[75
years ago this week, Billboard magazine
released its first chart of American popular music hits. So this week, I’ll
AmericanStudy five #1 hits and their cultural and social contexts. Share your
thoughts on these and any other pop hits, classic or contemporary, for a
chart-topping crowd-sourced post!]
On how the
originating #1 hit reflects a different era, and how it anticipated ours.
The #1 song for
1940, the first year for which Billboard
kept its nationwide tally, was “I’ll Never Smile Again”
by Tommy Dorsey & His Orchestra. Dorsey and his bandleader brother Jimmy
were all over the first Billboard chart,
with Tommy also charting with “Imagination” and Jimmy “The Breeze and I,” and
their ubiquitousness reflects the general dominance of big band music in the
chart’s early years (Glenn Miller had
three of the remaining seven top ten hits for 1940). Given how much we (or at
least I) associate both Billboard and
20th century popular music with the rock and roll sounds that would
emerge and come to dominate the chart in the subsequent two decades, it’s
important to note how different mid-century American culture looked, as
reflected on the first lists. The very first notes of “Smile” take us right
back to that big band era, one that would persist for many more decades (the Lawrence Welk Show debuted in 1955, was broadcast through 1971,
and continued in first-run syndication through 1982) but that was one of the
most dominant cultural forces as of 1940.
Yet if “I’ll
Never Smile Again” in many ways reflects a bygone era in popular music, it also
interestingly reminds us of our own moment. For one thing, Dorsey’s song was a
collaboration, with the music provided by Dorsey and his band and the vocals by
(a very young) Frank
Sinatra; by their nature, many of the other big band chart-topping hits,
including both “Imagination” (which also featured Sinatra) and “Breeze” (which
featured big
band favorite Bob Eberly), were likewise artistic collaborations. Such
collaborative efforts have never gone away, but I would argue that they have
returned to pop music very fully in the last decade: five of the last ten end-of-year
#1 hits have been collaborations, and perhaps the most
dominant trend in current pop music is for a song to be written and
produced by a DJ (such as Calvin Harris, David Guetta, Zedd, or the like) and
performed by a vocalist. Moreover, a significant percentage of the most
successful recent hip hop songs have featured collaborations between a rapper
(for the verses) and a singer (for the chorus). The sound of “Smile” might feel
far removed from 2015, that is, but its long list of artistic credits feels
very familiar.
There’s another,
even more universal way that “Smile” feels contemporary, though—and while this
observation might seem obvious or pedestrian, I believe it’s an important one
with which to begin a series on popular music. In its lyrics, from verses like
“What good would it do?/For tears would fill my eyes/My heart would
realize/That our romance is through” to the chorus, “Within my heart/I know
I’ll never start/To smile again/Until I smile at you,” Dorsey and Sinatra’s
song captures emotions of loss, longing, and love that have remained among the
most consistent themes of popular music throughout its late 20th
century evolutions (there’s a reason why the Greg Kihn Band recorded a song
titled simply, “The Breakup
Song”). Music, style, and genre of course play important roles in how a
song affects us, and I’m not suggesting that we all have to (or could) like all
types of music—but the truth is that popular music from 1940 has a great deal
in common with works from 2015, including in the collaborative nature of its
art and in the human themes on which it touches. A trip back through the Billboard charts highlights such
connections, along with the many specific contexts on which I’ll focus this
week.
Next #1 hit
tomorrow,
Ben
PS. What do you
think? Other hits you’d highlight?
No comments:
Post a Comment