A special music post for this Memorial Day. It has nothing to do with the holiday, but this seemed like a good day to squeeze it in.<\/p>\n
Music writer Sean Ross tracks what he calls Lost Hits. Based on his self-created Lost Factor, he looks at old songs and sees how often they get played today. Songs that were popular years ago but rarely, if ever, get played these days become his Lost Hits. You can dig into his old posts<\/a> if you want more background on his process.<\/p>\n Recently he took a countdown from May 14, 1983 and asked some of his readers to share if they knew of the songs when they were on the charts vs. if they learned about them later vs. if they never heard them. <\/p>\n This shit is right up my alley. <\/p>\n I was less interested in his results than my own. I did adjust the methodology a bit. I scrolled through the list just to see how many songs I could immediately recognize. I did pretty well: of that week\u2019s top 40 songs, I remembered 37. Interestingly enough, the only three I could not recall, even after listening to them, were sequential in that week\u2019s countdown. \u201cSo Wong,\u201d by Patrick Simmons<\/a> at #34; \u201cI Couldn\u2019t Say No,\u201d by Robert Ellis Orral<\/a> at #33; and Barry Manilow\u2019s \u201cSome Kind of Friend\u201d<\/a> at #32.<\/p>\n \u201cSo Wrong\u201d is not a bad song at all, although generic enough that I see why I don\u2019t remember it. \u201cSome Kind of Friend\u201d is forgettable, late-phase Manilow. And \u201cI Couldn\u2019t Say No\u201d is a genuinely awful song. <\/p>\n For grins I shot this list to my two brothers-in-music who were also huge chart geeks when we were coming up. Ed in ATX knew 33 of the songs. That surprised me as he was living in England back in 1983 and I figured his American chart knowledge would be a little lacking. John in Lee\u2019s Summit, who was arguably more chart-obsessed than me when we were middle schoolers, checked in at 32 songs. He said this chart came just before he really got into pop music and AT40<\/em>.<\/p>\n Honestly I\u2019m impressed they were in the same ballpark as my total, given they both have demanding careers that should have pushed a lot of this nonsense out of their brains. Meanwhile I listen to old AT40\u2019s<\/em> several times a week as I\u2019m cooking, cleaning, and doing other stuff around the house and my brain is more focused on remembering kickball results than anything that generates revenue for an employer.<\/p>\n If you are interested, here is Ross\u2019 original post with the list of songs of you want to take a gander. <\/p>\n