Tuesday, May 21, 2013

The Hot 100 and Me



Exactly 25 years ago, I got my first copy of Billboard magazine, which featured charts for the week ending May 21, 1988.  That week, Gloria Estefan and the Miami Sound Machine resided at number 1 on the Hot 100 singles chart for a second week with "Anything For You."  One of my favorite songs of the time, George Michael's "One More Try," occupied the number 2 spot, poised to take over at number one the following week.  And down one notch to number 3, yet retaining its bullet, was Johnny Hates Jazz with "Shattered Dreams."  As Chart Beat told me in that issue, "Shattered Dreams" was the first song in some time to fall yet retain a bullet, which is the symbol used on the chart to mark singles that have the highest airplay and sales gains for the week.  Falling and retaining a bullet would become more commonplace in the 1990s, after chart methodology changed in 1991, but in 1988, it remained a rare occurrence.

Throughout the next year or so, I would periodically pick up an issue of Billboard every several weeks.  It was a little too expensive to buy every week, but I still wanted to keep track of more than what Casey Kasem offered on the radio on American Top 40 every weekend.  By the summer of 1989, though, I had taken the plunge and purchased a subscription.  At around a couple hundred dollars for the year, that was a pricey item for a 16-year-old high school student, yet I saw it as a worthwhile expenditure.  For three years -- until I finally let my yearly subscription lapse in 1992 -- I anxiously anticipated receiving the magazine in the mail, and I pored over the charts, especially the Hot 100, keeping precise track of the chart movement of all songs that hit the Top 15 and keeping my eye on the rest of the songs on the chart as well.  By August 1989, I had begun my own weekly chart -- a make-believe chart based on my favorite popular music hits -- originally consisting of my top 25 songs, though after just a few months taking a Top 30 chart form.  I would continue that practice until the spring of 1998, at which time my interests and the world of pop music had diverged enough that I saw value in ceasing the practice.

Over that decade between my first issue of Billboard and the end of my own chart, I had invested myself in the Hot 100 in additional ways.  My Honors thesis during the Spring 1994 semester at Bowling Green State University examined changes in the Hot 100 based on the 1991 methodology modification.  I looked at how the new methodology significantly altered song movement up and down the chart.  That paper stemmed from work I had done for a Summer 1992 Sociology course on Popular Music and Society that became the first paper I delivered at an academic conference -- "Achy Breaky Chart:  Changes in Billboard's Hot 100 Chart," which I delivered at the Midwest Popular Culture Association Annual Meeting in Indianapolis in October 1992.  A year later, at the Midwest Popular Culture Association Annual Meeting in East Lansing, Michigan, I would deliver a second paper -- "Achy Breaky II:  More Changes in Billboard's Hot 100 Chart" -- that focused on genre implications of the methodological change.

These research projects reflected the interest in studying popular music that was fundamental in directing me to the study of popular culture.  In more recent years, I've focused more on other aspects of popular culture, particularly sports, and my interest in popular music has veered away from chart analysis, as reflected in my co-edited book on the interpretation and significance of Don McLean's "American Pie."  Yet, the draw toward diligently following Billboard's Hot 100 chart played a very significant role in my development as a person and as a scholar.  That makes this a particularly important 25th anniversary.