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.
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'
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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