A Blast From The Past

I’ve just finished listening to Casey Kasem’s “American Top 40” replay on XM7, and I must say it’s quite a blast to hear a lot of these songs again. I do hear them a bit on XM, but it was neat to hear them in this special countdown that XM7 replayed from the year 1979.

XM acquired the rights to rebroadcast Casey Kasem’s “American Top 40”, and I’ve been catching them every so often on XM’s 70s channel. Just now, they replayed the top 50 songs of the year 1979. I didn’t realize how many of these songs that I like actually came from the year when I was 15 years old. The Bee Gees nailed three songs in the countdown–the three major #1 hits from their Spirits Having Flown album; with their successes from “Saturday Night Fever”, this also lands them the title as the #1 act of the 70s. Donna Summer landed two with MacArthur Park and Bad Girls. Dionne Warwick had a monster hit with “I’ll Never Love This Way Again” (which featured a Barry Manilow production treatment). Cheap Trick squeaked in with “I Want You To Want Me”, and Blondie nailed “Heart Of Glass”. The Village People were at the “Y.M.C.A.” and “In The Navy” during the same year, which is a little more comforting that Randy Van Warmer’s “Just When I Needed You Most”. And the #1 song was The Knack, “My Sharona”.

Something I read elsewhere: the songs you heard during the age of 14 or 15 were the ones that formed your musical tastes for the rest of your life. I don’t know if it’s entirely true, but I must say that I knew just about all of these songs quite well, and it was a blast to hear them all together like this. And Kasem’s show itself was something I often looked forward to when a few of my favorite songs were on the charts.

It’s just sad that popular music today has degraded to such a point that I can’t even stand to listen to it. I doubt our kids will ever be able to enjoy music this good, like we did in our youth.