Why Year-End Music Top 10s Don’t Matter
And Why We Should be Talking About Music That Does Matter.
Let’s just start with this blunt point. You can’t argue with success because it makes you look like a dick. But maybe we can talk about success and how it is measured.
There’s no better time than Christmas to talk about music. The structure of the Christmas Top 40 is a microcosm of everything that is happening in music. Christmas music matters because people care about Christmas.
And there’s a surprising number of holiday tunes doing quite well. The No. 1 song on Billboard last week might sound familiar to your Grandma. It’s "Rockin' Around the Christmas Tree," the Brenda Lee song so old it could collect Old Age Pension. It took 65 years to hit No. 1.
In fact, the whole Billboard list is dominated by old Christmas songs. At the top of the charts Mariah Carey’s "All I Want For Christmas Is You" joins Brenda Lee along with Bobby Helms classic "Jingle Bell Rock" and Wham’s "Last Christmas". The kids sang Feliz Navidad at the elementary school Christmas pageant and since then I’ve heard it enough times in the last week to earn its number 9 position on the chart. You know these songs.
Except, there’s more to it than that. What is really going on is that listeners, like watchers of Hallmark’s annual Christmas movie lineup, love Christmas. They want it more than they want Taylor Swift, and that’s a lot.
Talk about a Cruel Summer, it’s a Cruel Winter too for new music. Every song I just mentioned comes in ahead of Taylor Swift’s "Cruel Summer." Heck, even Bing Cosby’s White Christmas at number 15 is 3 slots ahead of Swift. White Christmas was number one in the top ten 80 years ago in 1943 – a time when the world had more immediate things to worry about than inflation and the price of gas. I’m not picking on the Swifter, I’m just saying if she can’t compete with the old tunes then who can?
Agnostic Anthems: What Can We Know About Music?
NPR credits the Hallmarkization of music to changes Billboard made in how it measures success. "Back in 2018, Billboard reconfigured its chart calculation formula, giving more weight to streams (and especially to streams made on subscription or paid-tier services)." I don’t see anything wrong with that. Billboard is working to get a sense of what the world is listening to, and what music they care about, no matter what platform they listen on.
As the calendar's pages hasten to their end, a crazy concert begins – the annual cacophony of 'Top 10 Songs of the Year.' Writers and critics, wielding their pens like air guitars, orchestrate lists that echo through the halls of pop culture. But let's face it: this ritual is a mug's game.
The Lists
These lists - often a mishmash of record company bought and paid for chart-toppers and obscure tracks (nods to the esoteric tastes of would-be music influencers) - hardly ever align with the timeless classics, the true masterpieces that withstand the relentless march of time. They're snapshots, at best capturing a fleeting moment in music, but rarely, if ever, the larger, enduring picture.
Ted Gioia, in a seminal piece for The Atlantic last year, pondered whether old music was killing new music. Spoiler alert: it is – and not just on the Christmas charts. The golden oldies, which used to less derisively be called standards, are not just surviving; they're thriving, overshadowing contemporary tunes.
Why does this matter? It’s not nostalgia.
Music is a crystal ball into the future.
It offers more than mere melodies and rhythms. It's a seer. Political trends, technological advancements, shifts in fashion and style – music preludes them all. This prescient quality of music isn't just fascinating; it's pivotal and it’s important. With music, you can see 10 years into the future in most things - the changes, the trends, and the things people have had more than enough of.
Yet, as the year wanes, we find ourselves inundated with lists that do little justice to this prophetic nature of music. These year-end retrospectives, often marred by corporate influence and a race to the bottom in terms of quality and originality, fail to capture the essence of music that truly 'matters.' We're drowning in a sea of transient hits and token nods to diversity, while missing the songs that echo through the ages.
I’m not saying we can’t have our novelty songs. I mean even after all these years, I’m still curious, who did let the dogs out? But the conversation we ought to have isn't about which song was number one on streaming platforms or which underground track became a critic's darling. The real dialogue, the one we're sorely missing, is about identifying the songs that truly mattered in the year – if any. There might not be any in a given year. This isn't about filling slots in a top ten list; it's about discerning whether any song from the year will resonate through generations, and if not, why not.
If it was just a numbers game, we’d all be shrugging our shoulders at middling foreign language bands wracking up billions of views because, apparently there are a heck of a lot more of those people we delusionally call minorities, and they like music a lot more than us no matter how multicultural we imagine Canada.
We’re gonna need a working definition of songs that matter. Or do we?
The phrase "I know it when I see it" is a colloquial expression by which a speaker attempts to categorize an observable fact or event, although the category is subjective or lacks clearly defined parameters. It has been a common expression since at least the 19th century. A similar phrase appears in Arthur Conan Doyle's "The Hound of the Baskervilles," in which Sherlock Holmes comments on the quality of a portrait by stating "I know what is good when I see it." The phrase was famously used in 1964 by United States Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart to describe his threshold test for obscenity in Jacobellis v. Ohio. In explaining why the material at issue in the case was not obscene under the Roth test and therefore was protected speech that could not be censored, Stewart wrote:
I shall not today attempt further to define the kinds of material I understand to be embraced within that shorthand description ["hard-core pornography"], and perhaps I could never succeed in intelligibly doing so. But I know it when I see it, and the motion picture involved in this case is not that.
In his defining works on architecture, Christopher Alexander wrote that rooms, buildings, streets, and towns could have a quality without a name that made them timeless. We all know what a nice town looks and feels like. We have the form in our mind. We just don’t have the words.
There’s one interesting exception on the billboard chart. A song that’s not a Christmas song and doesn’t have a thumbnail picture that looks like it links to an Only Fans page. It’s Zach Byan and Kaycee Musgraves singing I Remember Everything at number 28. There’s something magic going on here. The chords are substitutions more so than a progression. The sparse campfire cowboy chorded instrumentation takes the timelessly folk melody to unexpected places. It’s a song anyone could sing or play. It’s a duet, sort of. More like a lover’s quarrel overheard in a closing-time parking lot. The same song, sung twice from two different perspectives takes on different meanings, yet intertwines into a moving story of passing through time and generations with a heavy sense of place. I suspect folks might be singing this song for a long time.
This is all to say that just because we don’t have words ready at hand to describe something doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist, and it doesn’t even mean we don’t care about it deeply. Let’s try some tools to get talking about music that matters.
Here’s a hypothesis…
Music that matters makes the news.
I’m not talking about songs that name-check the news like Paul Simon’s Me and Julio, The Clash’s Career Opportunities, or Elton John’s Levon.
Here’s my Music That Made the News list for 2023:
A lilting, melodramatic ballad savages an unnamed person for their life-sucking tendencies. Smart stuff from the thinking pop fan’s Taylor Swift.
Foo Fighters’ Rescued
Raging melodicism about being saved from peril, Rescued opens Dave Grohl and Foo Fighters’ cathartic first album since the 2022 death of drummer Taylor Hawkins.
Jason Aldean’s Try That in a Small Town
With his catchy but problematic song for angry people, bro-country hitmaker Jason Aldean seems to be advocating extralegal punishment for offences specifically committed in proudly American villages.
Oliver Anthony’s Rich Men North of Richmond
The red-bearded Southerner attempted to write a country-folk protest song in the Woody Guthrie tradition that was quickly interpreted by some as a right-wing anthem.
Miley Cyrus’s Flowers
Lyrically and production-wise, this smooth-groove single is straight out of the 1970s. Pure female-pop empowerment.
Now this is an imperfect list but it seems to me that music that made the news has a better chance of being music that matters in the fullness of time than other kinds of year-end lists. Will any of these songs matter in 10, 20, 80 years? We’ll see.
It’s important to note here that music that matters is not necessarily the best music, most accomplished, most popular in the moment, or popular for the right reasons. Progress doesn’t happen in a straight line. Music, as the leading indicator of many things, will be where we all see things going WAY too far outside the mainstream of thought. So music is where we get the chance to stop, check our directions, and often go back down the road to find the right spot or turn we missed.
I think that’s what’s happening now. We’re all noticing that the pied piper of pop music is taking us a little too far in directions that we didn’t want to go, whether it’s Miley Cyrus’s maniacal self-obsession or Jason Aldean’s reveling in ignorance and disrespect for the rule of law on which western liberal society is founded. The mega music corps are big heavy and dumb machines. It’s not that they are not efficient, profitable, well-run companies. The problem is, that companies like that are terrible at innovation - at change. In his book, The Innovator’s Dilemma, Clayton Christensen put forward the radical idea that big companies like this fail, consistently, precisely because they do everything right for their customers. Big successful companies are the last people who should be trusted with our future.
Music that matters is remembered. Auld Lang Syne. Happy Birthday. London Bridges. Jingle Bells. Music that matters stays with us. Often for a really, really long time.
This year, let's challenge the status quo. Let's shift the focus from the ephemeral to the eternal in music. It's high time we tune into the melodies that matter, the harmonies that herald the future, and the rhythms that resonate with the human spirit across time. After all, isn't that what music, at its core, is truly about?
Did that Song Need to be Written?
There might be more to worry about. It has to do with how and why music is getting made. When I was a kid my father had control of the radio dial on long car trips. He loved music. But that didn’t mean he loved all music. In fact, the most ardent music lovers are the ones you’ll find to speak out most passionately against a lot of music. My father expressed it like this. He’d say, “Well, that’s a song that didn’t need to get written.” And he’d flip the dial, preferring broadcast static to whatever bit of musical junk he just ran over on the highway. In other words, it was another one, just like the other ones - it didn’t offer anything new, or important, and it didn’t matter.
This year, YouTuber Rick Beato started to do a musical analysis of the top ten, casting a glaring spotlight on the monotonous uniformity of modern pop music. Beato's incisive analyses reveal an unsettling truth: much of today's pop landscape is a regurgitation of the same four-chord sequences, recycled sounds, and overused high-hat rhythms reminiscent of cicadas in a summer night. Melodies and lyrical themes, once the soul of music's diversity, now seem to merge into one indistinguishable, continuous track.
Behind this homogenization are the twin juggernauts of corporate music behemoths and algorithmic overlords, each perpetuating a cycle of sameness. Music mega-corporations, in their relentless quest for the next chart-topper, often pressure artists into producing “another one just like the other one.” In tandem, the omnipresent algorithms serve up a never-ending buffet of the familiar, reinforcing the appetite for repetition. The result? A pop music landscape where diversity (real diversity, not divisive Marxist identity politics) and originality gasp for air under the weight of commercial and technological conformity.
And then there's the role of DJs, those modern-day Orpheuses who weave songs into seamless tapestries of sound for the masses. In their hands, music becomes a tool, a means to an end – the creation of an endless mix that keeps the party going but rarely stops to savor the uniqueness of each song. In this vortex, individual tracks lose their identity, becoming mere links in a never-ending chain of sound.
Amidst this landscape of sameness, an intriguing dissonance emerges: the clash between the women’s movement and what I'll term "the dirty music" – the music that celebrates misogyny, sex, and the rest. This is the battleground where the ideals of agency and uniqueness stand in stark contrast to the grinding, often grotesque reality of a music industry driven by profit, porn, and low populist popularity. It's a space where the quest for authenticity in music is constantly at odds with the industry's relentless push towards a homogenized, one-size-fits-all musical output that grabs the attention of hormones more so than humanity. The most astonishing part is how each side pretends the other does not exist.
Was That a Different Song?
As we look back at the year in music, it's essential to ask: are we merely witnessing the recycling of the same tired themes and tunes, repackaged in slightly different wrappers? Because that music will not matter. Or is there still a pulse of originality beating somewhere beneath the surface? This is the conversation we need to have, far removed from the superficiality of year-end top 10 lists and closer to the heart of what music truly means.
Here's my concluding hypothesis.
Music that matters is music that we can sing together.
Music that separates people from music, reducing them to only spectators, might impress for a moment, it might make a shooting star or idol of the moment, but ultimately if we can’t carry the tune along with us in some way, it’s not music that is going to matter to most. I guess I’m saying I don’t think this ends on a high note. At least not a very high one.
Singing together used to be fairly common; people would gather around the piano in a parlor and belt out some tunes simply as a way to pass the time. Almost all the tunes in the Christmas top ten are from that era.
Today, if you’re not a regular churchgoer, you probably rarely, if ever, sing along with other people.
Which is a shame. In their essay on why you should go to church even if you don’t think you believe, Brett and Kate McKay argue that communal singing is truly one of life’s great pleasures. It’s a chance for a singular kind of emotive, spirit-elevating expression that finds outlet nowhere else. And the vibrations you send out, reverberate back, producing an effect that brings harmony to your health. Singing with others releases pleasure-producing endorphins as well as oxytocin, which lower stress and ward off anxiety and depression.
Singing with others also bonds you together with others in a unique way — quite literally as it turns out; studies show that the heartbeats of those signing together sync up with the music and with each other. The oxytocin released further increases these feelings of connection and trust, which is why group singing has been shown to lessen feelings of loneliness.
Singing With Others Breaches Your Echo Chamber and Connects You With People From Different Walks of Life
There’s been a lot of talk these days about how people are cordoning themselves off into more and more self-selecting groups. Nowhere is that more true than in music. Music “genres” foreshadowed today’s identity politics by a generation. The people people rub shoulders with too often share the same race, age, socio-economic status, and beliefs. Whites hang out with whites, the college-educated with the college-educated, 20-somethings with 20-somethings, every nationality has its city within a city, Democrats with Democrats — and vice versa down the line. The news that folks get is based on who they follow on social media (generally those with whom they already agree) and what shows up in their feeds, which is based on what they’ve “liked” in the past, and so skews to stories that affirm their preexisting ideology. There’s a legitimate fear that we’re all retreating into increasingly isolated echo chambers that are squeezing our minds into narrower and narrower chutes.
If we talk about music that matters we can get ahead of these problems and opportunities. We can include ourselves in the choruses that define our times. We can sing along. We can make our lives, our communities, and the future better. And we can have a whole lot of fun doing it.