Top 40

Adele

Top 40 radio was invented in my home town, Omaha, Nebraska.  Previously the standard rule was that radio stations never played the same song more than once a day.  In 1949 Todd Storz, the grandson of Omaha brewing legend Gottlieb Storz, convinced his father to buy him a radio station, KOWH.  Then, one day in the early 50s, Todd and his buddy Bill Stewart, the station’s program director, were across the street in a diner waiting for Bill’s waitress girlfriend to get off work when they noticed that, even though the restaurant staff listened to the same handful of tunes on the jukebox all day, played by different customers, after the customers cleared out, when they were free to play any song they wanted, they played the very same songs.   Todd asked the staff to identify the most popular tunes and the next day the station started playing them in heavy rotation.  Ratings went through the roof. 

By the end of the 50s top 40 was the most popular radio format in the nation.  But toward the end of the 60s FM radio came in.  Rock was becoming increasingly pretentious and the single was diminishing in popularity.  With the Beatles’ “Sgt. Pepper’s,” the album became the dominant format and remained so throughout the 70s.  In the 80s and 90s popular music began to fragment into subgenres, each with its own following.  Top 40 never completely went away, but it could no longer claim to be the ubiquitous soundtrack of American life. 



The Black Keys



But since the advent of iTunes, the single has staged a comeback and, with it, top 40.  Now there’s no need to buy an album.  You can download the singles you like and put them together in your own album.  The best selling singles chart on iTunes lines up closely with YouTube’s most popular videos and the Billboard Hot 100.  In a turnaround, top 40 now dominates FM radio, once the bastion of album rock.  If you think of punk as an early revolt against the pretention of album rock, you could say we’ve come full circle now back to something resembling the mindless bubble-gum pop and innocent emotion of the 50s, albeit with dirty words and more sophisticated production.  I can keep up with what’s new simply by sampling the iTunes top 200. 

So here’s the playlist I recently downloaded:

1)  “Somebody That I Used to Know” by Gotye – An Australian transplant from Belgium.  I’m not crazy about xylophone, but top 40 is about infectiousness and this lodges itself in your head. 

2)  “Paradise” by Coldplay – A little too lush for its own good, but sticky.

3)  “Someone Like You” by Adele – She owned the year and this was my favorite.

4)  “Lonely Boy” by the Black Keys – These guys just keep growing on me.

5)  “Moves Like Jagger” by Maroon 5 – Initially felt this wasn’t up to the standards they set in “Songs About Jane” (and maybe it isn’t) but it won me over nevertheless. 

6)  “Tonight is the Night” by Outasight – Callow, but good for the gym. 

7)  “Levels” by Avicii – Swedish technopop, but the video is amusing.  Also, like the Gotye song, it reminds me of Venice, where we heard them everywhere.  It appears that, this time around, top 40 has gone international. 

8)  “Drive By” by Train – Very catchy and infectious, perhaps even more addictive than “Hey Soul Sister,” their top 40 hit from last year.  Frieda loves it.

9)  “Not Over You” by Gavin DeGraw – His best since “I Don’t Want to Be.”

10)  “It Will Rain” by Bruno Mars – Frieda loves Bruno, that’s all there is to it. 



Broken Bells



11)  “The Ghost Inside” by Broken Bells – Here the list veers a bit away from top 40.  Broken Bells is a side project of James Mercer (of the Shins) with Danger Mouse and, even though they’re a couple years old, I like the 2 songs on this list better than anything on the new Shins album.

12)  “Hidden Hand, Hidden Fist” by STS9 – An instrumental band from Santa Cruz, too jazzy to be top 40 but with some hooks nonetheless.

13)  “On the Corner” by the Twilight Singers – A project of Greg Dulli (formerly of Afghan Whigs) too dark to be top 40, but this much saccharine pop on one list needs a little leavening.  Nice wah-wah guitar solo.

14)  “Tighten Up” by the Black Keys – Yeah, and my next list will have yet another song from these guys, so there.

15)  “The High Road” by Broken Bells – Maybe the better of the 2 Broken Bells songs; at least, the more accessible. 

16)  “Rolling in the Deep” by Adele – Frieda’s favorite.

17)  “We Used to Wait” by Arcade Fire – Every list needs a touch of pretension.

18)  “Missed the Boat” by Modest Mouse – Almost an oldie, already, but Frieda loves Modest Mouse, and we didn’t have this one.