Project X: Tonight We’re Gonna Party Like It’s 1952

Brian Raftery | April 3, 2007 11:34 am

We here at Idolator are obsessed with charts: Sales charts, best-of charts, even charts that chart other charts. In an attempt to keep track of all the rankings and reports that are compiled on a daily basis, we’ve asked Jackin’ Pop editor Michaelangelo Matos to break down charts from every genre imaginable. After the click-through, his take on the 10 most critically acclaimed songs from 55 years ago.

Project X No. 5: Acclaimed Music’s Top 10 Songs of 1952 Acclaimed Music is the brainchild of Henrik Franzon, a Swedish-born Canterbury, U.K. resident. Acclaimed synthesizes acres of non-jazz pop-music lists–via some oddment of weighted scales relating to size of list, authority of list maker, and period covered–into a mega-, meta-list that finally answers the musical question, “Say, just what is the most critically beloved album and/or single of all time? And what is the 2,537th? Say, while we’re at it, how about year-by-year and decade-by-decade breakdowns, as well?”

Even as someone to whom lists mean entirely too much–and certainly with no unkindness intended–Franzon’s mission is, well, insane. But within its measure, his work is pretty authoritative: I can’t have been the only one wondering why NARM bothered making a “Definitive 200” when Acclaimed Music exists.

Authoritative is one thing; predictable is another. To me, the most intriguing of Acclaimed’s many lists is its Top 10 Songs of 1952:

1. Lloyd Price, “Lawdy Miss Clawdy” (Specialty) 2. Hank Williams, “I’ll Never Get Out of This World Alive” (Mercury) 3. Kitty Wells, “It Wasn’t God Who Made Honky Tonk Angels” (Decca) 4. Jimmy Forrest, “Night Train” (United) 5. Little Walter, “Juke” (Checker) 6. The Clovers, “One Mint Julep” (Atlantic) 7. Hank Thompson and His Brazos Valley Boys, “The Wild Side of Life” (Capitol) 8. Little Walter, “Mean Old World” (Checker) 9. John Cage, 4’33” 10. Gene Kelly, “Singin’ in the Rain” (MGM)

All history is retroactive, and therefore prone to all sorts of revisionism. Tom Ewing, whose blog Popular chronologically reviews every U.K. No. 1 single, sort-of-jokingly refers to 1952 as “the dawn of pop.” Michael Daddino’s Yank version, American Hot Wax, begins in 1950. Neither writer is all that impressed with 1952’s pop Number Ones: their average grade (out of 10) per song is 4.2. The only No. 1 record from the period that came close to the Acclaimed list is Kay Starr’s “Wheel of Fortune,” which Acclaimed places 11th.

“Not many people tick [pick] anything in the 1952-1953 Number Ones polls,” Ewing recently wrote of the early Popular entries on a recent LiveJournal thread on “The Past.” “Fair enough – this stuff is quite obscure.” Pop’s boundaries shift all the time; that’s one reason it’s pop. Most of what topped the ’50s pop charts was overtaken (aesthetically, culturally) by the spawn of the first eight items in the Acclaimed Top 10. All were major hits on the country and R&B charts; all of them remain vibrantly enjoyable. But when Ewing continues, “But there’s no sense of curiosity either, or not of curiosity in the sense of ‘wow maybe there’s some great old stuff here.’ It’s too far beyond pop as we understand it to excite much enthusiasm,” he points out precisely how wide the gap has become–and so do the ninth and tenth items on the Acclaimed list.

It’s hard to imagine anyone in 1952 conceiving of the elephant in this list’s room as any kind of “pop.” Yet as much as 4’33” is a symbol first and music second (if at all), there’s also a sense in which it fits its era perfectly. It’s usually interpreted as four minutes, 33 seconds of silence; for its public premiere, David Tudor opened and shut his piano lid twice, playing zero notes, before calling it a finish. The composition is often referred to colloquially as “Silence.”

“Out of all the novelty hits of 1952–and it was an era of novelty hits, pretty much–4’33” has become history’s winner,” Daddino says in an email. If a novelty song’s primary hook is its concept, what a provocative concept we’ve got here–even if everybody gets that concept wrong.” After all, Cage wrote a composition, complete with movements; the point wasn’t a gag on the listener but a heightened awareness of one’s environment. (Cage wrote the piece after spending some time in an anechoic chamber and hearing, instead of total silence, his own bodily functions.) But it’s also a signpost for the future of a different kind of Pop–that of Rauschenberg and Warhol as much as the Beatles and James Brown.

The placement of “Singin’ in the Rain” on the list can be seen as the conceptual opposite of 4’33”–as simple, warm nostalgia. Actually, make that nostalgia within nostalgia: Singin’ in the Rain isn’t just a ’50s movie, it’s a ’50s movie about the ’20s. But it fits the list’s accidentally futurist agenda, too. The R&B and country stuff on the list suggest what pop would become; John Cage and Gene Kelly are talismans for what pop can be. After all, nobody thinks of “Singin’ in the Rain” as a song, per se; they think of it as a dance routine and a movie set piece. As the antecedent for the Twist, the Mashed Potatoes, the Macarena, ad infinitum, and as the predecessor for Saturday Night Fever, Purple Rain, The Bodyguard, etc., it fits right in.

Project X takes a critical look at a different Top 10 list biweekly. Suggestions can be sent to matos@idolator.com.