Reply All, "So Much Better," and the radio of Fall '99

The first noteworthy COVID-19 headline that failed to resonated worldwide occurred after Dr. Li Wenliang's death on February 7th 2020.

We heard a Pop Smoke song on Power 105 yesterday, and we felt a jog in our memory. (Did we use "jog" correctly there?) Didn't Pop Smoke die not too long ago? Did that happen? We had to look it up to be sure, and yes, he passed away back on February 19th, a headline that feels like it belongs to a buried, distant, alternate 2020.

On February 25th, we attended a current-events themed "trivia night" where the answer to one question was Pop Smoke. The Nevada Caucus was also around that time, which may have been the most recent hopeful moment in the history of the world.

As the viral outbreak and Super Tuesday collectively decimated any remaining hope for the future, morale was low and existential dread surged.

We did not expect the highlight that defined the following weekend to arrive from Reply All, a popular tech podcast that peaked in quality well over 18 months ago, before the atmosphere of the show started to hinge more heavily on creating characters out of the show's two primary hosts. We liked the show a lot better between 2017 and 2018 when it felt like there was more reporting, more cultural commentary, and less emphasis on the hosts as podcast personalities. Like many podcasters, their laughs are frequent and grating.

That said, their March 6th episode "The Case Of the Missing Hit" was an unexpected moment of lighthearted engagement. At least 7 or 8 reporters and bloggers reviewed the episode, including someone from The Guardian erroneously claiming it as "the greatest podcast episode ever."

So that's the first thing we wanted to note here: The episode is very funny, engaging, warm and nostalgic. It was something we really needed that weekend to temporarily lift our drowning, choking, suffocating heads from the slime bucket of life.

The other thing we wanted to discuss regards Evan Olson's major label flop "So Much Better," the subject of the episode.

Are there Top 40 flops anymore? The answer is a resounding "no." Due to radio consolidation, every current radio hit is carefully considered, backed by numbers to ensure longevity and justify the immense investment.

"So Much Better" arrived toward the end of perhaps the saddest era of '90s commercial radio, a brief stretch between the great label merge of Fall '98 and the advent of Napster one year later.

After the big merge, promotional dollars per song increased as a consequence of having less songs to promote. So 1999 was probably the first year when you could turn on the radio and notice smaller new music playlists. The breakthrough hits of this era felt bland and predictable compared to earlier in the decade. The "creative genius wiz kid" (ie Beck, Busta Rhymes, et al.) was no longer a profitable commodity. (We've written about this before, but the late '98 records that we always cite as suffering the most from the first wave of consolidation were The Cardigans' Gran Turismo, Nada Surf's The Proximity Effect, and Local H's Pack Up The Cats.) By Spring 2000, the excitement of MTV's longest running show, 120 Minutes, dwindled as it spent its final few months sneaking Broadcast or Primal Scream videos between premieres from prioritized VH1 artists and nu-metal bros.

After Napster, a pristine digital copy of a minor hit was as good as yours if you could afford enough real estate among a precious 11.2 gigs of hard drive space. (That was the size of our hard drive in 1999.) So if you heard a song on the radio every day for two months and it disappeared from your favorite station's playlist out of nowhere, you wouldn't have to invest $14.99 to hear it again.

Immediately promoted as a non-crossover VH1-ready pop hit, "So Much Better" never got the chance to build momentum on alternative stations. Vertical Horizon's strategy worked more effectively, as a handful of adult-alternative stations added "Everything You Want" to light rotation throughout Oct-Nov '99, eventually building enough steam to crossover, hitting #1 on the Hot 100 in June 2000. "So Much Better" also has no music video, and it was never performed on TV. Granted, these extra boosts didn't guarantee success. It helped when people actually enjoyed the song, which was not the case with an artist like John Oszajca for instance. He can say that he got to play Woodstock '99 and that his terrible song "Back In 1999" was the lead single for the Mystery Men soundtrack; otherwise, Oszajca's flop performed just as poorly.

Out of curiosity, we spent about an hour on Sunday, March 8th digging around some November '99 back issues of Radio and Records, Billboard, and a few similar magazines to see if there were other similar Top 40 flops of that era. "So Much Better" might have been the only flop of its type from that Fall, but it wouldn't surprise us if 5 or 6 other forgotten test-singles snuck onto playlists regionally between Fall '98 and Spring 2000. However, we doubt this phenomenon continued after the advent of Napster.

It's hard to say whether Reply All purposely omitted any fun facts to assist with the story's progression. Evan Olson's Wikipedia entry states that he used to play in a couple Chapel Hill area bands in the early '90s with none other than Ben Folds, perhaps the era's most well-known musician from that region of North Carolina. The Reply All episode makes it seem like Evan's CD oddly found its way to UMG by chance, but we suspect he had some inside assistance and probably knew some people.

One final note: This song really sucks. If it were on our radar by December 1999, it's very likely it would have landed somewhere among our "Worst Songs of 1999." (We'd like to find that list tbh. It's around somewhere.) Twenty years later, we're more lenient for funny-bad, but we're still puzzled by mental space that might inspire anyone to write a song that sounds like this.

Its production value and the dorkiness in the songwriting added many LOLz to the podcast itself. If it weren't so goofy, we probably wouldn't have enjoyed it. As Susan Rogers noted (without Reply All crediting her as Prince's legendary sound engineer), "So Much Better" sounds like three misremembered segments pulled from entirely different songs. Structurally, "it doesn't sound like a hit." She is correct. But the nuances in its production (revealed at the end of the episode) somewhat align with hits from that era.

For contextual purposes, it helped a bit to recall what radio actually sounded like then. Considering our attitude at the time, we don't think we were wrong throughout 1999 growing increasingly upset with how quickly alternative and modern rock radio had been immersed in prospects for VH1 and TRL crossovers. Just for fun, here's a C+P of what WLIR was playing that month. Again, we think it's strange that Universal never thought to pitch Evan Olson to stations like these...

1. 311 Come Original (Capricorn)
2. SMASH MOUTH Then The Morning Comes (Interscope)
3. FILTER Take A Picture (Reprise)
4. FOO FIGHTERS Learn To Fly (RCA)
5. GOO GOO DOLLS Black Balloon (Warner Bros.)
6. LIVE Dolphin's Cry (Radioactive)
7. TRAIN Meet Virginia (Aware/Columbia)
8. FIONA APPLE Fast As You Can (Clean Slate/Epic)
9. PET SHOP BOYS New York City Boy (Sire)
10. BUSH The Chemicals Between Us (Trauma)
11. JIMMIE'S CHICKEN SHACK Do Right (Island)
12. CHRIS CORNELL Can't Change Me (A&M)
13. STROKE 9 Little Black Backpack (Universal)
14. CREED Higher (Wind-up)
15. COUNTING CROWS Hangin Around (DGC)
16. SANTANA FEATURING ROB THOMAS Smooth (Arista)
17. SANTANA FEATURING EVERLAST Put Your Lights On (Arista)
18. KID ROCK Cowboy (Atlantic)
19. STING Brand New Day (A&M)
20. JAMES Just Like Fred Astaire (Fontana U.K.)
21. R.E.M. The Great Beyond (Warner Bros.)
22. SARAH MCLACHLAN Ice Cream (Arista)
23. BLINK 182 All The Small Things (MCA)
24. BECK Sexxlaws (DGC)
25. MOBY Bodyrock (V2)
26. TOM JONES & THE CARDIGANS Burning Down The House (Gut U.K.)
27. MARCY PLAYGROUND It's Saturday (Capitol)
28. LIMP BIZKIT Re-arranged (Interscope)
29. FUEL Sunburn (Epic/550 Music)
30. SAVE FERRIS Mistaken (Epic)
31. RED HOT CHILI PEPPERS Around The World (Warner Bros.)
32. THIRD EYE BLIND Anything (Elektra)
33. OUR LADY PEACE One Man Army (Columbia)
34. EURYTHMICS 17 Again (Arista)
35. BEASTIE BOYS Alive (Capitol)
36. RAGE AGAINST THE MACHINE Guerrilla Radio (Epic)
37. EDNA'S GOLDFISH Veronica Sawyer (Moon Ska)
38. SOULWAX Much Against Everyone's Advice (Almo)
39. BETH HART L..A. Song (Atlantic)
40. KORN Falling Away From Me (Epic)
41. MUSE Muscle Museum (Maverick)
42. STONE TEMPLE PILOTS Down (Atlantic)
43. NINE INCH NAILS We're In This Together (Nothing/Interscope)
44. EIFFEL 65 Blue (Republic)
45. OFFSPRING She's Got Issues (Columbia)
ADDS:
TORI AMOS Cornflake Girl (live) (Atlantic)
VERTICAL HORIZON Everything You Want (RCA)
BETH HART L.A. Song (Atlantic)