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| "Go to the mall..." |
There's a humorous scene in the movie version of Nick Hornby's High Fidelity when Jack Black's Barry – a rotund music snob masquerading as a sales clerk in a too-cool-for-school music store – is asked by a straight-laced suit if Stevie Wonder's I Just Called to Say I Love You is in stock.
"Yeah, we have it," Barry lies.
"Great, can I have it?" the guy asks.
"No, you can't."
"Why not?"
"Because it's sentimental, tacky crap, that's why not. Do we look like the kind of store that sells I Just Called to Say I Love You? Go to the mall."
While Wonder's iconic No.1 from 1984 is, indeed, sentimental, whether it's also tacky crap is a matter of taste. Millions loved – and still love – it. Mainstreamers – like Straight-laced Suit – need only tell the brooding, Pixies-loving Barrys of the world (and many of us know a Barry) to look at the scoreboard: "Millions of us can’t be wrong!"
I’ve been guilty of music snobbery myself. Mates have pulled me up on it. I’ve lambasted Nickelback and Good Charlotte and their fans; criticised the repetitive, Autotune-laden state of commercial radio. Once, as an album reviewer, I awarded a Hoobastank CD one star… after only taking in the first four songs. FM radio-friendly crud, I asserted. If only they formed a supergroup with Nickelback and Hinder, we’d only have one of them to endure.
So, while I was never so bad as to discard a band just because they’d, heaven forbid, become ‘popular’, I’ve thumbed my nose at my fellow man. I’ve been angry at the injustice of who makes it and who doesn’t; despondent at the absence of ‘real’ musicians at the pointy end of the national chart.
But with fatherhood smoothing over the last of my adolescent edginess, my stance has softened. This was confirmed recently when a spring-clean uncovered a box of memorabilia that hadn’t seen the light of day for years. Journals, photo albums and foreign newspapers from my backpacking years; cricket club newsletters; university essays; gig receipts and scribble-strewn beer coasters. All pretty regular stuff.
Nice though it was wandering dandily down memory lane, nothing instilled in me a jolt of excitement or surprise. Perhaps it hadn’t been long enough – or beneath the surface I was still clinging to those simpler, freer times.
Then I happened upon a clear plastic folder stuffed with old ARIA charts.
The most recent one – from the week ending of October 5, 1997 – bulged at the top of the pile. Elton John’s paean to Princess Diana, Candle in the Wind ’97, was the No.1 (having gone an unprecedented seven-times-platinum the previous week), while the top of the eldest chart – a slightly torn and faded copy from September 20, 1992 – was Jose Carreras and Sarah Brightman’s syrup-soaked Barcelona Olympics theme Amigos Para Siempre (Friends for Life).
It was five years of music, yes, but more than that, it was a stretch of tumultuous terrain: ages 15 through to 20. Formative years, to say the least: from easily-led high school student through to hard-drinking factory worker who saved $10,000 in 18 months before leaving behind his parents’ embrace and river-hugging hometown for two years in Europe. These charts represented the last of my innocence.
I pulled out the 200 or so pages and flicked through them, a whir of red, black and white fanning 15-year-old dust into the still air of my back shed. The dust particles lingered, as if telling a thousand stories of schoolyard angst; of football in the winter and cricket in the summer; of smoking and drinking in spots we were sure no adult knew about; of squinting green-eyed into the big world.
I pulled out a few from the middle of the pack, from July 2004. While most of the songs came flooding back, it was the look of the charts themselves that seemed more familiar. Their vintage-cool layout didn’t change over the years, and I liked that.
The song titles were emboldened, the artists in plain type, and in italics, the record company. Little symbols represented the units shifted: a triangle for platinum sales; filled-in circles for gold. The Coca-Cola logo splashed all over the page. An advert for 'Take 40 Australia' segregating the top 40 from positions 41 to 50. Three columns – ‘TW’ for the week’s position; ‘LW’ for where it was last week; ‘TI’ for number of weeks in – provided the chart data for each song and album. Like my other great love – cricket – there were ample statistics to hand. And the process was environmentally sound, too: each page was double-sided, with the national chart on one side, the Victorian/Tasmanian chart on the other.
I recalled, with a snigger, the lengths I’d go to at the local music shop to make it look like I wasn’t a regular collector. The ponytailed, head-to-toe-denim-wearing, always-unsmiling guy staring at me from behind the counter: a bookish, skinnier version of Barry, sans the underlay of charm, wit or animation. It was as if the rat-faced tosser knew I was only in his shop to pick up that week’s chart… and I was the weirdest kid in the world because of it.
I felt embarrassed going in there, but I couldn’t stop. After Sept 20, 1992, I went months without missing one, and my collection quickly built up.
Then came a day when the latest batch wasn’t in the usual position. Filling the space instead was a mix of CD and gig adverts. I scanned the joint, thinking they might be elsewhere, when Ponytail cut the silence. "Yeah, they didn’t arrive this week." I looked across to see him nodding towards the space where the chart-pile should be, a bemused smirk spreading across his wretched face. "I called them this morning. Should be back next week."
"Cool," I chirped, feigning interest in the compilation stand, which was dominated by the latest incarnation of the 100% Hits dynasty. Ponytail clicked his tongue and moved a box of CDs from one end of the counter to the other. And then he said, in surely-rehearsed upward inflection: "…’cos I know how into them you are."
I blush-smiled. On a whim I took $4 of the $6 I had in my wallet and bought the cassingle of House of Pain’s Jump Around. And I waited two weeks before setting foot in there again.
I wondered if I was the only person in my town of 5,000 people to collect them on a regular basis. Indeed, was I the only person who collected them, period? Did Ponytail hold a huge ARIA bonfire each Sunday, or were there are other chart-nerds out there?
As it turns out, there are: ariacharts.com has a forum of chart-nerds who discuss, at length, the points system devised to collate the most successful songs of each year, and of all-time – while providing their own weekly top 40s. So, although I had my doubts back then, my habit was nothing unusual. And my teenage-self envisaged, I guess, that they might, one day, prove an invaluable recollection tool. (I hadn’t, of course, banked on the internet.)
The 1990s don’t always get a great rap – compared with the ‘60s and 70s, anyway – but my little collection proves it was a time when the charts were far less predictable. Word of mouth back then – without the immediacy of social media – moved much slower, and songs' climbs, particularly from new artists, followed suit. Singles on the gradual climb would rub shoulders with tunes falling in the other direction after having spent four or five months in the top 20.
It was rare for a song to be No.1 in the first week – a feat that’s now become commonplace on the back of talent shows. It was the era of film clips that told stories (even my dad, whose appreciation for music ended in the early ‘80s and is now limited to Eagles and Springsteen best-ofs, was enchanted by Richard Marx’s Hazard), and I’d live those stories through Rage every Saturday morning.Alongside Smash Hits magazine, Rage – which I’d quietly risen to watch in the pin-drop silence most Saturday mornings since the age of nine – kick-started my fascination with the singles chart. I loved reaching the top five, especially when I deduced that one or more songs weren’t at the countdown’s pointy end the previous week. That said, I wouldn’t get bored by tunes that stayed an eternity at No.1, such as Bobby McFerrin’s Don’t Worry Be Happy and Bryan Adams’ Everything I Do (I Do it For You); not necessarily because I liked these songs, but because they remained at No.1, week in, week out, over a period that sometimes spanned three weather seasons.
Things evolved – the teenage years hit; girls’ bodies changed shape; anxiety set-up home in the head and gut; Mario Bros sucked the hours away – but still Rage endured, through the ordinary musical years of 1990 and 1992 to the grunge-and-Britpop brilliance of 1991, 1993 and 1994.
Although the top-selling songs of ’92 to ‘97 – Achy Breaky Heart (Billy Ray Cyrus), I’d Do Anything for Love (Meat Loaf), Love is All Around (Wet Wet Wet), Gangsta’s Paradise (Coolio), Los Del Rio’s Macarena, Elton’s Candle and Aqua’s Barbie Girl – suggest that novelty and paper-thin pop existed as much back then as today, the ‘90s were actually a time when a decent portion of the top 50 (and, sometimes, even the top 10, as indicated by the high peaks of Rage Against the Machine’s Killing in the Name and the Chili Peppers’ Under the Bridge) had good, real music.
It was a time when artists sang and played instruments – and people borne from talent shows didn’t pervade the chart like TABs do modern-day pubs. Heck, even Barry-types would comfortably take the chart music of the ‘90s over today’s procession of tween pop, done-to-death R&B and soulless, by-the-numbers stadium rock. Where albums of the ilk of Nevermind, Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness, OK Computer and (What’s the Story) Morning Glory – which all threaten the northern end of critics’ all-time charts nowadays – were a more regular occurrence back then, we now have to make do with only the odd gem. It’s why when there is a win for good music – such as Arcade Fire winning a Grammy for The Suburbs in 2010; or Gotye’s Somebody I Used to Know hitting No.1 – it’s so rightly celebrated.
And yet while a part of me will always respect those who dig a little deeper than commercial radio (and filling in the gaps with Triple J’s Hottest 100 each year), I’ve come to realise the kids of today see things very differently than I. I understand and accept that music, regardless of whether it’s Adele or Augie March, is a universal glue to lives; it soundtracks births, break-ups, weddings; nights of red wine and maddening talk.
To my astonishment I’m veering back to the mainstream. I sometimes find myself switching to Triple M while driving home from work. I acknowledge that ARIA’s all-time top two songs (as far as the aforementioned points system is concerned) – LMFAO’s Party Rock Anthem and the Black Eyed Peas’ I Gotta Feeling – are stick-in-your-head catchy and, while not original, crafted in a way that’s super-appealing to the masses: a difficult act to master. And I can’t help but think of the hundreds of thousands of early-life good-timers in pubs and nightclubs each weekend, delirious and dancing, the songs sound-tracking a few million kisses and selfies.
As it’s turned out, I have no choice but to side a little with the mainstream; with three girls under four (my 21-month-old already offers up a chirpy rendition of Justin Bieber’s Baby) it’s only a matter of time before a future incarnation of One Direction will be part of my lot.
As a big-lipped man once said, you can’t always get what you want.
