I have heard of a grand total of zero songs on Billboard's current Hot 100

I didn't realize Spotify had a free option as long as you sit through some ads. I had some fun creating a playlist last night, with my Billboard Top 40 hits book as my guide.

 

Couldn't identify a single song in the top 100.

On a funny tangent, I've been showing 80s music videos to the office millennials, and they are fascinted by them. They even like some of them. I'm talking absurd shit like Talking Heads and some Peter Gabriel videos. Best comment I got was, "You lived in such a weird time."

 

Show 'em this.

 

For a decade or so, I got fed up to the gills with Led Zeppelin, specifically "Stairway to Heaven."

It was on every AOR or classic rock stations, several times a day. It just got to be an automatic switch-off.

But for about 20 years now, radio programming has changed to the point that "STH" is on once or twice a week, not four times a day.

So now I can listen to it again, and it kicks ass.

 

Hmmmmm.

 

Dude, Talking Heads were anything but absurd.
And Peter Gabriel was fuck-all better than Phil Collins.

 

The night I discovered MTV at a friend's post-college apartment, one video made it very clear how big the phenomenon was going to be: "In the Air Tonight."

 

Don't Stop Believing is on every fucking day on half the English speaking stations in LA. I can hear it every day on my commute if I listen to the radio. Can't do it. Won't do it.

That song is 35 years old.

 

What makes pop music today borderline insufferable is the need for almost any song to be a dance song. It's mindless. Hell, Katy Perry, bubble gum pop star who still has a little of that apocalyptic Christian in her, has a song out about it.

 

My wife had won some tickets to a concert that had a bunch of singers and bands that neither of us had heard of, so she took our youngest. Beforehand, we looked up one of the singers and found her on YouTube.

I pointed out to my wife, "wow, it's a music video." We both were surprised. It's not like we see them on MTV anymore.

 

Not a current song, but still a damn brilliant piece of satire about pop music openly masquerading as a pop song.