I like that song, weretable. It didn't seem weird to me. And Neneh was teh hawt. Seems like a recipe for popularity to me.

Well, I LIKE it. But it seemed strange for top 40 radio. *shrugs*

I always liked that one too. But it did seem like a popanomaly. I love it when pop gets weird. It gives me hope that something as stoic as pop charts can be pushed and changed a bit.

Kraftwerk's "Autobahn" comes to mind.

popanomaly = excellent, useful coinage.

The ones that come to mind for me are the ones that usually are the front of a wave. I was ASTONISHED that Smells Like Teen Spirit was a hit. Same goes for those early Green Day number ones.

I mean, yeah, things like punk rock were a reflection of the stuff that was happening in popular music, but these days, including when Nirvana broke, the same machine that made people think they liked Michael Bolton told them they liked Nirvana. Why did the machine do that? I am confused by the machine on occasion.

And then, when things that I expect to be marginalized, like, I dunno, Franz Ferdinand, start getting air time on the Q, I am usually a little weirded out.

But then, I can't stand commercial radio, and haven't listened to it since I left Windsor in 1980 (near the end of the golden era of DEEEtroit radio).

Anything by Ashlee Simpson or Christina Aquilera should not be popular.

What's a radio?

KLF's Justified and Ancient.
(Hail Eris!)

certainly lots of Beatles, like "Strawberry Fields".
Tiny Tim's "Tiptoe through the Tulips"
Devo's "Whip It"
Procal Harum's "Whiter Shade of Pale"
Iron Butterfly's "In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida"

Lot's of 60s stuff that probably seems tame now, but at the time was maybe pretty out there. Certainly before my time though, so I can't say for sure.

Musical Youth's "Pass the Dutchie"
Village People's "YMCA"
(I understand why these last two were popular - cuz they were catchy, but pretty subversive)

The JCB song.

Which I love. It's a modern folk song, the guy has a totally English folk singer's voice.

A massive hit in the UK, although it shouldn't have been, based on what's usually in the charts here.

Schnappi, in which a little girl sings about her pet crocodile. What the hell is wrong with Germany?

Ich Bin Schnappi das kleine krokodil. Totally rockin' song. What's wrong with the UK? I didn't even hear it until a few months ago!

No popular song ever stuck out like an infected thumb on Top 40 radio more than Roger Whitaker's "The Last Farewell". Really.

the stone roses.

What's a radio?
Yeah, I heard that fucking crazy frog song one day on the radio, reached over and turned it off and it hasn't been back on since. Something that used to be my best friend has turned septic and had to be cut off.

Basically, anything created in a year that starts with 2 should never be popular, I think.

I'm with essexjan, "The JCB Song" is totally apposite to what you expect on the radio these days.

(Assuming the definition is not "What is crap that people should not like" -- I mean, I certainly get why nu-metal and such is popular)

Damien Rice's O is, of course, most excellent and therefore its success is fully justified -- I'm simply baffled at how it found a place in the charts. It isn't folk, it isn't rock, it isn't really pop.

Win Butler (Arcade Fire singer) says in the intro to his cover of the Magnetic Fields' "Born on a Train" that he was "working at a shoe store in Boston, and this came on the radio, and I just thought What the hell is that? and kept asking them to play it". I managed to come to AF just before the moment when everyone began hearing about them, and I have a bit of the same opinion -- how the heck this incredible album became popular, I don't know, but I'm not arguing.