Damn, how'd I miss this?

Barely two days after my 10th high-school reunion, Pandagon's Amanda Marcotte (who graduated from high school the same year as me -- you learn something new every day), brought up this interesting little exercise from A Small Victory:

. . . go to Music Outfitters, type the year of your high school graduation into the search function, select the top 100 most popular songs, cut and paste it onto your blog and then bold the ones you like, strike out the ones you hate, and leave alone the ones you don't care about or don't know.

I was gonna totally do this, but then I found out Amanda was also a fellow 1995 graduate, and it was almost kind of eerie how much her list resembled mine (or what mine would've been), with some notable exceptions:

· I didn't hate "Gangsta's Paradise." I pretty much only tolerated it, but I didn't hate it.
· I actually kind of liked "This is How We Do It," but possibly only because I remember that song having been played at my senior prom, and that prom is one of the few positive memories I have of the girl I was going out with at the time, so . . . you take what you can get, I suppose.
· I also remember liking that "You Gotta Be" song by Des'Ree, though it got old quick.
· I liked the Annie Lennox song and was OK with the U2 song from "Batman Whatevers" -- which cannot be said for pretty much anything else associated with that movie.
· And the Pretenders song at #95, while certainly not among their best, is still pretty decent. Chrissie Hynde farting into a microphone would've probably been better than 90 percent of what passed for pop music that year.

Which brings me, I guess, to the same conclusion Amanda had: Pop music sucked in 1995. I guess it's not much of a coincidence that that's about the same point at which I stopped listening to the radio almost entirely, other than NPR and sports talk. Oh, and the '80s station that popped up in Atlanta a few years ago.

But the other conclusion is -- the previous conclusion notwithstanding -- that I'm apparently still somewhat more lenient toward shitty music than Amanda is. Though anyone who's endured my Friday Random Tens over the past few months probably knew that.