Monday, 27 February 2012
I keep meaning to talk about this, and I guess now is as good a time as any.
Adele’s album, 21, has now spent (drum roll, please)… 21 weeks at number one on the Billboard charts. The fact that the album title and the number of weeks it’s spent at number is amazing enough (maybe as amazing as when Bare Naked Ladies’ “One Week” spent one week at number one). But what’s more amazing is that this is the longest that any album has sat atop the top position since the century began.
Don’t judge an album by its (boring) cover: the music will not make you fall asleep.
Actually, you’d have to go all the way back to 1984 to find an album that’s spent more time in the top slot.
As much as I like this singer and her music, and as much as I feel she deserves the top spot for as long as the buying public will give it to her, I can’t help but feel she’s wrecked something: For the past 19 years the ten albums that have spent the most time at number one could be broken down thusly:
Two from the 1950s
Two from the 1960s
Two from the 1970s
Two from the 1980s
Two from the 1990s
…And now Adele has gone and skunked that up.
“Hey,” you say, “What are those ten albums that have spent the most time at #1?”
“Good question,” I said, “Don’t bother guessing. You’ll never figure it out.”
“Really?” you say, “‘Cause I thought Thriller was, like, a monstrous best-seller.”
“Okay,” I say, “So it appears you will be able to guess one of them. But don’t bother with the other nine. They’re not what you’d think they should be.”
Okay, enough with the cuteness. Until Adele steamrolled onto this list, here were the ten albums that spent the most time in the #1 position:
- (54 weeks) West Side Story – Soundtrack (1962–63)
- (37 weeks) Thriller – Michael Jackson (1983–84)
- (31 weeks) Calypso – Harry Belafonte (1956–57)
- (31 weeks) South Pacific – Soundtrack (1958–59)
- (31 weeks) Rumours – Fleetwood Mac (1977–78)
- (24 weeks) Saturday Night Fever: The Original Movie Sound Track – Bee Gees (1978)
- (24 weeks) Purple Rain – Prince and the Revolution (1984–85)
- (21 weeks) Please Hammer, Don’t Hurt ‘Em – MC Hammer (1990)
- (20 weeks) The Bodyguard: Original Soundtrack Album – Whitney Houston/Soundtrack (1992–93)
- (20 weeks) Blue Hawaii – Elvis Presley (1961–62)
So now that 21 has spent the same amount of time at #1 as (*choke*) Please Hammer, Don’t Hurt ‘Em, it is now tied for seventh place in the Billboard pantheon of longest-running best sellers.
My wish for the upcoming week is that Adele can one-up Stanley Burrell and last 22 weeks at #1.
Tuesday, 28 February 2012
This morning, as the professor entered class, I overheard her talking with a fellow student, and she said something akin to: “Stefanie emailed me this morning to say she wasn’t coming to class because she didn’t finish the reading. Not a good excuse, to me.”
Yeah, I agree, that’s a miserable excuse.
In fact, in an effort to find some kind of rationale behind this, I broached the topic with a friend later in the day. Specifically, I wondered why a student, already behind on the reading, wouldn’t just come to class and try to learn something about the pages she didn’t read by listening to the lecture. “Maybe she was afraid she’d be called on,” my friend suggested. I disagreed, primarily because the girl would be under no compulsion to raise her hand. I also pointed out that class meets on Tuesday and Thursday, and last Thursday the professor said she would be spending the 28th lecturing about the Great Depression.
Is this a great depression, or what?
Our assigned reading, by contrast, begins with the 1940s, and so there was no reason to even expect we would be touching on the reading. And, in fact, we didn’t.
Maybe the student just felt guilty. Or hungover. Who knows.
The professor wandered around the classroom, saying hello to the students, before the class began. She sauntered over to me, and asked: “James, did you work?”
“Yes,” I said.
“Full time?”
“Yes.”
“And do you have a family?”
“Yeah, I have a wife and two kids.”
“Did you do the reading for today?”
“Yes.”
She began to walk away. As she did, she shook her head and said, “I don’t know why these other students claim they don’t have time for the readings.”
I was going to say, “They must not be awesome, like me.” But I caught myself and, instead, said, “They maybe are taking more credits.”
The professor then asked how many credits I was shooting for this semester, and I told her I was just taking this one class (it’s tough to fit in more credits when I have a goal of dropping classes every semester).
The professor nodded and seemed to feel this satisfied the current conundrum.
“Conundrum.” God, I love that word.