Billboard Hot 100 of the decade

[freakytigger.livejournal.com]

http://www.billboard.com/#/charts-decade-end/hot-100-songs?year=2009&begin=1&order=position

via Maura.

Let's do a poll about it! (Well, the top 40). Tick as many as you like!

[Poll #1497610]

Comments

[koganbot]

Repeating here what I posted on Tom's tumblr:

When you jump to the albums list you find more variety - country and teenpop and mainstream rock - but you're still not finding performers who get much attention from critics (Eminem, Beatles, and OutKast the only critics acts in the Top 40). Carrie Underwood Some Hearts is deceptively low at 14 because its sales were racked up mid and late in the decade when album sales fell through the floor; I think if you pro-rate her numbers that album is near the top of the decade. The results that made my jaw drop were Usher (Confessions at number 2) and Norah Jones Come Away With Me at number 4), since I simply wasn't giving those two any thought all decade, except for the hit where Usher hooked up with Lil Jon. Also, Shaggy and Enya in the Top 20! I doubt that Enya fans and Norah Jones fans are having much impact on what dominates the singles charts.

As I've been arguing for a while, though maybe not in these terms, if anything, we're less fragmented culturally, more aware of each other. But that awareness has two consequences: (1) our experience seems more disparate, precisely because we're more aware of the other pieces, and (2) there's less a sense of a center. Also, cultural commentators were not particularly noticing how much teen life jumped to movies and video games starting in the late '70s. Nor was I (or, to the extent I was noticing, I wasn't caring). "Music" is less a distinct activity than it seemed to be forty years ago.

To put all this in perspective, I doubt that pre-Beatles there were many music stars that got much name recognition from the average person on the street, at least in America. Elvis and Sinatra did, but even they had movie tie-ins.

[koganbot]

Or to put the last thought differently, the music stars with wide-spread name recognition were singing in the rain movies: Garland, Astaire, Julie Andrews. Maybe there's an obvious exception I'm not remembering. Jolson, I guess; he was in movies but was famous already outside them. My impression is that people like Hank Williams and Chuck Berry and pre-1965 James Brown were massively famous among listeners to their genre, but not among the general public, though I don't have figures to back this up.