I was looking at this feature at Stereogum. The number ones on the Billboard hot 100. I remember being a teen and listening to the countdowns. I started in 1989, and I even tuned in for the yearly countdown. And I followed the charts all the way through 1990 and 1991. Those, coincidently, were unhappy years of my life, the early years of teenhood, when I was not making the first right steps towards adulting. And coincidently or not, pop music from those few years was pretty bleak. Mainstream pop was running out of ideas. You had hair metal, which was recycling the same old cliches over and over. You had people rehashing a lot of old ideas that were working in the 80s. Most of the exciting things that were going to take place in mainstream pop had already taken place: U2, Simple Minds and arena rock. Human League and synth pop was over. Bobby Brown and New Jack Swing was a good thing, but it got stale easily.
If you looked at what the pop charts looked like in the late 70s, it was pretty awesome. A lot of the number ones from that era have gone on to become classics. By the 80s, it seemed as though the big corporations had gamed the system, and started picking who the winners were going to be, to the detriment of the pop landscape. There were a few bands who were great, but when you go through the big stars of that era – Paula Abdul, Milli Vanilli and New Kids on the Block, do you remember them for their personalities, or do you remember their songs? In retrospect, David Foster’s work with Chicago and Peter Cetera were perfectly respectable, but to a teenager, it was completely bland and lacking in excitement. And there was that nightmare of finding out that Bryan Adam’s “Everything I Do” was at the #1 for 8 straight weeks.
I was bored out of my senses. Every now and then, there would be a hit single that I would like, but it wouldn’t go up to the top like I wanted it to. There was the “Humpty Dance” which was pretty cool. Public Enemy was making great music around that time, but, to quote one of their song titles, “leave this off your fucking charts”.
There’s not that much I remember about my life at that point. My parents were berating me for not doing as well at school as I used to. I wasn’t having much of a social life. Things weren’t fun. Quite possibly I was going through a lot of necessary growing pains, and my brain could have been so busy trying to rewire itself that it hardly took notice of what was going on all around. In many ways, those were the last years of my childhood, of having a closer relationship with my parents, and the difficult years when I had to learn how to break free and chart my own course. In some small way, I had to figure out how to not allow them to hinder me from doing what I had to do.
But unbeknownst to me, something was bubbling under the surface. If you look at the history of pop music, they’ll tell you that a lot of wonderful music was being made in the years between 1988 and 1991. It just wasn’t making it to the top of the pop charts. There was the Pixies. There was grunge and the whole Seattle scene. REM was starting to become popular. Sonic Youth had just released their best work. There was a lot of new music coming out of the rave scenes in the UK, especially in places like Manchester. It was a whole new world that I had completely missed out on because I was paying attention to the one place that had shitty music – the pop charts.
That’s why when the term “alternative music” came along, you had to understand the context: it was an era when the top of the pop charts was no longer an accurate reflection of all the good music being released. You might think that there would be a discerning public out there, who would apply the wisdom of the crowd to the vast clutter of pop music being released back then, and magically sift through everything and bubble up to the top the best and most deserving music. It was a great system when it worked, but by that point in time, it was no longer working. The early 90s were a pivotal period in pop music history because it was a point where firstly, that system was no longer working, and secondly, the variety of music being made was so great and so vast that the pop charts could no longer be your only source, or even first source of discovering good and new music.
And so the great 90s indie movement had gathered steam. (It didn’t begin in the 90s, it began in the 80s.) What followed after 2-3 years of being completely bored with the pop charts was 2-3 years of making wonderful musical discoveries over and over. Music from the indie pop scene was being made available. I was starting to discover music that Singapore had banned for decades: Led Zeppelin, Jimi Hendrix, Cream, Jefferson Airplane. The few years after the “Nevermind” album dropped were some of the best years of my life. As per that Velvet Underground song, my life was saved by rock and roll.
So this series about number ones is significant to me because it described the first few years of discovering pop music to me, and how comparatively bleak they were. And in many ways, they remind me of what my life is now. I’m back, living with my parents again… living in the same room again. Getting bored again, sweating away in hot and humid tropical afternoons. This time, instead of dreaming of escape, I’m actually looking back at when I did escape this reality, and it was all in the past.
And there’s another similarity too: in the here and now, just as it was 30 years ago, we’re living in a world where there’s a cultural desert in the pop charts. Except I’m starting to wonder if there’s any great music to be found anywhere, or if you can’t make great music anymore because everything’s already been discovered. The scene now is unseemingly deferential to the past, and it almost sounds as though people have given up on the idea that there’s anything new and great about pop music.
I wouldn’t exactly say that those years of listening to the dreck that goes to the top of the charts was necessarily time wasted, because if nothing else, it taught me to think hard about what I wanted from music, what I wanted music to sound. And the reality is that I’m living in Asia: the notion that pop music has aesthetics and good taste is a little foreign. There’s always been this unseemly deference to the pop charts and the popularity of the songs. Pop music was a business, all the product was meant to be disposable and there wasn’t very much consideration beyond whether something or somebody was popular. I had been familiar with this attitude in the days of mando pop and canto pop, and when K-pop came along a few years later, I was like, “oh dear here we go again”.
In this series, they’re up to Gloria Estefan’s “Coming Out of the Dark”. We would be one year away from Nirvana storming to the top of the charts and knocking Michael Jackson off. It was the symbolic change of guard, the moment when the 80s gave way to the 90s. And it was also the point at which I stopped paying attention to the Billboard hot 100 as some kind of arbiter of what was good and great about pop music.
Music Composition 