Hot Hits in the Hot Season!

This infographic at Personal Creations shows which songs dominated the charts for the most weeks during each summer for the last 50 years.

It seemed like "My Sharona" was a #1 hit for more than six weeks in the summer of 1979, but my memory of Casey Kasem's "American Top 40" that far back is a little fuzzy. I do remember that when it fell out of the top spot, it was replaced by Robert John's drippy "Sad Eyes."

My friends and I couldn't figure out how that song was number one when almost everyone hated it, even girls. It didn't even have the saving grace of being a good slow dance song because it was about a sad breakup that was happening because the singer's wife or steady girlfriend was coming home and the fling had to end. In fact, just a couple of years ago "My Sharona" came up in a conversation with a high school buddy who made a point of saying, "And that 'Sad Eyes' crap that came after it, blecch!"

At the risk of sounding like an old curmudgeon (which I am not; I am a middle-aged curmudgeon, thank you very much), I will point out that a bunch of summers after, say, 1993 offered stuff that makes me wish for "Sad Eyes." I've got plenty of music made in the 90s, Oughties and Teens, so it's not just that I think stuff from when I was younger was better. But it seems that what floated to the top of the charts during those years was hardly the best that year offered. This is not unique to these decades; I am willing to bet that the summer of 1974 offered much better and more sensibly punctuated music than Paul Anka and Odia Coates singing "(You're) Having My Baby."

I listen to Top 40 radio so I can know what the youth in my church are talking about, and I can't recognize more than a handful of those songs -- which means that even though I heard them, they didn't stick with me at all. And of the handful I recognize, I can probably say I like two or three (especially that "Call Me Maybe." That sucker's an earworm par excellence!)

Which is, I guess, another exhibit in the argument that Famous Don't Mean Fantastic, which is proven or disproven every other day or so depending on which example you want to cite. I don't know if that one will ever have a definitive answer. What does have a definitive answer is how awful it was to listen to a Top 40 station during the hot season in 2013. Twelve weeks of "Blurred Lines?"

A cruel, cruel summer indeed.

(H/T JenX67)