Beardo Billy: His best look.
New York's Q104.3 has maintained their station branding for as long as we can remember despite a handful of format flips throughout the '90s. We fondly recall their early '90s format, when it was not uncommon to listen for two hours and hear two Pantera songs, two Alice In Chains songs, two Megadeth songs, and two Soundgarden songs. We were barely teenagers at the time, but we prefer continuing to guess that they didn't give one single fuck. Nirvana deep cuts were frequent, i.e. "Verse Chorus Verse" catching us offguard while getting ready for school and causing us to miss the bus 20 minutes later.
One would think this version of Q104.3 would be remembered for their breakers, although I'm now searching Google and no one has written about this. Throughout 1993, their most memorable breaker would follow this format:
"This is Q104.3 music".
(Cue 5 seconds of "Mother" by Danzig.)
"This is not."
(5 seconds of "I Would Do Anything For Love (But I Won't Do That).")
"This is Q104.3 music."
(5 seconds of "Sober" by Tool.)
"This... is... not."
(5 seconds of "I Will Always Love You.")
"This is Q104.3 music..."
(Here's where the DJ would play the next cued song in its entirety. In this instance, let's say it's "One" by Metallica. Sure, that works.)
A few times, we heard a version of this breaker where the announcement replaced "This... is... not." with "This sucks." The following spring, they shortened the breakers to be a little jokier. One of them announced "No ABBA," followed by 5 seconds of "The Sign" by Ace Of Base, "No Van Morrison," followed by 5 seconds of "Mr. Jones," etc. In case anyone hasn't noticed, we hugely miss the days when it was acceptable to publicly call out songs or artists that objectively or subjectively suck, which is a big part of the reason why we want Beavis and Butthead to re-pivot back to watching music videos. (For the record, we like "The Sign" and "Mr. Jones.")
This version of Q104.3 flipped to classic rock by the end of 1995, signalling the beginning of the end of NYC radio's final golden era (alongside the peak years of Hot 97, Z100, WNEW, and Long Island's WLIR). Within the next year, K-Rock seized the rock-block void, flipping to an alternative format, kicked off by Howard Stern himself spinning their first song, "Sweet Dreams" by Marilyn Manson. And like many new commercial stations from this era, they were at their most exciting within the first two years, before market research and pressure from advertisers determined how they should narrow their playlists.
As it currently exists in 2020, the classic rock version of Q104.3 definitely maintains a vibe that still feels derivative of NYC radio's final golden era. It's a lot more human sounding and less robotic than 90% of modern commercial radio.
And for whatever reason, they've kept up with their 20-year Thanksgiving weekend tradition of playing through their top 1043 songs of all time, which are (allegedly) chosen by their listeners, although they would need to accumulate a lot of votes to break 1000 songs every year.
We heard a decent amount of the top 70 while driving around, running errands, and searching for parking on the Sunday after Thanksgiving, and we definitely notice a handful of similarities and differences from the classic rock countdowns we heard during the 90s.
We started to wonder. Why do boomers still love these songs? And why are so many of the most beloved boomer jams so fucking long?
For whatever reason, many of the songs that boomers consider "the best of the best" are actually two songs, or two-part songs.
- The number one song every year is "Stairway To Heaven," which is basically two songs.
- "Hey Jude" is also pretty much two songs, since the long coda is basically its own separate song.
- "Free Bird" has a long guitar solo that is basically another song attached at the end.
- "Layla" is two songs.
- Good job Elton John for outright designating "Funeral For A Friend/Love Lies Bleeding" as two separate songs. We're not making this shit up. This is real and very strange phenomenon.
- "Sgt Pepper (Reprise)/A Day In The Life." This is also two songs.
- "I'm Your Captain/Closer To Home" is two songs.
- "Nights In White Satin" has that spoken word thing at the end.
- "Time" has the "Breathe (Reprise)" thing at the end.
- "Eruption/You Really Got Me."
- "We Will Rock You/We Are The Champions."
- "Scenes From An Italian Restaurant" is half of a song, followed by another complete song, followed by the second half of the song that appears at the beginning.
- "Shine On You Crazy Diamond" is at least three songs (depending on what album it's played from), and same goes for "Paradise By The Dashboard Light."
- "Suite: Judy Blue Eyes" is four songs.
There's an intriguing element of anticipation listening through a countdown with so many long songs. Depending on the placements, it could take an hour and a half to get through 10 songs, which could be annoying but it's also kind of cool in its own way. And the anticipation in these types of lists is a big part of why we love countdown shows. That said, it would be cool if "Marquee Moon" or "Sister Ray" might show up on occasion. If only the boomers knew...
We forget why we wanted to blog about this. Oh right, the analytics. We were wondering how some artists' and songs' placements have changed over time. We feel like Billy Joel's MSG residency shows may have helped increased his placements. Billy Joel's hits and deep cuts placed a LOT better than we expected. Like, we never knew the live version of "Miami 2017" was that popular.
We'd also be willing to wager that "Wake Me When September Ends" is the most recent song that appeared in 2020, which is very unfortunate. We'll figure this out later.
All 20 years of their top 1043 countdown are available to browse here: https://q1043.iheart.com/featured/top-1043-songs-of-all-time/
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