A shot across the bow

I'm going to start listening to some Billboard Top 100 singles on a regular basis, and do a little writing about what I glean from a fresh dose of popular music. There's a few reasons I'm curious about this, namely that I don't know anything about the AV Club's reporting about current trends, and Greta's blog where she watches a horror movie a day as we approach Halloween has been a lot of fun: there's the impetus and the method. More importantly-- I'm completely ignorant of a large slice of modern culture.

When I say I've never heard anything by such-and-such artist, my friends always assure me I must have heard them somewhere... but they're usually wrong. I'm completely ignorant of most popular music. I never listen to the radio, I don't have TV (I'm not an anti-television snob; I watch the stuff when shows come out on DVD), and I try not to shop at piped-in music places. No broadcasts, no commercials. I really am in the dark about pop music.

I think it's kind of funny that I can argue the merits of 500 Days of Summer against the annoying tragedy of The Backup Plan without any real love of romantic comedies, but I have no idea what Jay-Z or Katy Perry sound like. If one of her songs weren't featured in a lousy tween adventure movie we've been making fun of for months, I would have no idea what Lady Gaga sounds like.

Plus-- there are good pop songs in the world. Even my most intolerant friends will cop to liking something that was a Top 10 hit sometime in the last 30 years, and so will I, and I'm not so curmudgeonly that I'll insist pop hits were fine in the past (even if the keepers were few and far between) but "everything totally sucks now."

So here's my plan. I'm going to listen to three songs a week from the Billboard Hot 100... really listen to them. More than once, even. I'm picking #3, #17, and #51 from each week. Mostly, I don't want to deal with #1, so I'm skipping down to #3 for a chart topper. #17 seems like it's far enough down from #3 for some variety. Finally, I want to have access to the kind of things that never make the Top 20... so here's hoping #51 can put a different kind of song in the mix.

I'm going to pull these songs every Thursday (dunno how that lines up with Billboard's schedule), and go from there. The numbers might slide around if something is in the same spot two weeks in a row (I'm not going to do the same song twice). Also, after looking at the charts, I'm not doing anything from Glee; I'm looking into new music, so I'm passing on all of the retro hits that constantly swamp the charts in Glee form.

It'll take me a little bit to figure out how I'm going through all of this, but I'll figure it out eventually.

Wish me luck.

addendum #1...

Trouble with songs stagnating in the top 5 has inspired me to pick different numbers.  As of Week #4, I'm hitting these chart positions: #11 (High), #33 (HiMid), #66 (LoMid), and #99 (Low).

 addendum #2...

The Keep/Delete measure wasn't allowing for any shading between the "delete" songs that I wouldn't really listen to for fun and the "delete" songs that make you want to do egregious harm to everyone involved in its creation.  The new measure is like this:

	Stay	I want to stay with this song; this is a cozy tune I will listen to in my normal life, like any song I'd listen to as a normal guy listening to music I love.  This is the highest praise I can give.
	Walk	I can walk away. It's not bad... it may even be good, but it's not good enough for me to stay.  Even if I appreciate this song, it's not good enough to hang in my headphones for weeks; even if I'm not keen on this tune, it's not so bad as the music that inspires RUN!
	RUN!	Oh please, make it stop.  It's hard to believe anyone can listen to music this empty and soulless without being sucked into a terrible void.  Your best bet is to run like hell and hope the zombie apocalypse doesn't catch up to you.