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Kitchen Table Kibitzing 3/7/2023: The Music of 8th Grade [1]

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Date: 2023-03-07  

Good evening, Kibitzers!

The other day, I happened to hear the song Love Is Blue. In 1968, I really liked that song, and apparently a lot of people in 1968 felt that way, because it was the Billboard #2 song for the whole year, behind only Hey Jude.

It’s one of those songs that was woven all through the environment at a certain time, so when you pull on it many years later, all kinds of other threads of that time come along that are tangled with it. You guys know what I mean, I’m sure.

In early 1968, I was in 8th grade. We had limited control over what we could listen to most of the time, because the only music-playing device that was really portable was an AM radio. Once we picked WABC-AM in New York, they picked the songs.

And so, most of the songs that recall bits of that school year for me can be rounded up by checking out the Billboard charts. I looked first at the top 100 songs for 1968 and for 1967. No surprise, they were packed with songs that resonated for me, the trouble being that there were 200 of them. Sure, not all of them were good, but even with hard pruning I was nowhere near “diary can be opened by readers” territory.

My second idea was better. There are also lists of the #1 song by week for each year. And there are way fewer than 52 per year, because some songs stay at #1 for a long time. So much easier to pare it down to ten songs/diary! Of course that leaves out lots of good songs, but we already established you can’t open a 150-Youtube diary. SOMEONE has to choose among them if not me. Why not the great mass of 1960s record consumers? Have they ever steered us wrong? (Don’t answer that.)

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