He now says he isn’t sure whether the record exists at all.īut the evidence is right there. Whitburn, the authority in this area who has tracked down literally everything else, is totally stumped. No one is known to own a copy of the record or know what the song or artist even was. It debuted at #106, went to #103 then #102, then dropped off the chart-and apparently off the face of the Earth. appeared on the “Bubbling Under the Hot 100” chart (which was, at the time, simply positions nos. He now has them all, except one.ĭ.A.'s "Ready 'n' Steady" bubbles under the Hot 100 on June 16, 1979, then bubbles its way into oblivion three weeks later.įor three weeks in June 1979, a song called “Ready ‘n’ Steady” by an artist called D.A. Joel Whitburn is a meticulous record collector and researcher whose mission it is to own and catalog every record that has appeared on the Billboard singles charts since they were invented in 1958. What was “Ready ‘n’ Steady,” and what happened to it? Here are a few of the ones I find the most intriguing. Unsolved pop culture mysteries remind me of the vastness of time, in the face of a world where we expect nothing to still be hidden. If you have a basically proficient command of Google and something is still a mystery to you, chances are it is a mystery to society as a whole. One side effect of all this, for me anyway, is a heightened fascination with those facts that still manage to fall through the cracks. About the academic validity of the writing on blackboards in school-set pornographic films. About the lifetime winning percentages of all six Legends of the Hidden Temple teams. There are dusty Web backwaters where you can learn all about every conceivable piece of Calvin and Hobbes merchandise. The ease with which facts can be learned has made it possible for netizens to be obsessed with ever more specific minutia. But I also wonder what they’d make of the 117 different Billboard charts or a college football ranking system that takes into account six different computer-generated data sets.ĭetails play into our understanding of culture more and more, and Wikipedia and the Internet in general put them at our disposal with a minimum of effort. It’s interesting to imagine what a medieval lute player would think of Slayer or what the Knickerbocker Club would think of modern baseball. We’ve formalized things in a way that probably didn’t seem necessary or practical in past eras. What I think might be overlooked is that not only has a great deal of culture been created in this time period, but so has a stupendous amount of information relating to that culture. Come to think of it, that’s sort of a crucial theme to this blog. (Not that everyone would find all of it artistic or entertaining, of course.) The invention of all our familiar mass communication technologies enabled that, and I revel in living in a world that’s completely flooded with pop culture. The media explosion of the past 50 or 60 years has led to a big increase in the amount of what anyone might call art or entertainment.
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