Tom Breihan over at Stereogum has been running this column called The Number Ones, where he reviews every #1 single in the history of the Billboard charts starting in 1958. Even when I disagree with Breihan's take, it's still worth reading. And it gives me a reason to visit Stereogum's vertical stacking of (mostly) irrelevant garbage. It's a great premise. I wish I had thought of it.
In that spirit, I'd like to inaugurate The Number Fortys, where I'll review every single song that sat at #40 on the Billboard chart, starting at the beginning of 1984. I'm hoping the bottom of the chart will toss up more surprises, bring stranger stuff to the light. We'll see. I'm not going to cheat by looking ahead. I'm hoping the bottom of the chart will toss up more surprises, bring stranger stuff to the light. We'll see. I'm not going to cheat by looking ahead.
Why 1984? Well, it's right around the time I became fully cognizant and obsessed with popular music. Also, it was a really good year for music. I could have done 1983, but the #40 song the first week of 1983 was Air Supply's "Two Less Lonely People In The World." If we're going to evaluate music on a scale of 1 to 10, and if we're being inspired by mainstream-ish music crit, I guess we have to--like in keeping w/the premise, the Air Supply song is a fucking 0, a bunch of helium-sucking Meatloaf trash.
You can't kick off a series with that and expect anyone to ever come back to anything--this site, the internet, recorded sound--ever again. The week after Air Supply, A Flock of Seagulls "Space Age Love Song" reached #40. That song is emphatically a 10 (am I doing this scoring thing right?).
But it feels like cheating to start something like this on the second week of 1983. I mean, the premise is already flimsy enough.
And so our first song, the song that will be the inaugural song is from Robert Plant, a man who spent the 1970s singing for a band called Led Zeppelin (their entire recorded output gets a 3--hey, this scoring stuff is fun!). After the death of their drummer, and many years after the band's collective death as a creative entity, (basically everything after "Over the Hills and Far Away" can go fuck itself), the remaining band members went their separate ways. Plant began his solo career in 1982 with an album called Pictures at Eleven. I've never heard it, and I don't recognize the title of any of the songs (I was still two years away from music obsession). But his next album, The Principle of Moments, from which this column's inaugural single was pulled from, is pretty good.
All the things I hate about Led Zeppelin, the squealing vocals, the squealing guitars, the strutting obvious testosterone, are gone. Instead, "In the Mood" is all subtlety, the kind of song you want to put on repeat because it'll make the morning last forever. The entire song sounds like an experiment in exploring the infinite space between moments of time. Over a bed of humming meditating synths, there's this guitar riff that moves with the lanquid pace of a dream. Blink-blink-blink, and I don't think I've ever heard a guitar riff with three notes in those exact spots. The first and third notes are (almost) exactly on the snare beat, but that second one seems to slide around the beat, occurring in a moment that is both slightly ahead of, and slightly behind, where you'd expect to hear it.
It sets the pace for the rest of the song, a song that is about wanting to hear a song that may or may not be the song that we are listening to. It's not very far from Eno's solo stuff. Phil Collins drums here, and also drummed there. Indeterminacy is everywhere in "In the Mood." Every part of the song, the guitars, the drums, Plant's vocals, have a stop-start quality, rushing ahead and falling back, but nothing about the song feels herky-jerky. It feels meditative. It feels attuned to the natural rhythms of life. After all, our breath, our hearts, also have tempos that fluctuate and lurch.
The week after this, "In the Mood," climbed to #39. It was the highest it would get on the charts. I found The Principle of Moments in my local Goodwill a few years back. This is definitely the best song on the album, but "Big Log" (I know, right?) is also good.
Score: 9/10
THE NUMBER ONE
The #1 song that week was Paul McCartney and Michael Jackson's "Say Say Say." It's competent hyper-melodic soft soul from McCartney that gets over on Michael Jackson's vocals, who at this point in his life, could sing the absolute shit out of anything (to be fair, Paul almost holds his own at the 2:45 mark). Fun fact: did you know rhinoplasty can change the timbre of one's singing voice? Michael and Paul would both feel the effects of this as the years went on.
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