Diving into the messy vat of nostalgia that is Casey Kasem's American Top 40

Gen X, we've got to stop deluding ourselves into believing that today's pop music is worse than it used to be.

Like YouTube, I was relatively late to the wonder that is the Internet Archive. I mistakenly thought that, like the Wayback Machine, it was a repository for defunct websites, where someone such as myself could find their old Geocities page and cringe in embarrassment at what used to pass for “web design¹.” Turns out I was wrong: it’s actually perhaps the most important website on the internet, a massive, invaluable collection of out-of-print books and magazines, impossible-to-find elsewhere recordings, old movies and TV shows, and more, all for free just by checking it out like a library book². It’s impossible to see everything that’s available there, there’s just too much.

Thanks to the Internet Archive, I have enjoyed, just in the past few months, entire issues of Premiere, at one time the best film magazine in publication, the novel on which the camp thriller classic The Fan³ was based, and an audio recording of author Frank Garlick reading his book The Big Beat: A Rock Blast, essential “Satanic Panic” text that warned parents against the dangers of rock ‘n’ roll music. I’ve also found many, many episodes of American Top 40 Countdown.

Now, you might be thinking “But isn’t American Top 40 Countdown still a thing?” It is, but who gives a shit? Ryan Seacrest has been hosting it since 2004, but I have no evidence that anyone actually listens to it or that it exists as anything other than a contractual obligation. I’m talking about the prime era, between its debut in 1970 and 1988, when it was hosted by Casey Kasem, who offered up trivia, song dedications, and music history along with current hit music, all in a caramel-smooth, warmly paternal voice that made Sundays go down a little easier.

During the first few weeks of pandemic lockdown, I listened to the 80s era episodes for hours a day while attempting to work. I enveloped myself in the bubble of the past, when somehow we thought the U.S. Government would manage to get its shit together in the face of a deadly, highly communicable disease. Then I started playing Animal Crossing, and that suddenly became the distraction of choice for several months. Now, with things not looking a whole lot better on the survival of humanity front, I’ve recently found myself drawn to AT40 again. It’s been a fascinating experience on both an anthropological and personal level, because it reinforces the concept of being nostalgic for something that is, often, quite terrible.

I don’t mean that in the same way that people who post Facebook memes about the “good old days” when parents used to beat their children do, I mean feeling sentimental about the pop culture of your youth while acknowledging that much of it is an atrocious embarrassment to revisit. I’m only up to early 1983 in my journey to the past, and there have been more than a few times when, while listening to an episode, I’ve winced like I’ve just swallowed a cup of NyQuil.

As the saying goes, no one ever went broke underestimating the taste of the American public, and that’s wildly apparent here. Pop music by its very design is bland and vapid, ephemeral, a hook in which lyrics play a very distant second in importance. 80s pop music, particularly the early 80s, seemed designed specifically to be played in pharmacies and dentist’s offices, largely unnoticed unless someone looks up towards the ceiling and asks “What is this shit?”

The most important thing to note about early 80s pop is how aggressively white it is. Coming out of the disco era and with hip hop on the horizon, mainstream radio promoting the most boring middle-aged suburban mom music imaginable felt intentional, as if it was trying to create a safe haven for Caucasian sensibilities. On any given week, out of 40 songs on the countdown, an average of just five would be from Black artists, and even then it tended to be the same performers, predominantly Diana Ross and Lionel Richie, until Michael Jackson took over. And let’s be frank, no one in Des Moines or Oklahoma City was threatened by the idea of their kids listening to “Endless Love” or “Sail On⁴.”

It’s incredible to discover that, well into the 80s, Barry Manilow and Neil Diamond were still prominent voices in pop music. People my age have Mandela Effected Manilow into always being a corny lounge act whose success was based mostly on irony, but he had a stranglehold on 70s and early 80s radio, with more than two dozen singles hitting the top 40, and the worse the song was, the higher it seemed to rank on the chart. People loved this shit, it was what they demanded to hear, with songs like “Rock the Casbah” and “Goody Two Shoes,” the songs that still slap more than forty years later, as the bizarre, unlikely outliers driven mostly by the still brand new MTV.

Speaking of bizarre, though it seems like a weird shared hallucination now, it’s true: human beings wrote, recorded and released a song called “Pac-Man Fever.” Though it was intended as a goof, it implausibly became a hit, ranking higher at the end of 1982 than “Our Lips Are Sealed” and “Don’t Stop Believin’.” We’ve also never collectively answered for the success of “Hooked on Classics,” a medley of classical music set to a vague disco beat, which reached as high as number 10 on the chart⁵, the parody song “General Hospi-tale” (number 33), and “The Curly Shuffle” (number 15). Nor has there ever been an explanation for why Vangelis’s theme from Chariots of Fire, an instrumental so relentlessly dull it sounds like an experiment in anti-music, managed to stay in the Top 40 for five months straight⁶.

But you know, it hasn’t been all bad. As I get closer to 1984, the music is slowly improving, with Michael Jackson, Prince, Madonna, and Duran Duran, the musical acts that would eventually define the decade, taking over, and songs like Herb Alpert’s disco-flavored trumpet fart “Route 101” now the outliers. It’s also been fun rediscovering the less remembered one-hit wonders⁷ that came and went without making the same impression as, say, “Come On Eileen” or “Tainted Love.” True, some of them absolutely deserved to be forgotten, like Charlie Dore’s “Pilot of the Airwaves” (a song that could be remade now to address the parasocial relationship we have with podcasters), but then there’s also genuine jams like Donnie Iris’s “Ah! Leah!” which I’ve listened to on Spotify more times in the past couple of weeks than I’d care to admit⁸.

And I don’t know, man, even when subjected to garbage like “Love on the Rocks” it’s oddly kind of nice. It’s soothing, but also incredibly funny, like looking at prom pictures of yourself. Nobody goes to the prom trying to look like a big dork, and yet we all do, eventually. Time endorkens us, you might say. None of these songs, save perhaps for “Pac-Man Fever,” had been recorded as a joke. All of them were created by people with stars in their eyes and the sounds of cash registers in their ears, who believed (and were obviously right) that they had their fingers on the pulse of what audiences wanted to hear.

There’s such a refreshing lack of irony to the whole thing that you just can’t bring yourself to hate any of it, even something as audibly and spiritually repugnant as “Escape (The Pina Colada Song)”. Maybe the earnestness is what makes it so comforting. These are hard times we’re living in, and they’re made harder by our pernicious, understandable-but-still-exasperating need to skewer everything, and mock sincerity as being for naïve chumps. It sucks the joy out of life, and right now we need all the joy we can get. Rather than sneer at a song like “I Made It Through the Rain,” Barry Manilow’s last big hit⁹, maybe it would benefit us more to try to figure out why it landed so hard with listeners, and if there’s any way we can get back to that place of pure, mawkish sentiment again. Maybe we’d be better people for it.

That being said, there’s just no excuse for “Copacabana.”

1. Not that I’ve, uh, ever done such a thing.

2. The Internet Archive’s future is murky thanks to a lawsuit by authors claiming copyright protection on books still currently in print (or even newly published) but available for free on the site. It is, of course, a valid and very legal point they’re making, but at the same time I am unclear why that material simply can’t be pulled from the site whenever it pops up, rather than shutting down the whole thing.

3. Written entirely in epistolary format (like Dracula!), it’s delicious trash in which Douglas, the titular (and very horny) fan, casually mentions in a letter to heroine Sally Ross that he has a 9-inch long penis.

4. They probably were threatened by “Super Freak,” however, which entered the charts in August of 1981 and stood out among singles like “Theme From The Greatest American Hero” and “The Beach Boys Medley” like a spicy Cheez-It on a plate of saltines.

5. Followed by “Hooked on Swing,” which, much to my displeasure was on heavy rotation at my local skating rink for the summer of 1982.

6. I could write a whole essay on the baffling success of Styx’s “Mr. Roboto” (number 3), a single from a concept album about a man who’s placed in a prison for rock ‘n’ roll misfits and escapes by disguising himself as a robot janitor.

7. I now regret not starting a list of songs showing up on the top 40 that I am quite sure I never heard until now, even though I was alive for all of the 80s, like Leslie Pearl’s “If the Love Fits Wear It,” something called “Sausalito Summernight,” and Pia Zadora’s surprisingly not-terrible cover of “The Clapping Song.”

8. Pittsburgh’s favorite son Donnie Iris, still performing at age 80 god bless him, has managed to make a fruitful career out of one song, releasing a live album called Ah! Live!, and a Christmas album called Ah! Leluiah!

9. In fact, Manilow was so beloved by listeners of American Top 40 that his songs were requested more often for Kasem’s long-distance dedication segment than any other performer, a whopping 36 times.