The Lukewarm 100
Good post by Archangel over at www.crackteam.org (which you can read here) on the Billboard Hot 100. I think that I can safely say, without blowing Agent Archangel’s cover, that he and I are the same age, grew up listening to a lot of the same music, and have musical tastes that overlap in a lot of areas.
Anyway, after reading the post, I mosied (moseyed? Whilom haven mosey?) over to the Hot 100 myself, had a gander, and a cow while I was at it. Am I getting old, or is Archangel right in asking if it’s all shit?
Top ten: the only tune here that I once liked was “Love Song,” by Sara Bareilles. It’s one of those irrepressably catchy little numbers that, thanks to some commercial or other, was suddenly ubiquitous and not so catchy any more. Scanning the remainder of the top 50, I’m not seeing much else that grabs me; it’s a hodgepodge of bubblegum, overblown rap, overhyped pop, and overwrought country… in other words, not exactly the staples of my musical diet.
All of this raises a question, besides the “am I getting old” one (which I’m not; I can’t remember the last time that I judged the health of music, popular or otherwise, by what was on the charts): How have I heard half of this stuff?
I don’t listen to much radio. The stations I listen to are more likely to play Richard Thompson, for instance, than Miley Cyrus. Mind you, I’m not proffering this as some kind of well-burnished indie cred; I gave up on that around the same time I stopped spiking my hair. It’s just a simple statement of fact. So am I getting all this music by some form of osmosis? Picking up radio waves through my fillings?
Besides, the stuff that’s been in heaviest rotation for me the last couple of years has been a combination of new stuff by older artists I’ve loved for ages anyway (Killing Joke, Lyle Lovett, Joe Henry, Adrian Belew, Ozomatli, The Negro Problem et. al.) alongside newer stuff that comes either from friends’ recommendations, reviews, search engine accidents, and more osmosis (The Go! Team, Magnetic Fields, and Transit Kings, for instance). It’s not as though the newer music is somehow awful–though a lot of it is. It’s just that sometimes, finding the good stuff is like panning for gold in a dung heap.
Tags: Billboard, Music, singles charts