A year ago, I wrote a Lost Factor column defending the hits of 1974. To detractors, it was the year of “(You’re) Having My Baby,” “The Night Chicago Died,” and “Annie’s Song.” I remember it as the year of “Waterloo,” “Rock Your Baby,” “For the Love of Money,” and “Let It Ride.” Besides, I don’t hate “The Night Chicago Died” and “Seasons in the Sun.”
Instead, I always thought 1975 was the garbage year for hit music: “Feelings,” “I’m Sorry” by John Denver, “Wildfire,” “Please Mr. Please,” “The Last Farewell” by Roger Whittaker. Early on in my career, I remember a conversation with John Leader, editor at the trade publication R&R, where he mentioned that “a lot of people say 1975 was a terrible year,” which just cemented how I felt about it.
But last weekend, the SiriusXM 70s on 7 American Top 40 rerun was August 1975. And I realized that much of 1975 as a flashpoint stemmed from two songs climbing the charts that week — “Feelings” and “Run Joey Run.” But 1975 is also the year of “Get Down Tonight,” “Some Kind of Wonderful,” “Fight the Power,” “Jive Talkin’,” and “Supernatural Thing.”
For those songs only remembered at the chart geek/person who sought out AT40-level, 1975 was an especially great year — “Up In A Puff Of Smoke” by Polly Brown, “Emma” by Hot Chocolate, “Get Down, Get Down” by Joe Simon, “I’m on Fire” by Dwight Twilley Band. I don’t like the MORish 1975, but I remember the goofy 1975 relatively fondly, including “Dyn-O-Mite” by Bazuka, “Shame Shame Shame” by Shirley & Company and “Black Superman-Muhammad Ali” by Johnny Wakelin. Even “Run Joey Run” is more goofy than galling.
One of the things that was made clear to me after 18 months of writing about the Lost Factor, our calculations of which songs did and didn’t endure at radio through pop music history, is that Top 40 (or at least AT40) indeed played it all in the ‘70s and, as such, you can write the brief either way for most years.
I decided to throw it open to Facebook friends. What was their worst year for hit music? The condition was that it had to be a year when they were listening to contemporary radio, and not the years after they had given up on keeping current. Some responded with a few different years or a stretch of years (1990-94 was a popular one), and I tallied those as well.
I asked the question on Tuesday night. By Wednesday morning, the only years between 1972 and 2003 not to have been cited were Top 40’s resurgent years of 1983, 1984, and 1985. There are some general votes for the doldrums of the early 2000s. There are several votes for 2020. There is one vote for 2018-21, even though I’ve just written a “Song of the Summer” column about how music is getting better this year.
Only one reader named 1975 as their worst year. As it turned out, that year had several defenders, including R&B radio veteran Marcus Chapman, for whom 1975 is “my pick for the best year ever in music — funk bands, Philly soul, jazz funk, and early disco were all awesome that year.”
Instead, readers’ most reviled years were:
1981 – 14 votes (1980 got eight)
1990 – 18 votes
1991 – 16 votes (both include those blanket votes for 1990-94)
I’ve railed plenty about 1981. I’ve written recently about the dominance of pop/rock in that year, which would have been fine if there had been no “disco backlash” (actually directed more toward Mainstream R&B in one of its best periods) and if the new-wave songs that were pop hits in the UK and Canada had made it here a year or two earlier.
Even then, I’ve seen a Facebook discussant reel off their summer ’81 faves — “Jessie’s Girl,” “Bette Davis Eyes,” “Urgent,” “The Stroke,” “Winning,” “The Breakup Song,” “Seven Year Ache,” “Queen of Hearts” — which would have all been valid if I wasn’t sitting through a succession of Air Supply hits to hear them
The disdain toward the early ‘90s has a few different lightning rods. Charlie Mitchell recalls it as “the era of third-class hair bands, AC crossovers, and light rap.” Another reader characterizes it as “Billy Ray Cyrus into Right Said Fred into Color Me Badd, C+C Music Factory, Marky Mark, and Wilson Phillips.” That’s certainly reflected in the high Lost Factor scores for hits from 1989-1992. As Top 40 collapses and less poppy Hip-Hop fills the void, Lost Factor scores actually decline when you get to the mid-’90s.
Where the ‘90s recover differs widely, probably depending in part on where you were and what radio you had access to. There are significant votes for all three years between 1994 and 1996. There are even a few “worst year” votes for 1997, remembered now as Top 40’s renaissance year. There are a few blanket votes for “anything after 2000” or for the early ‘00s, whose extremes were reminiscent of the early ‘90s, with Trapt and Yung Joc sitting in for Winger and Young M.C.
“These responses are so subjective,” wrote Rich Marino. “One frequently mentioned year here was actually my favorite year for music. You’ll never get any non-biased answers to this question here.” Steve West agreed. “Everyone is [influenced] by the year they started discovering music and [upset by] the years when their favorite sounds disappeared from radio in favor of something else. It happens to everybody.”
All of which inspired me to reach out to John Leader, a legendary programmer/jock-turned-voice actor, for the first time in years in hopes of remembering his qualifier to “a lot of people thought 1975 was bad.” As it turns out, Leader now remembers 1975 as one of the last years of musical variety and Top 40 dominance before the balance tipped to rock radio. It was also the year Leader started at KHJ Los Angeles. Even “Feelings” is better if you’re the one saying “93-K-H-J” over the intro.
I get similarly sentimental about the late ’80s/early ’90s. I was Billboard radio editor in 1988-92. I remember the years through 1991 fondly because of the excitement of covering the radio wars of that era. Top 40 only started to really rankle around 1992 when Top 40 started to collapse. I didn’t like Top 40’s music in 1992, but I really didn’t like not having the option of hearing it at all in 1993-95, a time when the format didn’t exist in places.
Regular readers won’t have any problem figuring out my current least-favorite years. They’re 2016-19 — the year when pop music slowed to sludge and then the two years when it stayed there. In 2020, there was at least an acknowledgement of the issue, even if the product flow was impeded by COVID and by the way that Top 40 found and developed music. I’m willing to cheerfully acknowledge the late ’00s as my “happens to everybody” moment of falling out with popular tastes, but the ratings show that I wasn’t alone.
With a steady stream of uptempo music from core artists arriving on Friday mornings, I’m not sure if the hits of 2021 are good or just better. For now, better sounds great. I might go back and write the “but also … ” brief for 2017 at some point. At the moment, however, I’m happily diverted.
CHR (or top 40) has always had and ebb and flow. In my lifetime, I’d say that the post 1964 years were so strong as to carry pop radio into about 1973, although the overall quality had been fading for 3 years by then. My first set of “bad” years was probably 1973-1974. Sappy, folksy, older boomers coming down from their hippie highs were not fun to listen to but they did dominate the pop charts. But, thanks to strong R&B and rock acts, they don’t qualify as “worst” – although what was bad was…..REALLY bad.
A much stronger qualifier would be either 1980 or 1981. Brutal years. Too mellow, with CHR stations ignoring the fun acts that were bubbling below the surface and ceding them to AOR. It took until 1982 for CHR to wake up from that stupor.
After that, I’d say 1990-1991 are another obvious choice. Radio traded the energy of the mid-1980’s in for way too many slow tempo songs and – mirroring other bad years – depressing schlock. By then, I had given up on CHR and was listening to alternative rock and (believe it or not) oldies and classic rock stations.
I aged out of CHR some time around 2008, which seemed to be another bad time for CHR product, though much of it sounded low quality to me by then. Overuse of autotune, etc.
I agree that perception of bad years will depend on a person’s age and radio-listening geography. For me, it would be years like 1988 or 1990 (bad for both CHR and AOR), but at the same time, I grew up in a university town with a student-run station that played a lot off-the-wall stuff during the same era.