Death of the Hit Parade?

Perhaps in the future, music will fall out of favor completely as a generational defining thing. Maybe kids will have something else completely different defining them, than music.

But why are my kids and their friends going back to the Beatles, Talking Heads and Dire Straits? They themselves say that there is nothing good in music these days.

The people having this discussion are older. If we were in our formative years, I'm sure we'd feel much more connected with the popular music of the day. I bet you a lot of teenagers will be citing music from the TV show "The OC" has been very indicative of the mid 00's. Also, you could probably scan through a lot of teeny bopper MySpace pages and get a fair representation of the songs that mean a lot to kids these days. Don't do it though; it'll only make you look creepy.

As for Coturnix's comment: People still turn back to Ella Fitzgerald and Elvis Presley and, heck, even Mozart and Beethoven. Good music stands the test of time, and we're now getting to see which songs from the 60's through the 90's have staying power.

Ok, my rant on this:
Pop songs, that are recorded and the recordings sold for a lot of money, and "albums" (similarly) were an invention of the last 60 years. The music that was created to be in this format was rock and country, both coming from essentially the same mix of black American and folk music. The idea of individual song recordings from artists as a staying medium (for say 4 or 5 generations) is really yet to be proved. There is nothing physically or technologically set in stone about "hits". It is the copyright laws and quirks of distribution that set things up the way they are now. There are a lot of other ways it could be in the future. This whole commercial vs performance monetization I think will not last and any use of it to indicate "health of music" or something like that is no good.

I went and clicked on the "Chart Attack" link. I know have heard something that I had somehow, up until now, missed, the Star Wars Theme/Cantina Band.

Does anyone know any way to unhear this? Do I need some sort of brain injury?

But why are my kids and their friends going back to the Beatles, Talking Heads and Dire Straits? They themselves say that there is nothing good in music these days.

Music has been made into a commodity, and the consequence is that it's aimed at the widest possible audience and the simplest tastes.

Mass-produced music is like mass-produced everything else.

Markk: you make a very good point, and in my post I was careful not to make any judgment about the "health of music." To the contrary, as an indie music reviewer, I hear lots of great stuff coming out all the time.

Chad, as for your main points, the one about the generational factor makes a lot of sense to me - and it jibes with Markk's point too. As to the point about conflating the years, that is surely a tendency to be guarded against, but I don't think I'm guilty of it to the extent of invalidating my main point. I think EACH year in the "rock era" produced many songs that became classics, while in recent years, there have been far fewer. Looking over the the hits listed on the Chart Attack site, I see many in each year. Taking a random week from 1984 - and that's my least favorite period, personally - we have:
10. If Ever You're In My Arms Again - Peabo Bryson
9. She Bop - Cyndi Lauper
8. Sunglasses At Night - Corey Hart
7. State Of Shock - Jacksons
6. I Can Dream About You - Dan Hartman
5. Missing You - John Waite
4. When Doves Cry - Prince
3. Stuck On You - Lionel Richie
2. What's Love Got To Do With it - Tina Turner
1. Ghostbusters - Ray Parker, Jr.

A handful of those have become classics, and I personally know at least 8 of them really well. I don't think you could pick a week from 2004 and find the same thing. I don't think you'll be able to look back in 2024 and find a bunch of classics in that 2004 list.

Jon, you know 8 of those songs from 1984. I recognise 6. I'm sure neither of us would recognise as many songs from the same week in 2004.
Guess what? We're both old.

I think the relevant comparison isn't between how many of those songs from 1984 I recognize and how many songs from the same week in 2004 I recognize, but rather between how many songs from 2004 I recognize and how many songs from 1984 my parents recognize. Or, possibly, how many of those 2004 songs my students will recognize in 2024.

As for that specific chart, I recognize nine of the ten immediately (I'm drawing a blank on "Stuck On You"). Realistically, though, there are only three that I would say are potentially "classic" songs in the sense that everybody alive in 1984 would instantly recognize them, and I'm only certain of one of those ("Ghostbusters"). "What's Love Got to Do With It?" is fairly likely, as that was a monster hit as well, but I'm less certain of that one, and "Missing You" is a maybe, though that's a bit of a cheat because Tina Turner covered it a few years ago.

"Sunglasses at Night" is instantly recognizable to anybody who was a teenage pop fan in 1984, but I don't think that people who were country music fans in 1984 would remember it. Ditto "When Doves Cry," which was a big hit for Prince, but is less iconic than "Let's Go Crazy" or "Purple Rain."

Is any of this a function of the greater variety of sources for music? I recognized every song on that 1984 list because I was 14 at the time and so was listening to the same set of radio stations and watching the same set of videos as everyone else who was 14. Music that wasn't on the radio or MTV was harder to be exposed to.

The early 80s you are talking about are in the tail of the "music memory" distribution for boomers, so you are missing that the centroid of what you hear is right dead in the center of the music consciousness of my generation.

You might not even realize what hit song is being played in the background of an ad for an investment company or anything else we might dispose our income on. Why else would a serious investment company choose acid rock that got played on underground stations for its ad?

I mean, PETER f'ing FRAMPTON is in a Geico ad!

You can thank your lucky stars that no one is using "bubblegum" music from the mid 60s in ads.

Harry #3 said: "Good music stands the test of time, and we're now getting to see which songs from the 60's through the 90's have staying power."

Exactly. We have had more than 200 years to come to the consensus that Mozart was a genius and Salieri was a hack, and that's why anybody who has never seen Amadeus has probably never heard of Salieri. We are only starting to have that weeding out process with music of the 1960s, as many of the people who were around when that music was new are still alive--and a few (McCartney, the Who, Paul Simon, the Rolling Stones) have continued to produce new music. I (born 1967) personally find that some of those 60s hit songs are really good and some are trash. Multiply by millions and we will see what survives.

I recognize six of the songs from the 1984 list. Meanwhile, of this week's top 100 pop singles (from Billboard), I recognized zero, or maybe one. So I'm an old fogey, except that I was born in 1979 and the songs from 1984 were popular when I was a little kid. I remember them not because they are voice of my generation or whatever (who is the voice of my generation? 50 Cent?) but because I heard them dozens or hundreds of times throughout my childhood. Those songs stayed popular for years on the "soft rock" and "easy listening" stations that my parents favored.

I think there is in fact a generational divide here, but it's not due to the fact that the older generation is still controlling music. It's due to the fact that the older generation used to drive music sales, and now the younger one does. In the 80's, apparently, pop music was something that 35-year-olds with minivans and kids would listen to. If in fact teenagers listened to it as well then it was in fact more universal than today's pop music, just by attracting listeners from a broad age range.

Ray #8: Yeah, we're both "old," but you're missing my point. I'm predicting - and I could, of course, be wrong - that 2004 didn't produce as many songs that WILL become "timeless classics" as 1984 or 1974 or 1969 did.

Brian #10, yes, there's a greater variety of sources, which goes hand in hand with audience fragmentation. There's also a greater variety of types of media vying for attention (video games, HDTV...) which means music itself has to compete for brainspace in a way it didn't in past decades.

I could also remember 9 out of the 10 from that list (I didn't know the Jacksons' song). But I'm even more conservative than Chad. I would say MAYBE only Tina Turner's "What's Love Got to Do with It" would be recognizable (in its original form) to today's kids. Ask any teenager, "Who ya' gonna call?", and I bet less than 10% of them would think of answering "Ghostbusters". I made a "Bill and Ted's Excellent Adventure" reference the other day and got nothing but blank stares from current undergraduates.

I think what is interesting is WHO gets to decide what becomes a classic. How do kids today learn about 70's and 80's music (besides stealing it through file sharing)? Usually through background music in commercials and in soundtracks to "period pieces" set in those decades. While Corey Hart's "Sunglasses at Night" may have moved more units and be more memorable to people who lived through the 80's, I'm sure younger kids would think more quickly of Timbuk3's "Future's So Bright, I Gotta Wear Shades". So it's advertising, marketing, and some general Hollywood types that are making the final decision as to which songs survive. Look to "American Dreams" or "That 70's Show" or "Cold Case", not to the actual charts from the era. The kids today probably think The Romantics' "What I Like About You" was the only song played on the radio through most of the 80's.

Capella #13 said: "I think there is in fact a generational divide here, but it's not due to the fact that the older generation is still controlling music. It's due to the fact that the older generation used to drive music sales, and now the younger one does."

Popular music has been marketed mainly to young people (in their teens and 20s) since at least the days of Elvis. The generational divide was definitely around when my parents were in high school in the 1950s, it was still there when I was in high school in the 1980s, and it remains to this day. I remember eight of the songs on that 1984 list, but my mom (the radio was usually playing soft rock at my house when I was growing up, too) would probably remember at most two: "What's Love Got to Do with It" and maybe "Ghostbusters" (and I'm not sure about the latter). Pop music and I went our separate ways in the 1990s, so I doubt I would remember more than one or two of the songs from 2004.

Harry #15 wins the scary thought of the thread prize with "So it's advertising, marketing, and some general Hollywood types that are making the final decision as to which songs survive." On most of the studio albums I own, there are several songs that made my 4 and 5 star playlist that, for reasons I don't pretend to understand, never became hits while dreck like Lionel Ritchie's "Stuck on You" did. And now, of the songs that made that cut, the marketroids are picking the alleged best of the alleged best. I'm not sure I trust this crowd to do a good job.

I think it is a fragmenting of the industry thing. Most of these hits were from a time when there were a few music radio stations in each market and the three networks controlled TV.

It was much easier for a hit to saturate other mediums.

Today things are fragmented and Rap/Hip Hop is not yet considered "safe" for Madison Ave.

It is very rare for something like "Who Let the Dogs Out" to break out into the national consciousness.

"I'm predicting - and I could, of course, be wrong - that 2004 didn't produce as many songs that WILL become "timeless classics" as 1984 or 1974 or 1969 did."

I know. Another way of putting it is that you're grumbling that kids today don't listen to proper music, like they did when you were young. As Chad points out, the question is not how many of those 1984 songs _you_ remember, its how many _your mom_ remembers, and how many of those 1984 songs your grouchy uncle paid any notice to back then.
(And speaking of moms, I doubt I'd recognise more than a couple of the hits from this year's charts, but I'm sure my wife would recognise many more - because she listens to the radio in the car and I listen to my ipod)

I think the crux of this discussion is a combination of what # 10 Brian said - "I recognized every song on that 1984 list because I was 14 at the time and so was listening to the same set of radio stations and watching the same set of videos as everyone else who was 14." and "Is any of this a function of the greater variety of sources for music?"

In the '80s there were two powerful means of discovering new music that don't exist in the same way anymore - MTV and radio. MTV was a national playlist, so kids all over the country got exposed to the same music. When that many people are hearing the same songs, it's far easier for them to become "classics" and enter the popular consciousness. And radio was far more popular and less segmented then it is today. Kids in the '80's listened to the radio to hear new music. Today, kids find new music on the internet, which is far too segmented to allow the same songs to reach everyone at once.

You can look at it like this - in the old days, we had far fewer choices, so the songs that made it through the gatekeepers made more of an impact. Today there are way more choices and no more gatekeepers. I'm not saying that that's good or bad - but the marketplace is completely different than it was 20 years ago.

"you're grumbling that kids today don't listen to proper music, like they did when you were young"

No, that's absolutely not what I'm saying. I'm saying there's no such generalization as "kids today" the way there was in 1969 or 1984. "Kids today" are a more fragmented audience than we were when we were the kids and young adults having formative life experiences soundtracked by the songs that were being played, and overplayed, at the time. That's what I'm sayin'.

I don't even like most of those songs from 1984. They're not the type of music I was into or that my friends listened to. I didn't even listen to the radio at that time, in fact - I was too busy graduating college and trying to figure out what to do with my life. But I still internalized most of the top-charting songs, because they were so woven into the fabric of day-to-day life, you couldn't avoid them.

I'm not so sure the Dan Hartman song is that obscure. I had just turned 11 in August of '84, and was by no means a music buff, but I was familiar with that song.

I was joking, Jon.
But still, your prediction of what you think people will remember in 20 years time is based on
1) a guess about how familiar 14-25 year olds are with current music
2) a guess about how familiar 30/40 year olds were with 70's/80's music,
and your evidence for these guesses is that _you_ remember 1980's music, but you don't recognise the songs on last week's chart.

Thanks for the clarification, Ray!
Now, what you're saying in #22 is that my thoughts on this are based on anecdotal evidence, and that's certainly true. If it were worthwhile (and surely it's not), someone could take surveys of "kids today" to prove or disprove my point. But ultimately only the passage of decades will tell.

Chad,

These are interesting points you raise, though I think you fall a little bit into the "compression of the past" trap yourself; for example, when sweep the 60s and 70s together and imply that even early 80s music was "Baby Boomer"-oriented, or at least reflected their tastes in some respect (see The Big Chill -- a movie by and for Bomers -- for a contemporary take on Boomers' attitudes).

In the 60's and 70's, rock was a relatively new form of popular music, and it came in with a bunch of new or new-ish media and distribution channels. The record industry as we now know it was more or less created in the 60's, and television was relatively new. The music press that we now know didn't really come into existence until the late 60's, and only really became established in the mid-to-late 70's. All those media outlets were new, and provided opportunities for young people who were familiar with the new forms to step in and make a niche for themselves.

What, exactly, were these new media and distribution channels? You make it sound as if the recording industry (and radio, and DJ's) didn't really exist before the 60s. The popular music of the 60s used the pre-existing media and channels, including television: think of the Beatles or the Rolling Stones on the Ed Sullivan Show. The machinery of recording music, pressing records, and selling it via radio (and movies) was already in place. Even the seamy underbelly was already there: payola scandals date back to the 50s.

I'll maybe grant you the musc press -- Rolling Stone and its ilk -- but I'll admit I'm not sure what the state of music-related publishing was prior to the 60s. Serious pop-music criticism probably does date to the 70s, but how important has that really been for the music industry? (Important for the careers of individual artists and bands, perhaps, but not necessarily the cause of it all.)

Rap and hip-hop are arguably as big a departure from rock as rock was from Frank Sinatra, but their rise didn't coincide with any significant new media opportunities-- there are some record labels and networks and magazines that grew out of hip-hop culture, but they weren't stepping into a void the way that new media companies were in the 60's and 70's. And, as a result, they've failed to displace the older order, and have had to settle for co-opting mass culture in a slightly watered-down form palatable to the people who were raised on rock, and are still in charge of producing, distributing, and marketing music to the masses.

See, this I don't really buy at all. Music executive are, first and foremost, concerned with making pots of money. If they could spin a new movement into the next 60s/70s wave of rock & pop, they'd do it, personal tastes be damned. (This is certainly true of the 50s record executives who marketed people like Elvis Presley, and I'm sure it was true of executives in the 60s, who were probably from the generation of Sinatra.)

Your argument would make sense if the 60s record companies were all de novo, being run by crazy teenagers and 20-somethings; but I think most of the major record companies that produced the big hits of the 60s were pre-existing companies like Capitol Records, Columbia, Decca, RCA, Atlantic, and so forth, which for the most part date to the 30s and 40s (and sometimes earlier!).

I'll start by saying I'm probably young compared to the other people posting here. I am 22. Although I must admit I listen to old music mostly. (Pink Floyd, Beatles, The Smiths, The Cure)
But I wonder if you have considered the following points:
1.) Music has become more commercial (thus the music that is "popular" is mass marketed and therefore usually not very good -that is an understatement) (Charts usually represent these marketing tactics)

2.) There is a greater spectrum of music now than 20 years ago

3.) If you look at the past you only remember the good music

4.) due to the 1st point and 2nd point you have to look for good music

5.) When you were younger you were probably more prone to go look for new kinds of music (or talk to people about new music)

6.) music in the charts has become more and more centred on music you can play in clubs, i.e. music you can dance to but is necessarily not good to listen to

7.) Music channels are dead. They provide no insight to what young people listen to. Mainly rap videos. But I must say I don't like that kind of "rap". I suggest rap like: The Streets, Le peuple De l'herbe, etc.

Anyway, although we don't have monster hits that anyone would like, we have more person specific music nowadays.

Some tips:
The Shins
Flaming Lips
Sufjan Stevens
Norah Jones
Anathema
Devendra Banhart (for all the hippies)
The Postal Service
The Mars Volta
Textures
dEUS
Tool
Eels
The Books
Belle & Sebastian
Sigur Ros
Bjork
etc.

@Jon: I know Prince and Tina Turner since I used to listen to it as a child but I think that younger kids would have a hard time. As for the rest in that chart I have no idea..
Except Lionel Richie but come on.. that's bad.

If you really want to know what I listen to:
http://www.last.fm/user/kittythecat/

I'm not sure I trust this crowd to do a good job.

I don't think you can define 'a good job' coherently, except possibly as "reflecting my personal tastes". And frankly, we're not especially concerned with reflecting your personal taste.

Market forces have always determined what becomes popular, and what lasts. For the past several generations, the "Hollywood types" have had serious influence over those forces. What, did you think that the music you were familiar with somehow appeared from nowhere, and it's only today's music that's mass-produced and controlled?

Jasper, thanks for your input. Valuable points about dance, and about there being a "greater spectrum" of music now. That greater spectrum reflects my own observation as well, and contributes to the reduced possibility for monster hits.
Of the artists in your big list, I'm familiar with about 3/4 of them, but I'm having a hard time thinking of any "monster hits" that have come from any of them in the past 7 years or so. (With the exception of Norah Jones, but in that case, the "hits" are more her whole albums than individual songs, no?)

Also, Jasper, I'd be very curious to know if you'd recognize songs like Cyndi Lauper's "She Bop," John Waite's "Missing You," and Dan Hartman's "I Can Dream About You" if you heard them, even if you don't recognize the artist and title. I still hear these songs - the last two, at least - in places like dentist's offices - seems to me they've entered the canon of classic soft rock hits. Maybe you do hear them, but don't recognize them and therefore they don't register. I wonder.

Fragmentation has always been a constant in pop music. A genre splits, or morphs, or begets, and those splits / morphs/ begats will fragment in turn. The trend is ever towards change, towards diversity, given the ephemeral nature of pop music and the base priority to make a buck. The interesting question is why someone chooses the Beatles over Elvis, the Dead over the Doobies, Joy Division over Donna Summers, Nirvana over Michael Jackson, the Ravonettes over Britney. The greater the fragmentation, the likelier one will hear the chords that resonate in one's heart, the rhythm that moves the soul. Evolution in media has merely ramped up the speed of change. The genetic imperative of pop is to divide, and to divide again and again....

Hey Jon, I listened to the songs you were curious about. I must say I have never heard them. Maybe that is because I live in Europe or because I don't listen to the radio (anymore).
I must say though that maybe nobody has noticed but the radio is filled with "classic rock" stations.

I think this might be because the enormous amount of post-babyboomers, that are/were avid music lovers are probably now or have been able to form these kind of radio stations.

@Caledonian: You must admit there has been much more mass marketing than in the past (especially since the boy band/girl band craze of the 90s): TV ads, clips, music stations, products endorsed by artists, etc.
If you would go to a primary school I expect you will see that the children are walking around with band T-shirts etc. (The amount of Goth children in Europe has become disturbingly high, which I find mildly amusing to see)
The age of the listeners has gone down dramatically which I think is primarily due to the overwhelming amounts of marketing.

What I meant to say is that the music industry is changing. The internet and social networking have provided most musicians to become independent w.r.t. the companies. We can now become more easily familiar with bands that do not want to create music solely for the money but more because they can make quality music. Musicians are hopefully returning to a time where the music itself mattered and not the amount of money you can make from music. (because I think you would all agree, everyone has had enough of remixes of old songs) (hmm it sounds as if I am nostalgic about the past I haven't lived through)

Actually I think someone could make a nice script applied to e.g. the last.fm site to view statistics about the musical taste of different generations. If you then update these statistics each year, you could actually quantize
1.) whether or not people tend to forget the bad music of their generation
2.)if the majority of people will prefer music from the 60/70/80s as time progresses
3.) if the preferred musical decades will shift.
(you would of course have to take into account the number of users in each generation and the fact that the last.fm users are probably not a representable group of our society, etc.)
And this will all be thanks to: data mining :)
(maybe google trends will already give insight?)

Anyway I might not be the best representative of young people since most of my friends listen to "newer" music and I am probably the only one who knows what LPs are and owns/listens to them.

Additional:

I can't stand 'She Bop'. But 'Time After Time' is fantastic.

Jasper:
I must say though that maybe nobody has noticed but the radio is filled with "classic rock" stations.

Oh, we noticed them ;-). "Classic rock" stations started appearing in the early 90s, I think, and I remember a sense of ironic dismay accompanying this: people who taken aback to discover that the daring, cutting-edge stuff they'd listened to as kids was now "classic." (Of course, as time went on, classic-rock stations started adding stuff from the 80s...)

Back in the 70s and early 80s, there used to be a number of "oldies" stations, at least in larger American cities. "Oldies" specifically meant popular music from the 50s and early 60s: early rock & roll (Elvis Presley, Buddy Holly, etc.), early soul and R&B, so-called "girl groups," doo-wop, etc. I think most of these station formats have disappeared, as their audience aged and became a smaller and smaller part of the market. (But I'm sure you can find versions of this format on satellite radio and the internet now.)

As for marketing: I'm not sure how you'd demonstrate that there really is more marketing of music today. There was a huge amount of marketing even in the 60s, for example: the Beatles made several movies, there was a whole TV show built around a kind of "Beatles lite" band which was created just for the show (The Monkees), etc. (The Monkees were arguably the first corporate-created boy band.)

I thought about posting this when this was a little fresher, but I wasn't really sure about what I was saying. So here's a late addition that I don't think has been covered: somewhere in between "With the Beatles" and "Abbey Road" recording technology reached a point where albums recorded in that time don't immediately sound "old." I've been listening to as many of the songs in the Rolling Stone "500 Greatest Songs" list as I have copies of, and you can instantly tell that you're listening to an "old song" when it was recorded before 1965 or so (it's a fuzzy line, but everything before 1960 clearly sounds old, and nothing after 1970 does.) I think this had a huge impact in what sort of music appeared in movies in the 1980s and on - in 1970, you couldn't put a 1950 recording in a movie without it sounding scratchy and out-of-place. From that point on, the second half of the Beatles collection and everything that followed have been available as "background music." I think that's why the music of the 1970s has exploded through our culture in a way that previous generations didn't. Similarly, following generations of music have had to compete with the music of the 1970s without the significant quality advantage.

Chris, while it's true that stereo recordings became increasingly common (as stereo equipment became more widespread) in the 1960s and continuing into the early 1970s, there was also a change in fashion. Radio and record execs in the 1950s actually preferred the tinny sound that you hear in popular music recordings from that era. My parents also had a significant amount of classical music on vinyl, some of which was recorded in the 1950s, and it doesn't have the tinny sound that you hear in the old Elvis, etc., recordings.

And of course your point about recording quality for music from the mid 1960s onward holds double for anything recorded after the mid 1980s, when CDs became available. When I was an undergrad in the late 80s, CDs used to indicate whether the album was fully digital (DDD), digitally mastered analog recordings (ADD), or analog masters digitized for CD (AAD). By 1990 or so, those labels disappeared: you could take for granted that all new releases were DDD.

I've noticed the same thing you mentioned about how when they need a song that everyone knows they pick something from the "golden age" (well, OUR golden age anyway - I'm the same generation as you). But how do we know this isn't just old fogeyism on our part? How do we know that in a few decades it won't be well-worn moldy oldies by Nirvana or Jay-Z that are used to sell canned soup or laundry soap?

When I was in college listening to the Dead or Jefferson Airplane or the Allman Brothers I don't think my parents would have recognized anything in the Billboard top 20 - but they would have has no trouble recognizing songs by the Inkspots or Dinah Shore or Johnny Mercer.