Pop Culture: College Starter Pack and Undateable Songs

Two light topics following hoops yesterday

For the last 22 years or so, I’ve been playing pick-up basketball in a regular faculty/staff/student game at Union, and for the last several years, the games have routinely been in the Viniar Center, where the varsity teams play. This is a huge improvement over some of the previous courts we’ve had to play on, but comes at a bit of a cost, namely that we have to make way for the men’s and women’s teams whenever they want the court.

During yesterday’s game, a player from the women’s team came in to do their regular shooting practice, so we moved our game to free up the hoop you see in that photo (from back in 2016, when my kids would still go to games with me), and finished our day out playing sideways (which is still a regulation court, but feels smaller). She also plugged a phone into the sound system to play music while she was shooting.

(This, btw, is one of the contrasts between the men’s and women’s teams: the women play their shootaround playlists through the sound system so it’s audible to everyone, while the men tend to wear earbuds. I assume this is because they’re mostly listening to stuff with wildly inappropriate lyrics that they don’t want blasting out if a tour comes through…)

One of the first handful of songs on her playlist was “The Joker” by the Steve Miller Band:

I cracked up at this, because this exact song was everywhere when I was in college, shuffling to class through the last falling ash from the asteroid impact that killed the dinosaurs. As I said on ex-Twitter, the album whose cover is the still image in that video was so ubiquitous you would’ve thought it was issued to students during orientation: “Welcome to Williams! Here’s your dorm key, here’s your class schedule, and here are your copies of Greatest Hits 1974-78 by the Steve Miller Band, and Bob Marley’s Legend. Enjoy college!”

(I made that joke during our game, and then the very next song on her playlist was “Three Little Birds.” I was like “See! See!” After that it took more of a K-BILLY Super Sounds of the Seventies turn, though: some Commodores, some Billy Joel, some yacht-rock-adjacent stuff that was definitely not on the college soundtrack in the fall of 1989.)

This got me thinking about a couple of pop-culture topics, both of which made pleasant diversions from thinking about politics. So I’ll throw them out here, in case you are also in need of a respite:

Topic 1: College Starter Pack Albums: As I said, there were a handful of records that absolutely everybody seemed to already have when they arrived on the Williams College campus back in 1989. These weren’t necessarily recent hits, but somewhat older stuff that there was a better-than-even chance you’d hear playing out a window or from a boombox if you walked around campus on a nice day. In addition to the Miller and Marley records mentioned above, these included:

• Led Zeppelin IV (the one with the weird symbols and “Stairway to Heaven”)

• Eponymous by REM (very slightly edgy, but super common)

• the Aerosmith Greatest Hits album with the red cover

• that underwhelming Grateful Dead best-of collection whose actual title I can never remember

• James Taylor’s Greatest Hits (there was a running joke of the form “Bob’s girlfriend is coming over, better throw on JTGH…”)

• The Doors Greatest Hits with the famous Morrison photo on the cover

These are mostly staples of the Columbia House ten-for-a-penny ads, which is a big part of why they were so common. There were a lot of individual albums that were also really common (the first Boston record would get played a lot, and most people at least owned Dark Side of the Moon though it wasn’t necessarily played in public), but these best-of type records tended to be the ones thrown on for background noise in groups, and so were the most likely to be heard if you were just wandering. And, for that matter, the ones most likely to turn up if you visited some other college at around that time.

(This is distinct from a handful of records that were incredibly popular within the particular social groups I spent most of my time with. A woman we knew freshman year was really into the Led Zep song “Fool in the Rain,” so I heard that a statistically unlikely number of times, and some guys in the rugby orbit were really into the band The Radiators so this particular piano riff figures really strongly in my early college memories:

(I don’t think that was all that big anywhere outside one particular group on our campus, though.)

There are also gaps that might seem weird, but are quirks of the music business at the time. There wasn’t yet a really good best-of collections for a lot of current stuff (the Madonna collection was a year or two off, but quickly became nearly inescapable), nor for Led Zeppelin (the big box set came out a year or two later) or the Rolling Stones (there were a couple that were kind of meh), so if they were represented it tended to be either individual albums or random songs on a mix tape. Rap was just starting to get really popular in the demographic groups feeding into elite colleges at that time, so there weren’t a lot of albums that would get a consensus as a soundtrack for dicking around in a quad (parties with dancing, on the other hand…).

Anyway, it was kind of fun spending a bit of time trying to dredge up the specific albums I think of in this category: records that were so common that you might’ve suspected they came free with a rented mini-fridge. So I thought I’d throw this out more broadly: What would you consider the starter pack albums for where and when you went to college?

Topic 2: Un-dateable Songs: It’s really common in college movies to set the time and place with a strategic needle drop: a song that is clearly and obviously associated with a particular era, that will make anybody who was around at the time say “Oh, yeah, that was [year]…”

It occurred to me yesterday, though, that “The Joker” is nearly the opposite of that. It’s a song that’s literally fifty years old (released in late 1973), but would not be out of place as diagetic music for a story set on a college campus anywhere in that span. You put “The Joker” over a wide shot of shirtless guys playing Frisbee in a college quad, and it’s an almost literally timeless shot— unless there’s a car in the background, it could be any year between 1974 and 2024.

This got me wondering about what else goes in that category: songs that could plausibly be played on campus at any time between their release and the present day. And also a closely related question: what’s the least date-able song out there? The song that would provide the absolute minimum possible information if used as diagetic music in a college movie?

This isn’t quite a matter of just identifying old songs that are still popular, because there can be valleys in this. If a wedding DJ throws on “Don’t Stop Believin’” in 2024 it’ll get an enthusiastic response from people my age and also from our kids, but if you had thrown that on in 1992 you would’ve come in for savage mockery unless you were clearly doing it ironically. We had to get well clear of the hair metal era before anything in that vein stopped being cringe-inducing. A lot of disco-era stuff was similarly out of favor during my college years, but has come back in a big way— I was at a thing a couple weekends ago where the cover band played “Brandy” by Looking Glass to a huge response, and while I can admit now that that song kind of slaps, you would’ve been laughed out of the room for playing it non-ironically when I was in college.

So it’s a bit tricky to identify songs that really go in that category. From my era, I think you’re looking at stuff like Tom Petty’s “Free Fallin’,” which blew up instantly and I don’t think has ever been on the wrong end of a pop-cultural backlash. (Not coincidentally, I think it also goes in the related category of “Songs that could’ve been a massive hit if they had been released in any of the last seventy years”…) I can’t swear that “The Joker” retained its popularity through the early 1980’s, but as someone who’s been in and around college campuses more or less continuously since 1989, I can confirm that it’s been a quad-shenanigans soundtrack staple that whole time.

I’m not sure what the oldest song that might have that status is, but I’ll throw out “Brown-Eyed Girl” as a nominee. That’s from 1967, so pushing sixty years, and it’s got the right kind of qualities: it’s the kind of song that it’s hard to imagine anyone objecting to it being played in a quad (or at the beach, etc.)¹ .

So there’s another question to pass the time (and maybe answer in comments): What is the least date-able song you could use as diagetic music in a college movie? Can you suggest better than “Brown-Eyed Girl”?

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So, yeah, that’s frivolous, but it amused me while I sit around waiting for students who may or may not come in with questions about this week’s quantum mechanics midterm. If you would like more such nonsense, here’s a button:

And if you have answers for either (or both) of these, the comments will be open:

1. OK, maybe Van Morrison himself, since I’ve heard people say that he’s angrily refused to play it at various points. I can’t confirm or deny the accuracy of that, though.