I was recovering from my kidney transplant over the summer of 2011. I felt like I was freed up to figure out some new career skill to attempt to acquire. I thought about how I been WordPress blogging for years, and how I enjoyed customizing the blog. But I hadn’t ever looked into the best practices for really working with WordPress at a level that might lend itself to career doing something like this. Si I thought I’d start a new blog and use it as my development platform.
I was also feeling nostalgic for my mixtapes of 20 years earlier, which mostly consisted of sappy love songs and a general quality of music that most would judge as pretty darn awful. I was nostalgic for the lengthy countdown cassette series I had made. Top 100. Top 100 II. Top 100 III. Top 100 IV. And then, in college, the Top 200. Each countdown included voiceovers announcing the countdown, Casey Kasem-style. “Up six notches to #12, it’s Peter Cetera with ‘The Glory of Love'” (…more)
98
Dionne Warwick
I Know I’ll Never Love This Way Again
97
Drifters
Save The Last Dance For Me
96
R.E.M.
Losing My Religion
95
U2
One
94
Lionel Richie
Truly
93
Cyndi Lauper
All Through The Night
92
Mitch & Micky
A Kiss at the End of the Rainbow
91
Chicago
Look Away
90
Bee Gees
Too Much Heaven
89
Duran Duran
Come Undone
Back to 2011. I was curious what a Top 100 15-20 years later might look like. But it had been so long. I could surely come up with 200 or 300. And then top379.com was an available domain. And so I decided my WordPress project would be to countdown my top 379 songs.
One song a day for a little over a year. I’d hit number one on Valentine’s Day 2013. That didn’t quite work out. The bulk of my time was not spent on making an awesome design or on designing some backend database structure that would make for an amazing dynamic data-driven site. It was spent looking up countdown data from obscure websites. And once I started figuring out every country I could find where a song charted, I felt obliged to continue that process. An hour a night was not sustainable.
Not to mention, I constantly lacked the confidence to post these sappy, schlocky ballads. Did I REALLY still like all of these Air Supply songs? I just wouldn’t be in the mood to deal with the question. I’ve listened to a lot of different music in the past 3-4 years, and my taste for sentimentality has dulled significantly. It’s hard to be motivated to post about songs I care nothing about and may be embarrassed to admit liking.
Well, I didn’t intend for this to be a recap of the history of the Top 379. It’s just a recap of the last 10 songs. Now that I’m under a hundred songs to go, I can see an end in sight…somewhere. I feel a need to finish this out, even if there is little interest from anyone including myself to persist. Frankly, I don’t even want to hear half the songs remaining in the countdown, though some of that may be a reflection of my current null-pointer relationship status. (Don’t ask what that means).
So…88 songs to go. Maybe if I can go through two a week, I’ll be done by the end of the year, or next Valentine’s Day.
bullcitydave 