What are Songs For?

I had to get a root canal yesterday and the dentist and his assistant were talking about the recent American Music Awards throughout the procedure. Apparently a number of South Korean artists, including BTS and Katseye, won big, making me wonder why it's called the "American Music Awards". But what are words for? Missing Persons asked this question with their hit song, "Words", back in 1982. That song charted at 42.

I thought BTS were over but apparently this year they already have the song of the summer.

I don't find it half as interesting as former song of the summer "Espresso" but that was all the way back in 2024. Times have changed.

The dentist and his assistant also talked about Justin Bieber. I had no idea people in the U.S. were still listening to Justin Bieber. Again, the algorithms have let me down. I wondered when was the last time I'd looked at the Billboard Hot 100. Actually, I'd looked at the charts recently because, going through my deceased father's things, I'd found a few decades ago he'd paid a research firm to provide him with a printout of the Hot 100 lists going back to the '60s. Nowadays, that information's readily available for free on Wikipedia.

So I looked at the current Hot 100 and saw that someone named Ella Langley had the top two spots with songs called "Choosin' Texas" and "Be Her" (to-day I see she's been unseated by Drake). I checked out both of those songs on YouTube and found them to be surprisingly boring. Also surprising is that "Choosin' Texas" only has 34 million views.

"Be Her", the number 2, has 15 million views accrued over three months while Olivia Rodrigo's "Drop Dead", which was at number 7, has 31 million views accrued over one month. How does that make sense?

According to Google's AI:

The Billboard Hot 100 ranks the most popular songs in the U.S. every week by combining three main metrics: streaming activity, radio airplay, and sales data (compiled by Billboard's data tracking partner, Luminate). The exact formula is a closely guarded trade secret, but the final rankings are generally determined by these core components

Those aren't very good metrics. How many people listen to the radio anymore? Both radio and sales data come with higher price tags--radio play nowadays comes with artificial financial incentives while sales data reflects the small percentage of people who still buy music. But as my father evidently discovered, the top ranking Billboard songs are often dull. How often do people still listen to 1973's number 1, "Tie a Yellow Ribbon 'Round the Ole Oak Tree" or "That's What Friends Are For" from 1986? How about 1996's number one, "Macarena"?

Anyway, although I found the Ella Langley songs to be dull, I noticed both of the songs contained the recurrent preoccupation with uncertainty and the difficulty in defining relationships I talked about in a post last month about Chappell Roan, Olivia Rodrigo, and Sabrina Carpenter. "Choosin' Texas" finds the singer uncertain about the status of her relationship with her Texas boyfriend while "Be Her" is about wanting to become another person. This may be a generation experiencing exceptional difficulty defining itself. But what are words for?