We Just Disagree, Part 1

Wm.

Oct 5

It all began innocuously enough, with a response to a tweet.

Mark Seaman, proprietor of My Favorite Decade and The CD Project, had just posted one of his periodic summaries of an old AT40 show, recapping Casey's stories and issuing rulings left and right about the tunes the U.S. record-buying public was digging at the time. As one with his own take on such matters, I sensed an opportunity. Mark readily agreed, and before long we settled on a format: each of us would pick a Top 40 chart, we'd both rank how we felt about the songs on each list, and then discuss over Zoom. The first meetup occurred about two weeks after the above Twitter exchange.

Over the last 2.5 years, we've jousted 18 times, covering 36 charts. It takes close to an hour to cover each list, as we often get waylaid by tangents. As you might think, there are plenty of songs about which he and I have the same opinion--both good and bad--and maybe just as many for which our takes are wildly different. Only once so far have we placed the same tune at the top; another time Mark's #1 was my #40, while my favorite has been as low as #38 for him. It's always, always all in good fun--while I'm sure we're both surprised occasionally by disparities, we both understand that in the end one likes what one likes.

The best thing to emerge from all this, though, is that we've become friends.

It's occurred to me that our rankings might make decent blog fodder. Mark's given me the go-ahead to share our collective thoughts with the world, so here we go with the first installment in an occasional series whose (highly appropriate) title comes of course from the Dave Mason hit of late 1977. Shows featuring both of these charts were recently rebroadcast by Premiere; can't promise that will be the prompt for future posts. I'm limiting myself to the top half of our rankings.

9/20/75

We started by restricting our choices between 1976 and 1986, but have since expanded a little beyond that. This 1975 chart is the farthest back we've gone to date, and it's a case of relative agreement. I'll cop to rating (at least) three instances of true schlock higher than they deserve. You'll learn that six matches in our top tens is on the high side for us. I'm cool with the Spinners and Earth, Wind & Fire as a collective top two.

9/29/84

This 1984 chart, on the other hand, was a much wilder (and more fun, honestly) ride. Fully half of my top ten landed in Mark's bottom ten. On further reflection, I should have placed Prince higher. "I Feel for You" is a fine choice for a joint top pick.

Our next confab, covering charts from March 1982 and September 1985, is scheduled for next week--eventually a report on those proceedings will get posted, I'm sure.

Oh, and we did at one point debate a November 1982 chart, though it wasn't the 11/6 list that inspired this whole thing.