To the left, to the left

As I work around middle schoolers, and, perhaps more than that, have a job that requires me to drive and wander around the bedrooms and common areas of middle schoolers, I have, like few other times in my life, a direct pipeline into the trends of current pop radio. As is perhaps well known to anyone whose heard any type of radio these past few (five? ten? fifteen?) years, top 40 radio, dictated by market shares and contractual obligations to play the same certain popular songs repeatedly within an hour placate to the needs of teen audiences, as teen audiences are the only subset of the population willing to hear the same certain popular songs repeatedly withan an hour.

This week, Nelly Furtado's "Say It Right" ends a ten week run at #1 on Billboard's Hot 100 by Beyonce's "Irreplaceable." Things weren't looking great for Beyonce 6 months ago - her B'Day album, successful enough, wasn't taking off the way Dangerously In Love was. "Deja Vu" and "Ring The Alarm" were top 20 singles, but the first was forgettable and the second, as daring as mainstream radio gets, must've freaked out listeners with all that yelling. Then comes "Irreplaceable." Beyonce herself called it her "secret weapon."

Every so often, a single comes along that isn't just successful because people can't get it out of their heads, but also because a certain sensation strikes - in each instance the song pops up, which is quite frequently, a listener finds him/herself reluctant to change the channel. The listener finds him/herself singing the song and not feeling embarassed about it. The listener finds him/herself downloading the thing or even buying the record. The listener, it seems, turns out to really like the popular song, only escalating its popularity.

Songs like these play all the time, as any popular song, but you find yourself not objecting so much, and even enjoying its ubiquity for a while. These songs are rare, but what they have the power to do is to, briefly, register excitement at radio - to hear a song and be thrilled at the capabilites of music, to remind listeners why they started to hear music in the first place. To say this is rare in pop music is an understatement. I can think of only a handful of examples from the past ten years - Outkast's "Hey Ya," for one, or Moby's "Southside," or Nelly's "Hot in Herre," or even Beyonce's first #1 "Crazy In Love." Billboard points out that Beyonce's ten week run with "Irreplaceable" was the longest of any single since Kanye West's "Gold Digger." I guess that was the last one.

Take a look at that group of songs - each song has in common that it spurred that excitement and that that excitement spurred its popularity. Yet even though that excitement was present once upon a time, it's also true that each of those songs despite holding off the sledge and anger of overplaying for much longer than would be expected, each eventually wore its listeners down into distaste. For West, he nearly ruined any goodwill I had towards Jamie Foxx. For Moby, since the popularity of "South Side," I seem to have never ceased finding the little guy an annoying munchkin of chest-pounding dullness. Perhaps "Hey Ya," a song that will be a top contender for the best of the decade - if not simply as one of the most memorable in the history of rap music - fares better, but, as my praise might indicate, not every song is a "Hey Ya."

When a song like "Irreplaceable" becomes that popular, though, it takes on a unique trajectory, as its biggest fanst tend to be under 18 (not its only fans though, certainly). Spending half my time around teenage boys for work, I've had plenty of time to monitor their reactions to the song - the inability to quit singing it, the sudden cessation of that singing when its clear people are noticing that a teenage boy singing Beyonce, the ad hoc caveat of "Damn, Beyonce's so hot."

I love Nelly Furtado's "Say It Right," a sensual chunk of electro-hip hop that acts like a sad complement to her mega-hit "Promiscuous," but it doesn't have that quality that made "Irreplaceable" so difficult to dislike, and what now makes it so difficult to not find annoying when the "to the left"s start up at, seemingly, every turn. That radio remains a wasteland is so accepted these days it can begin to sound like griping to mom about how she makes her mac & cheese. Still, the other songs I hear endlessly in a day's work - say, Ludacris and Mary J. Blige's "Runaway Love," whose alternate title must have been "poor people are sad," or, anything by Akon - lead to that other old feeling of listening to the radio, the one of frustration and cynicism. That the excitement of an "Irreplaceable" can get dulled down into that frustration I take as a good sign - that it's only more real in its changing nature, like a love affair deadened in the day to day.