It’s been three months since my last installment of ‘What the Kids are Listening To,’ wherein I feature the top songs on the current Billboard Hot 100 chart and reveal how out of touch I am with the modern music scene.
As is typical around the holiday period, there hasn’t been a whole lot of turnaround on the charts. Five of the Top Ten songs I covered in mid-November are still on the charts in mid-February. We do have new entrants in the top two slots, however.
Like pretty much every song on Elliott Smith’s self-titled 1995 album, ‘Single File’ is about heroin. Or at least it is using heroin as both a subject and a metaphor.
In this case, the lyrics describe a visit to a methadone clinic, where you wait in a “single file” line to receive your treatment for heroin addiction.
This year’s final Rock & Roll Hall of Fame inductee is T. Rex, the brainchild of singer-songwriter Marc Bolan.
T. Rex has been eligible for Hall inclusion since 1994 but didn’t become a nominee until this year. Bolan was considered one of the most egregious oversights for the past 25 years, because he is widely credited with starting the glam movement and was otherwise a major influence on British rockers in particular. I’ve read that without Marc Bolan, there would be no David Bowie.
Half of this year’s Rock & Roll Hall of Fame inductees died before their time. In the case of Christopher George Latore Wallace (aka The Notorious B.I.G. or Biggie Smalls), he was gunned down in his car following an after-party for the Soul Train Music Awards in 1997. He was 24 years old.
Biggie is the seventh rap act inducted into the Hall of Fame, and he made it the first year he was eligible. The other rap inductees are Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five, Run-DMC, the Beastie Boys, Public Enemy, N.W.A and Tupac Shakur.
Industrial rockers Nine Inch Nails (the brainchild of one-man band Trent Reznor) was first eligible for the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame in 2015. They were nominated that year and the following year, unsuccessfully, then missed the ballot for a few years before earning a spot in the 2020 class.
Reznor is no doubt a major influence on a genre of music I don’t much like, and his commercial and critical success — particularly in the 90s — makes him a no-brainer for the Rock Hall.
Meet Me In Montauk 