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Rate-A-Record: What Score Would You Give These Two Songs?
A Plethora of Pop Series
Given the number of times I’ve hit Terry Barr with a music challenge/prompt over the past year, it’s only fair that he would return the favor with a unique vengeance. He reached way back to the days before YouTube and MTV to a time when the only rock music you saw on TV was Dick Clark’s American Bandstand and resurrected a feature called Rate-A-Record. Rate-A-Record was not complicated; a panel of teens would listen to part of two songs and then rate each one on a numeric scale between 35 and 98 (don’t ask where the number range came from; no one knows).
The segment spawned classic quotes like “it’s got a great beat” and “you can dance to it.” Below is a video of one such Rate-A-Record segment from 1964.
Terry took the same premise but expanded it beyond just a snippet of each song. Following his lead, below I give you two songs that are probably unfamiliar to most here. Give each one a listen and then rate them in the comments.
