In honor of the 1,000th #1 single in the history of the Billboard charts, someone took the time to group a 5 second sample of all those songs from the 50s until 1992 (I’m not sure why they stopped there). I listened to it and loved it. I immediately thought that was something I would do for no reason whatsoever.

You see, when I was young the first secular (i.e. non-Christian or church) music I listened to was oldies. That was all I listened to for my first few years of music listening. It’s a pretty common phenomenon I think, even for not-very-religious kids.

So as I listened to all the songs from the 50s and 60s, I had a nostalgia trip back to my late elementary school years much in the same way when you smell something that you haven’t smelled in 10 years and you’re immediately transported back there for a few moments until you realize you missed your bus stop. The five senses can trip you out like that when it comes to memories.

I decided to use the sense of sound to make my own 5 second song sample collages but using music I was listening to at particular times in my life but chronologically. So in essence I’ve made my own version of this but autobiographical.

What was great about listening to all the Billboard hits in chronological order was that you could hear popular music evolve and mature right in front of you. It was like the opening scene from Adaptation. That is up until around 1976 when everything suddenly got horrible in the charts. This made me want to hear my own personal musical evolution (or de-evolution depending on your perspective).

So here’s what I did:

Using my own memory, Wikipedia’s year in music pages and an Excel document I’ve been keeping of every album I’ve obtained since I started buying albums back in 1996, I made my own personal music history collage. But it’s not just music from when I was young. It’s not as simple as just Stone Temple Pilots, Soundgarden and Metallica songs meshed together because that’s what was popular when I was in high school. It goes from me listening to “Sex & Candy” when it was popular to me getting into Led Zeppelin.

You can hear when I transition from oldies to a more Top 40 thing when I was in the 7th grade. And you can hear when I discovered/got into The Beatles, Pearl Jam and Sonic Youth. It’s like hearing your old random radio mix tapes in order.

I decided to choose 20 years as a nice round number because age 10 was around the time I started listening to interesting music and since I recently turned 30 it seemed like ages 10-30 would be an interesting era to document through pop music. My version of 1991 through 2011 is what you’re going to get.

I didn’t necessarily pick my favorite songs from that era or the biggest hits, I just wanted to pick what was the most representative of me at the time and what reminded me the most of being in that place. I wanted to be as honest as possible even if it’s now embarrassing as hell. And I’m not nearly as embarrassed by my preteen years on this thing as much as the late 90s. Yikes. There is way too much Blink 182 and Dave Matthews Band on there than I’m comfortable with (I wish there was more Cure and Pixies songs on here, but like I said I wanted to avoid any revisionist history).

So the rules are: be honest, limit it to two songs per month and try to stay around 5 seconds. I’m happy to say those rules were followed in a general sense, but not 100% I’ll admit. It’s quite a personal journey. I can hear breakups and moves in there not to mention the songs that were on the radio when I was driving around at 16 being an idiot.

If you have similar taste as me, are of my generation or just want to hear a 10-year-old kid slowly turn into a 30-year-old kid click on the player above to listen or go here. I’ve delineated where each new year begins at the bottom of the player.

Enjoy!

(Thank you very much to John Wright for all of his technical wizardry on putting this together for me. Without him there’s no way this would’ve been possible.)

Comments (View)

Matt Payton's Tumble-o-rama