hell wrote:
jrralls wrote:
Tscott wrote:

I should go back and listen to that first Mariah Carey album. I loved it back in 1990-91, but didn’t care for any of her later albums and let her debut release fall by the wayside. Easily been 25 years since I heard that song you posted above.

If you search "Mariah Carey" on youtube and then sort by viewcount, it's something like #35 so it's nowhere near one of her better known things.

Do you really think you can measure the popularity of something using youtube that existed before youtube?

It's not perfect, but it's a good quick and dirty check of how popular something has been from 2005 to now.
And I think it's really valid if if I'm largely measuring things that pre-date youtube, which is about 90% of Mariah Carey's top 100 songs.

"All I Want For Christmas Is You" - came out over ten years before YouTube existed. The official version was uploaded in 2009 and since then it's gotten over 400 MILLION views. "Love takes time" uploaded two weeks earlier, a "mere" 18 million. So it's a good measure of which one is more popular, I think.

27 years after my entire Junior High was jamming out to this song I learn that it's about cheating. Other people's p[other name for cat]. Granted, it hasn't been in my playlist since Junior High, but still that's a long delay. What's the longest you've ever misunderstood a song for?

Jock Jams! That's another way to get your song to be played before a very large crowd of people over and over again for decades after your song's moment in time has passed. If you've got some kicking refrain that can vaguely be used to inspire athletes, you've got a good chance of having some staying power.

Coming in at #100, this just barely squeaks in for 1991. I didn't realize how much guest vocal Kate Pierson (Of the B52's) lightened the song until I found an early demo version without her and it is much more sad and introspective. It's more . . . dare I say it . . . REM? - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=essY...

If, and I don't accept this as valid, but IF in 1992 "Sayin' flat butts are the thing" was actually as common as the most honorable and chivalrous knight Sir Mix-A-Lot claims, then he might be the most influential rapper of the 20th century as the 21st century seems to have unequivocally and totally been converted to his viewpoint re: posteriors on the right side of the bell curve.

Also, Sir-Mix-A-Lot is the only nationally famous rapper/hip-hop artists to come out Seattle. (On his first album's cover he is humping the Space Needle).

IMAGE(https://cdn-s3.allmusic.com/release-covers/500/0001/257/0001257446.jpg)

Tracy Chapman's 1988 song, - Fast car - is the first song in the year end top 100 that I would call even #protoalternative. But this song? It's pro-nothing. This is full on without a doubt alternative.

Statement: Alternative was for the 90's what Hippie music was for the sixties and disco was for the 70's.

It would be a lot easier to track "every song X" as I'm listening to them. Any interest in how many Alternative songs actually hit the year end top 100 in the 90's?