rolling with the years

Pal Ken unearthed a pretty interesting musical meme, and because I have never been one to shy away from a quick and dirty source of content, I've decided to use it as the basis of today's post.

So here it is, an annotated list of the songs that topped the Billboard Hot 100 charts on every March 13 since I emerged from the womb on that date in 1972. It's a countdown to the End Times which offers clear proof that "popular" does not necessarily equal "good."

1972 - "Without You" by Nilsson - And thus I entered this world bloody, screaming, and to the tune of calcium-leeching soft rock.

1973 - "Killing Me Softly with His Song" by Roberta Flack - Even soul was affected by the power of the 1970's.

1974 - "Seasons in the Sun" by Terry Jacks - Is it any wonder I took to punk rock as strongly as I did?

1975 - "Have You Never Been Mellow" by Olivia Newton-John - The de facto anthem for the Me Decade.

1976 - "December 1963 (Oh, What a Night)" by The Four Seasons - Attempting to escape the malaise via fuzzy nostalgia.

1977 - "Evergreen (Love Theme from A Star Is Born)" by Barbra Streisand - Fuck you, record buying public of 1977.

1978 - "(Love Is) Thicker Than Water" by Andy Gibb - And the effects of cocaine abuse are stronger than cardiac muscle.

1979 - "I Will Survive" by Gloria Gaynor - Saturday Night Götterdämmerung!

1980 - "Crazy Little Thing Called Love" by Queen - I can handle a little Mercury every now and again.

1981 - "I Love a Rainy Night" by Eddie Rabbit - "When the stars were right, They could plunge from the C&W chart to the Hot 100; but when the stars were wrong, They would remain in their own genre subdomain. But although They were no longer on Top 40 radio, They would never really pass from public consciousness..." - The Call of Cnt'ry'mu'zk

1982 - "Centerfold" by the J. Geils Band - I've already discussed the personal significance of this song here.

1983 - "Billie Jean" by Michael Jackson - It was a given that this musical journey was going to pass through Neverland at some point.

1984 - "Jump" by Van Halen - What fuck is a "record machine," anyhow? Apart from being a way to dodge coming up with a rhyme for "jukebox," that is.

1985 - "Can't Fight This Feeling" by REO Speedwagon - Forget all the talk about Minor Threat and 7 Seconds, this here is the real font from which emo music sprung.

1986 - "Kyrie" by Mr. Mister - No, no.

1987 - "Livin' on a Prayer" by Bon Jovi - I preferred the Swinging Erudites' version, "Livin' on My Hair."

1988 - "Never Gonna Give You Up" by Rick Astley - Happy Sweet 16, Andrew! We chipped in and got you a rickroll!

1989 - "Lost in Your Eyes" by Debbie Gibson - That's Deborah Gibson now, thank you very much.

1990 - "Escapade" by Janet Jackson - Six of one...

1991 - "Someday" by Mariah Carey - ...and a half dozen of the other.

1992 - "To Be with You" by Mr. Big - Music to peak in high school by.

1993 - "Informer" by Snow - Truly the Falco of his times.

1994 - "The Sign" by Ace of Base - ABBA 2.0

1995 - "Take a Bow" by Madonna - ...and exit the stage, please, before things get any more embarrassing.

1996 - "One Sweet Day" by Mariah Carey and Boyz II Men - Honoring the late Steve (Def Leppard) Clark and the late David (C+C Music Factory) Cole in the most insipid manner imaginable.

1997 - "Wannabe" by the Spice Girls - "What I really really want is to host bumpers for the Soap Opera Channel."

1998 - "My Heart Will Go On" by Céline Dion - Never underestimate the purchasing power of teenage girls.

1999 - "Believe" by Cher - The auto-tune effect that launched a thousand shitty Eurodance tracks.

2000 - "Amazed" by Lonestar - Country-fried cheese.

2001 - "Stutter" by Joe featuring Mystikal - If 6 was 9 was a forgettable R&B hit.

2002 - "Ain't It Funny" by Jennifer Lopez featuring Ja Rule - No, not particularly.

2003 - "In Da Club" by 50 Cent - Ugh.

2004 - "Yeah!" by Usher featuring Lil Jon and Ludacris - ...and Bella Abzug and Helmut Kohl and Madame Curie and Jim J. Bullock and that one dude at the gas station with the lazy eye.

2005 - "Candy Shop" by 50 Cent featuring Olivia - Ugh³.

2006 - "You're Beautiful" by James Blunt - Flattery will get you nowhere, James. My affections are not for sale to some next-gen James Taylor who yodels the word "beautiful" like he's just been kicked in the nads.

2007 - "This Is Why I'm Hot" by Mims - "I can sell a mill sell you nothing on the track." How refreshingly honest.

2008 - "Low" by Flo Rida featuring T-Pain - Honestly, this stuff exists solely for the purpose of being licensed into tinny-sounding ringtones, right?

When I embarked on this project, I had hoped that there would be at least a couple tracks in the list that even I wouldn't feel embarrassed posting. As it turned out, there was "Crazy Little Thing Called Love" and not much else. (You may beg to differ, but mine is the hand that rests on the tiller.) So Queen it is then, along with an excellent acoustic cover of 1984's featured slice of pop rock bombast...

Queen - Crazy Little Thing Called Love (from The Game, 1980) - The greatest thing composed in a bathtub since Marat's Éloge de Montesquieu.

Aztec Camera - Jump (from a 1984 b-side; collected on The Best of Aztec Camera, 1999) - Maura once suggested that there was some kind of Dorian Gray relationship between Aztec Camera frontman Roddy Frame and Echo & The Bunnymen's Ian McCulloch, where McCulloch staved off the ravages of time by passing them on to Frame. If that was the case, the spell has apparently been reversed, as Roddy has been looking rather spry as of late, while poor Ian appears to be in the advanced stages of mummification.

Schrödinger's landscape

Cambridge Road, Burlington MA, circa 1949
My maternal grandmother grew up in Woburn's west side, three steps from the Burlington line. Her father and grandfather worked at Cummings Farm, long since bulldozed and obliterated to make room for the shopping centers, condo complexes, and office parks that occupy the crowded stretch of Cambridge Road (and it will always be "road," not "street" for me) from Bedford Road to Route 128.

Traces of the Cummings estate still remain, as the bulk of Mrs. Cummings's substantial land holdings were bequeathed to the "children of the City of Boston" in a restrictive trust which eminent domain takings have only taken a small bite out of. Every so often there has been talk by Boston politicians to find a loophole to break the trust and sell the prime real estate, thus securing a huge windfall to fund projects like the Rose Kennedy Greenway or a 1:1 scale replica of the Sphinx -- bearing Tom Menino's face -- to be built on the South Boston waterfront that is Mayor Mushmouth's personal Valley of the Kings.

For now, though, the patches of forest and scrub between the office buildings and used car lots remain overgrown and beyond the reach of deep-pocketed developers. Every time I drive up that way with my grandmother, which is more times than I can count, she delivers the same series of nostalgic rambles about what the area used to be like when she was young.

"We used to race paper boats in that drainage ditch. My uncle drowned in that stream when he was trying out his new galoshes. He was six. I used to babysit for people up this hill. It seemed so steep back then. You could wander wherever, and no one would tell you to get off their land..."

The litany never varied, and became etched in my brother's head and mine through years of repetition. Even when I drive the stretch alone the routine of places and events queues up unbidden, a subconscious mantra and stuff of which family in-jokes are made.

On the way back from our weekly trips to Target, I'll occasionally take a detour through my old North Woburn stomping grounds, though it has become harder and harder to reconcile the visual input with the expectations of decades-old memories. The phantoms retain more substance than the present reality, and I still see the Tomato Hill sandpit or the seasonal marsh/skating pond in the woods in place of the subdivisions that now occupy those spaces.

From my late childhood through my mid-twenties, the pace of development in the area was glacial -- a single-family home here and office building there, but apart from the last lurching encroachments from the local industrial park, there was little in the way of rapid, drastic transformations of the landscape. What did occur was gradual enough to be easily internalized and placed in context. This not only applied to Woburn and its surrounding communities, but to the places in town where I used to spend my time -- Brighton Ave to Kenmore Square, Mass Ave from the MIT Bridge to Porter Square, Cambridgeport to Central Square, Porter Square to Davis.

Then came the real estate boom and tsunami of gentrification that came in wake of rent control being repealed in Cambridge. I also got a car and started driving again, which shifted my axis of operations away from the city and back to the suburbs. I work in Boston, but what I actually see of the city is mostly limited to a stretch of Morrissey Boulevard and the view from I-93. It's no great loss, to tell the truth. In this era of retail chains and global branding, the only difference between city and suburb is that the suburbs have better parking and slightly smaller chance of stepping in a puddle of human urine.

When I do make the rare trip into town, I find a landscape transformed beyond recognition, to the point (as in the time I met up with a friend in Davis Square) where I lose my bearings in places I've walked through dozens of times before. I can deal with the new well enough, but I've yet to encounter an instance of the "new" being an improvement rather than a bland upscale repurposing.

The nature of the changes filters back to me from my wife or from urbanocentric friends. Kenmore Square has been effectively eradicated. Allston has slowly been absorbed into the fiefdoms of Boston University and Harvard. Harvard Square has turned into a strip mall with pretensions of atmosphere and Central Square has gone from the home of radical bookstores and Cheapo Records to hosting The Gap.

There's no real reason to go back anymore, and I prefer to preserve my mental image of the landscape (including the stop sign in Kendall Square my pal Leech walked straight into in a golden moment of unintended slapstick) as it was back in 1994 in a dead/not dead state immune to the quantum flucutations of empirical evidence.

It does make me an unreliable source of driving directions, however.

Duran Duran - Careless Memories (from Duran Duran, 1981) - Infinitely preferable to "Careless Whispers."

Saint Etienne - It's All Gone Horribly Wrong (from The Misadventures of Saint Etienne, 1999) - A Japanese soundtrack album to an English film released only in Spain and which starred an American actress (Parker Posey, as per the Mandatory Posey Appearance Act signed into law by Bill Clinton in 1994).

Svensk - Getting Old (from a 1967 single) - Psychedelic freakbeat is immune to the ravages of time.

Orchestral Manoeuvres in the Dark - Architecture and Morality (from Architecture & Morality, 1981) - Brutalism is maladaptive.

hate myself today

I have no problems with the idea of growing older.

A certain sense of fatalism and pronounced lack of ambition have made it easy for me to accept, rather than rail against, the immutable fact that this trip through the timestream is one-way only. It is far better to negotiate the rapids on one's own terms than to be worn down and swept away in a futile fight against the current.

Besides, the concept of "youth" so many attempt to cling onto tends to be little more than a fixation on superficial trappings and cluelessness cloaked in an aura of false simplicity. The longer one attempts to hold on, the more absurd the situation becomes, and harder it becomes to let go of things that aren't really that important at all.

That said, I could do without those little reminders of mortality that my body springs on me at inopportune moments. I can live with the cosmetic stuff like gray hairs and whatnot; it's the random flare-ups of pain in my kneecaps (reminders of a 1985 scooter accident), the recurring lower back issues, and, most recently, the painful spasms in my neck and shoulders. Granted, most of these are self-inflicted wounds -- legacies of misadventures past or my flagrant disregard for all things ergonomic -- but the passing of years has only sharpened their lingering impacts.

The Modern Lovers - Dignified and Old (from The Modern Lovers, 1976) - "Dignified" is a relative term where I'm concerned.