Which Hit Songs are Being Forgotten?
I swear you won't remember these
The past is constantly being forgotten. One of my goals of this newsletter—and my book—are to make sure we remember all of the good, the bad, and the ugly of our musical past. Sure, there was tons of great stuff released in, say, the 1960s. But there was also tons of rubbish that we forgot about. Because there are so many people talking about the music we remember, let’s talk about the music we forget—for good reason or not.
The Forgotten Hit Songs
By Chris Dalla Riva
When Billie Eilish was on Jimmy Kimmel Live! a few years ago, the titular host asked her if she knew who some older artists were:
Kimmel: “Do you know who Madonna is?”
Eilish: “I do know who Madonna is.”
Kimmel: “Can you name a Van Halen [song]?”
Eilish: “Who?”
Kimmel: “I’m gonna start crying”
This exchange set off a brief firestorm online. How could one of today’s biggest pop stars not know who Van Halen was? The group scored 16 top 40 hits on their way to selling millions of records. (If you’re reading this, Ms. Eilish, my favorite Van Halen hit is “Dance the Night Away.”)
The problem is that Billie Eilish was born in 2001. By then, Van Halen had not only gone through three lead singers, but they weren’t together anymore. Van Halen was never at the forefront of culture during Billie Eilish’s life. It’s not strange that she didn’t know about them.
Of course, this is just a soundbite from a talk show. It’s possible that Eilish would know some Van Halen songs. But it’s also a good illustration of how humanity’s collective relationship with the past changes over time.
This is a topic I’ve written about extensively in both this newsletter and elsewhere. In fact, on the second page of my book, I note how “once-unpopular works [are] now hailed as masterpieces and ubiquitous hits of yesteryear [are] fading from our consciousness by the day.”
Today, I want to illustrate the second half of that statement. Let’s talk about the massive hits from long ago that are being forgotten the most. We’ll start with the 1960s and we’ll work our way through each decade up to the 2010s.
The Top 5 Forgotten Hits: 1960-2010
If you want to know the music that is being remembered, you can just look at aggregate streaming numbers. For example, the most streamed song on Spotify from the 1990s is “Iris” by The Goo Goo Dolls. It’s safe to say that if people continue to listen to it in such large number, then it’s remembered quite well.
To measure the music of the past that we are forgetting, we need to find the songs that were hits long ago that are not streamed much anymore. This isn’t hard. You just grab every song to ever crack the top 5 on the Billboard Hot 100 and look up their current popularity on Spotify. Those with the lowest popularity are deemed the most forgotten.
Spotify’s popularity metric is not just a count of total streams. According to their documentation, it looks at how recent a track’s total streams have occurred. So, this is a point in time measure. And by this measure, these songs are tremendously unpopular.
“Loop De Loop,” the Johnny Thunder song that I am listing as the most forgotten hit of the 1960s, has so few streams that I’ve released a song that basically matches it. I’d honestly guess that when I played this song during the writing of this piece that I was the only person that streamed it that day, if not that week.
Does that mean that “Loop De Loop” is bad? Of course not. It kind of rips. It’s just played a lot less these days than other big hits from the decade. And we are going to come across many songs in this piece that are great but largely unplayed.
Jackie Wilson’s “Night,” another song among the most forgotten hits of the 1960s, is also good example of this. The song sees the soul singer perform in a more operatic style. And he nails it. I’d go so far as to argue that it’s one of the most spectacular vocals of the 1960s.
But not all of these forgotten hits are good. In fact, we’re lucky that many have been swept into history’s dustbin. And we can see that illustrated vividly by looking at the most forgotten hits of the 1970s.
