My co-worker Mandie and I recently undertook a project very
dear to each of us. We were both
listeners of Q101 and we both thoroughly enjoyed listening to their yearly top
101 countdowns. Over the years I have illegally
downloaded legally purchased many of the songs from these countdowns and
added them to my music library. Those lists represented some serious effort and
reflect a strong piece of who I am. I
had tried sharing my music library with other co-workers but they just didn’t
appreciate the awesome power of what they had been given. Mandie, on the other hand, very much wanted
to listen to the Q101 lists. It took
fighting through some technical network difficulties but eventually she was
able to enjoy the lists as I did.
I’ve shifted gears to being more of a country music fan
these days but this past December I had a deep longing for the Q101 countdowns
that were always played during that time of the year. I decided to start at the beginning and
listen to my custom lists in order. I
casually mentioned this to Mandie and she agreed to do the same. Since I like lists and ranks, I thought it
would be fun to create our personal top 5’s from each year and compare
them. She then got this crazy idea that
we should blog about our top 5’s. I
initially balked at the idea because that was going to be a lot of work.
I had been posting my top 5’s in my IM status at work and
they didn’t seem to be tilting anyone’s world on its axis. In fact, only one other co-worker (Jon) even
commented on the lists and that’s only because he was using them as a way to
gauge his knowledge of “modern” music.
It was usually a good year for Jon, a self-proclaimed fan of music from
my parent’s generation, if he had heard of (and not even necessarily heard) 2
of the songs in my top 5.
Citing the lack of interest in my IM statuses, I complained
that no one would want to read about my silly little lists. People have their own lists and can’t be
bothered with mine. I knew this from
fantasy sports and Okrent’s Law. Those
who know me best understand that fantasy sports may be my ultimate passion,
even more so than *gasp* Q101 countdowns.
Daniel Okrent is credited with creating rotisserie (fantasy) baseball
and his law is the words he used to describe his creation: “There's nothing
more interesting than your own rotisserie team and nothing less interesting
than someone else's." Simple but oh
so true.
Incidentally, if you ever want to endear yourself to me and
win your way to my heart, you should view ESPN’s excellent ‘30 for 30’
documentary about Okrent and the creation of fantasy sports, entitled “Silly Little Game.” Only then will you
understand the depths of my insanity and truly empathize with me when I
complain to you about Henderson Alvarez’s no-hitter screwing me out of a
championship on the final day of the 2013 season.
But I digress, and this is about the music. Anyway, Mandie insisted on the blog entries
and I finally relented. Since I’m a man
of my word and I do acknowledge that writing this will be pretty fun, here we
are.
I’ve composed many love letters in my head to girls I’ve had
a crush on. I’ve even done it very
recently. Those letters have gone
unwritten and undelivered however. It’s
my hope that all of those pent up feelings will come spewing out now in a
glorious tribute to Q101 and a select few of the songs that comprised its top
101 lists. I’m going to serenade the crap
out of these songs. You see, Q101 also stole
my heart but it never brought me pain and it never kept me up at night against
my will. I can assure you that if Q101 kept
me up, it was very much in accordance with my will.
Granted I’ve listened to all of these songs many times over
through the random shuffle of my music library.
However, I had not listened to them in sequence by year since Q101 had
died. It was pure joy to start at the
beginning and advance through the years as if I was growing up all over again.
1994 was the year I first started really being aware of
music, so that’s where my Q101 journey should
begin. My musical education up until
that point consisted of whatever I had heard in car rides with my dad and
whatever CDs my mom would have played on the living room stereo. It’s why I’ll always have a soft spot for The
Beach Boys and why I listen – listened, listened, I meant listened! – to Wilson
Phillips.
I didn’t own any albums of my own and I didn’t even listen
to the radio before then. I was 11; I played
sports outside and I played Nintendo.
Life was good and I didn’t know I had any voids to fill. Slowly, music weaved itself into conversations
at school. Nirvana. Alice in Chains (NOT Allison Chains as I
later learned). Stone Temple
Pilots. What the heck were my friends
talking about? They had discovered music
and it was clear I was woefully behind the times. I too began to wonder if there was a whole
other world out there for me to explore.
All I knew is that I definitely wanted to fit in and talk amongst them
as a peer.
And so my musical enlightenment began. I could have been pulled in the direction of
any genre. Thankfully my friends chose
the music that they did, even if their options were limited. Pop music could get you made fun of, country
wasn’t “cool” enough, and rap/hip-hop had not really penetrated into the walls
of our small, all-white school.
I had the great fortune of being able to listen to Q101 on
the bus rides to and from school during my formative years (’94-’96). I don’t know if our bus drivers wanted to prove
that they were hip and with it, or if the high schoolers on the bus high had
more authority than I thought. We had
nicknames for all of the drivers -- Tar Lungs, Dave Thomas (yes, the Wendy’s
guy), Heavy Evey -- but looking back, I appreciate them for giving me the gift of
Q101.
I acquired a stereo during this time period and began
listening to Q101 in my room as well. It
was a pain in the ass getting the antenna positioned just right sometimes but I
could listen to Q101 late at night if I kept the volume low enough to avoid
waking up my parents. Discovering
headphones was a big win for me.
As I entered high school, I began to crave for something
more. This era (’97-’99) was marked by
exponential growth in my love for alternative music. I had begun to select favorites in the
alternative community and, dammit, I wanted to hear them on demand. I couldn’t simply wait for Q101 to decide it
was worth playing. My stereo had a CD
player and my dad’s ’92 Bonneville (my first car) had a cassette player. My friend Josh had become the music fan I
aspired to be but knew I never could. He
had accumulated something like over 800 CDs, so his collection had pretty much
anything that suited my fancy. He burned
a couple mix CDs to tide me over and I converted them to cassette tape for the
car.
There was also a guy named Adam who was a year older than
me; he made (and sold) custom mix CDs at request. He had a pretty lucrative little business in
high school from what I recall. Virtually
any song you wanted could be yours. This
guy must have thousands of CDs I thought to myself. I also had him burn me a couple mixes of my
favorites.
One day, it all changed.
A high school acquaintance named Van Ham turned me on to this thing
called Napster. It was a file sharing
program where I could get music from others who shared my musical tastes. So that
was Adam’s secret. Well, I didn’t need
to pay him any longer. I became an
insatiable beast downloading everything I could think of. I’d queue up 20 songs to download before I
went to bed and anxiously check the next morning to see how many went through to
completion. We had incredibly slow
internet so I was prepared for a low success rate. Still, there were countless times I cursed
angrily at songs that had failed at 95% complete. It was all worth it though to add to my
personal library and create even more custom CDs. Because I was a jerk who took advantage of
the system, I downloaded songs from others but didn’t share mine. Plus I had been told that it was only illegal
to distribute music illegally.
My favorite years of Q101 are during the end of high school
and junior college (’00-’03). My high
school graduation was symbolic of my alternative music graduation. I was now listening to songs as they came
out. My musical library was growing
impressively. I have the highest collection
of songs from the countdowns during these years. My best friend Tom and I listened to so much
music during the trips to and from JJC. Accordingly,
my strongest musical memories often come from this time period.
The next period (’04-’06) represented a bit of a transition
period. I still very much enjoyed the
music and Q101 was still an important part of my life. Napster had since been shut down but there
were other offshoots (iMesh, Limewire) that let my library continue to
grow. It just wasn’t quite the same
though. Perhaps it’s because I had
idealized the music from the previous “graduation” period so much that nothing
after could possibly live up to it.
Perhaps it’s because friends were moving away and drifting apart so the
memories created through music weren’t as strong. Q101 helped guide me through the remainder of
college. It was my buddy during that
rough stretch after college when I felt little self-worth because my only form
of employment was a part-time retail job.
The final years of Q101’s reign over the airwaves (’07-’10)
were less influential on my life. I was
now a working adult trying to cling to an ever-changing work of rock
music. Q101 never moved from its place
as good ‘ol #1 on my radio dial but it was definitely competing with country
music by this point. As I shared my time
between the 2 genres, I inevitably started falling out of touch with some of
the newer bands coming onto the scene.
This is evidenced by the fact that my library contains barely over half
of the songs on the list in 2009 and 2010.
By contrast, I have over 90% of the songs from a couple years during my
golden age of Q101. Music was getting
much harder to acquire as file sharing networks were condemned left and
right. I stopped creating my custom CDs
and I do miss those days. Fortunately,
sites likes Pandora, Grooveshark, and Spotify came to the rescue. Even if I couldn’t obtain a copy of
everything I wanted, I could still listen to it.
There are a few logistical things to call out about this
project. As anyone who has listened to
the countdowns knows, some songs appear on the list in multiple years. Mandie and I agreed not to double up on any song. She believed the song should be included the
first year it made a list because we “didn’t really want to give credit to a
song clinging to its past glory.” That
worked for a while but halfway through I realized that some multi-year songs
may actually have been more popular in the 2nd year. I made the executive decision, for my lists
anyway, that a song was only eligible for the top 5 in the year in which it
ranked higher on Q101’s list. (To be fair, I’ve since reapplied that rule to
all years.)
It is also worth reiterating, especially when we get to the
latter half of the 2000 decade, that these are MY personal lists. I do not have all of the songs from each year
and I made no attempt to listen to all of the songs from each year. Some of the missing songs I simply don’t care
for and others I probably never heard in the first place. Even if it’s missing for the latter reason, I
highly doubt the song would break into the top 5 anyway.
I do have a playlist from Q101 for 1993. I don’t remember it being played in the later
years they did the countdowns but it must have been played at some point. The station did create the list and I do vaguely remember a DJ apologizing for
some of the music on the list. You get
songs from artists like Sting and Duran Duran.
You also get songs from several groups I’ve never heard of. It was a year of transition for the station from
its previous format and I don’t have any memories of listening to the station
in 1993. Neither did Mandie, so that
year wasn’t included.
Mandie has already posted
her top 5’s for all years. I sincerely
encourage you to check it out as well the other things she’s written in the
past. Partly due to the aforementioned
“lot of work” and partly due to my long-winded nature that precludes me from
writing anything quickly, this project is going to be a series. I will write about each year separately but the
individual years won’t be nearly as long as this. I figure doing it this way will also help me
boost my blog post totals.
What you can expect from each entry (for as long as I’m
willing to put forth the energy):
- A link to the full list as created by Q101
- Links to the music video (assuming I can find
it) for each song in my top 5
- A few lyrics from each song in my top 5 that
likely have some meaning to me
- A snippet about each song that includes any or
all of the following:
- My justification for picking the son
- Stories I have to tell related to the son
- Fun facts about the song gleaned from Wikipedia
(re: Dave has nothing else to say about the song)
- Writing that tries really, really hard to be
interesting despite the limitations of its author and would feel offended if
you didn’t read it and comment on it
I have no timeline for the rollout of this series. I’ve already wrote the entry for 1994 though.
So what are you waiting for? Let’s kick this thing off!
