I’ve been thinking about Pop Music a bit the past week or two, prompted by being forced to listen to my wife’s choice of music in our car one day. It’s some “hits of the 70’s, 80’s, and 90’s” piece of something-or-other…unless you like that sort of thing, then it’s a wonderful FM station which plays all the greatest songs you know and love. I’ve assiduously avoided listening to radio from the first opportunity I had to not listen to it, sometime in my late teens or early 20’s. I suppose some readers don’t understand what I’m talking about. Through high school we listened to music in two places, basically: cars and our bedrooms. We had AM radio in the cars and vinyl records in our bedrooms. If you really got into it and had deep pockets, you bought a big Wollensak reel-to-reel tape machine, but if you were a wannabe like my brother and me, you bought a cheap little portable recorder and stuck the painfully crappy microphone in front of a tiny transistor radio speaker to record “off the air”.

In small-market Spokane only two radio stations catered to young people and their shocking tastes in music: KNEW (neé KJRB by the time I left high school), and KXLY. All popular music of whatever genre mixed freely on these stations. No FM station played popular music until around the time I entered college when KREM-FM suddenly started an “underground” playlist. Underground radio featured stoned out DJ’s: “Hi, I’m John. Yeah. We’ll be playing some heavy tunes for a while. I hope you like them.” We programmed the buttons on the radio–oh Lord, do I have to explain how car radios worked back then? Those too?–to the two AM stations and became adept at punching the button for whichever one wasn’t playing a song we loathed, which happened frequently. You’ll understand in another paragraph.

But back to that moment a week ago when I listened to many songs I hadn’t heard in years. The one which sticks in my head is “If This Is It” by Huey Lewis and the News. I’m going to hate myself for looking that up and reminding my brain about it: I had a viral ear-worm for days after hearing that song. It’s not that I don’t appreciate Mr Lewis, it’s that I don’t particularly like that specific song. “I Wanna New Drug” has sentiment I can get behind. “The Heart of Rock & Roll” zips along quite nicely. But a slow near-ballad which basically says, “do you see this going where I think it’s going” struck me then and continues to as ridiculously mundane. Maybe you like it. Fine, you’re entitled because we all ask music to deliver different things and if the song delivers, great…for you. I like absolutely stupid songs because of a bass line or because the singer’s voice seems to mock the very words being sung, or because it has a frenetic beat, or a multitude of other reasons. I’m not going to mention two extremely popular groups which demographics say I should love, and I can’t stand them. I lost a friend over that once.

Listening to my wife’s radio station, I had a startling realization. I had been getting pretty egotistic about how broad my musical horizons are. I like country, blues, rock, blues-rock, folk, world/ethnic, jazz of various ilks, classical, a little bit of hip-hop and…pop. My enforced listening session in the car showed me I don’t really like pop per se, I like it very selectively. I protested to myself about all that pop music I liked from my youth. That’s when it hit me: we like all those songs which formed us as we left childhood, negotiated adolescence, and became adults. After that? Not so much. We went in different directions. Some folks I’ve met never went anywhere. They only listen to songs from the oeuvre when they were 10-25.

Today proves my point. Yesterday I finished chores and declared it to be Birthday Week. I’ve decided one day isn’t big enough to handle 70 years. Until Tuesday June 11th, I’m celebrating. Today unfolded at a leisurely pace, pointed toward some music listening, writing, and a Phillies game. I decided to listen to music from the beginning of my listening life, and then realized “the beginning” eludes definition. I settled for the year my pre-teen fan-tasy grew into musical appreciation: 1966. Until then I’d focused on whatever TV and radio served up: The Beatles, early The Rolling Stones, The Monkees. In 1965 my brother and I began buying a few different bands on 45rpm records, and in 1966 I got my first 33rpm LP, The Young Rascals. It coincided with my birthday and the end of the school year. I ran out of the schoolroom never to return to elementary school, and I ran into adolescence with a newfound appreciation for the melding of pop, soul, and rock which had started to occur.

I decided to re-introduce myself to 1966 by looking at the Top 40 lists for the year and selecting songs to listen to from it. Locating a wonderful site called Top 40 Weekly, I selected 1966 to be presented with the Top 40 chart for every single week in 1966! Wow. Here’s the beginning of the first one from January of that year:

This proves my point. (Of course, it’s self-referential, but nevermind.) I look at the first song and start singing the lyrics. I look at the second one and smile and hear Paul singing the title words. Likewise with #3 and #4. I’ll admit #5 threw me for a minute–I’m more familiar with “Catch Us If You Can” by that group, as heard on the Lloyd Thaxton show. Giving it a play, though, it came back to mind. How about #6? Check. And #7? Check. Not until #8 did I say to myself, “punch the button.” I like a few Righteous Brothers songs, but they carried a crooning 50’s style of music into the 60’s, and it didn’t play well. But who can’t smile listening to #9?

Then we hit #10. Lord knows how Eddy Arnold managed to get a charting song out of that number. I felt the revulsion rise up. Today’s form of button-pushing, the skip-track button on the streaming service came into play quickly. The remaining songs? I smiled again at #11; sang the lyrics to #12 with my wife; and wondered how #’s 13 and 14 got on the list. I don’t recall ever hearing them. The Shangri-Las managed to push out a charting song in 1966? You gotta admire that, even if the song was horrible. (I never heard that one either.) Gary Lewis’s song typified his talentless group, but made me remember “This Diamond Ring” so it wasn’t worthless. I couldn’t find #17 on Tidal, and then a relaxed wide smile–the Beatles again. Before there were LP’s in my life, there were 45’s:

I couldn’t find Ramsey Lewis Trio’s version of “Hang On Sloopy” and wonder what the heck a jazz trio could’ve done with The McCoys’ big hit. The Beach Boys were a selective thing for me, and #20 didn’t hit the spot. I continued through the list until I hit #40. It kinda made the whole journey worthwhile: “Lies” by The Knickerbockers. I loved that song; still do. They had another great one as shown at the top of this post.

The final 45 I bought occurred in 1976. I bought it only because I knew I would never like the album, but I wanted the song for posterity’s sake:

Our musical likes have more to do with where we grew up and what we listened to at the time, than anything objectively wonderful about the music. We like what we like, and we don’t what we don’t. Objective criticism fails precisely because it rejects subjectivity. Do I like “bad” songs? You bet. Do I dislike “good” ones? True. Are you totally inexplicable to me because you like “A White Shade Of Pale”? Abso-effing-lutely.