I’ve been reading Tom Breihan’s Number Ones column for a good while now, and was very amused by a bit from Monday’s entry about Glenn Medeiros’s “She Ain’t Worth It”:
This song came out when I was 10 years old, a brand-new and enthusiastic fan of pop music, and I have no memory of it ever existing. If there wasn’t hard-copy evidence of the song’s status, I would’ve never believed it was a #1 hit.
I find this funny, because I’ve been having exactly that reaction to a bunch of the songs he’s written up recently (including Medeiros’s). In fact, I had that reaction to the very next entry in the series, Mariah Carey’s “Vision of Love”. Breihan writes about this song as a momentous Event, but I can’t honestly say I have any recollection of hearing it in 1990. This despite it being the song that prevented the one track from the recent columns that I definitely do remember hearing, “The Power”:
All in all, four of the last twelve columns are songs I could swear were made up this year just to mess with my head (the other two are the Tommy Page and Taylor Dayne songs), and an additional two are songs I fucking hate (the NKOTB and Paula Abdul-with-rapping-cartoon tracks).
This isn’t because I wasn’t plugged into music at the time. It’s actually because I’m a bit older than Breihan, so was off at college already. The recent columns cover the summer after my freshman year at Williams, and what’s been striking about them is how quick and comprehensive my decoupling from pop music was.
Prior to 1989, this column functioned as a great source of nostalgia, because growing up in a rural part of not-The-City New York state, I didn’t have access to much of anything but Top 40 radio. I didn’t always like the songs that topped the charts, but I was almost always aware of them. That started to change a bit at the end of high school, when I became aware of a new station in Binghamton with more of a Classic Rock focus, and started to click away from songs I didn’t like. But my knowledge of Top 40 just falls off a cliff once I went away to college, and really doesn’t come back until circa 2013, when SteelyKid started asking to listen to current pop on car rides.
Once I graduated high school, I moved off into a kind of college radio bubble (not that I listened to the college’s radio station all that much (it broadcast with “1/3rd the power of a good hair dryer” in the memorable phrasing of one of their bumper stickers). I was just surrounded by people who were mostly listening to a different kind of stuff than was making the Top 100, both older stuff (that’s when I dug into the Rolling Stones back catalog, for example) and new stuff in the alternative scene (a lot of REM, the Replacements, Sugar, Dinosaur Jr….). The only time I really heard current pop was at the occasional dance party (which really wasn’t my scene) or when we went to bars on Spring Break, and they tended not to play gloopy ballads.
I’m struck by this because a bunch of the pop-culture podcasts I listen to will talk about the 90’s as a period of “monoculture,” when everybody knew this or that song, or TV show, or movie. The sudden collapse of the Number Ones as a reliable nostalgia factory is a reminder that this wasn’t ever really true— there have always been a dizzying array of (sub)cultural bubbles out there that are blissfully unaware of what the folks in other bubbles regard as titanic and inescapable hits. It’s just that most of the people commenting on this were too young to have been aware of let alone a part of any of those bubbles, and so view the era as an undifferentiated monoculture.
And, to be fair, I probably do a bit of this myself— I tend to collapse a lot of the period before I graduated high school into “The 80’s,” when in fact it reflects a lot of different subcultures that didn’t coexist all that happily. At the time, though, I was a kid in a rural area with limited radio coverage, and didn’t really know much about that.
Anyway, this has been on my mind for a little bit, and only cracked the write-about-it threshold thanks to Breihan’s dig at Medeiros (and because I’m really bored in a hotel room). If you need me for anything else, I’ll be over in the corner, crumbling into dust.
Here are some buttons:
And if you’d like to mock me for not knowing Mariah Carey’s first giant hit, the comments will be open.