You may not know the name Joel Whitburn, but you should. Like most music fans, he's a bit obsessive — collecting records, poring over the liner notes and making categories and lists. But, Joel veers off into a sort of statistician field of dreams. He began to compile the data from Billboard music charts — and later, video charts, which we'll get to in a moment — and decided to publish the results. Whitburn's company, Record Research, has been doing exactly that since 1970 — compiling and publishing over 100 books that are essentially the quantitative history of popular music. (And in a very bad-ass aside, Whitburn also has a record collection that includes every song that hit the Billboard Top 100 dating back to 1936, every charted pop album back to 1945 and pretty much everything else. Except, maybe, that new Fuck Buttons album everyone seems to dig.)
This leads us to something called The Whitburn Project, in which similarly obsessive stat hounds decided to start sharing this data online through insanely detailed spreadsheets. It's all sort of underground and requires a fairly high level of geekitude to get the data. And, as Waxy.org points out in their story that shone a light on this project, it's all surely in violation of several copyrights so please note that I'm not encouraging you to hunt it down and distribute. And I don't say that just to cover my ass. It's for your own safety and sanity. This is the holy grail for music obsessives: Once you look, you may never look away.
This, finally, leads to the point of this already too long post: Grabb.it TV.
The brave souls from Grabb.it used the data as a basis for a site that features The Weekly MTV Top 20 Music Videos dating back from MTV's launch in 1981 up through the launch of Napster in 1998. It's a time capsule. An instant look into the music video zeitgeist of any week during the prime MTV age. Take a look back at the Top 20 MTV Videos for this week 20 years ago. We 're talking George Michael "One More Try" at #1, Samantha Fox "Naughty Girls" at #5. We have the slow fading of 80s pop from the likes of Rick Astley, Debbie Gibson and Belinda Carlile contrasted with the appearance of hair metal pop like Poison and Lita Ford. And, we have Pebbles. And Al B. Sure. And trust me: Most weeks are just as dizzying as this one.
Grabb.it TV has embedded YouTube links of it all, broken down by week with accompanying news headlines culled from Wikipedia. The interface is a a pull-down menu of each year and then a corresponding timeline that goes from Week 1 to Week 52. It's all pretty intuitive and guaranteed to eat into your productivity. Be careful.
--> Visit Grabb.tv/TV for videos videos videos (all YouTube)...
