What constitutes a "hit" in your mind?

[payn]

There are times that I legitimately don't recognize songs from vinyl that I actually owned.

I’ve so much vinyl I forget what I have

 

[MGibster]

I lived through 80s pop music so I most certainly agree with this. But that perspective adds a point to - to find a 'hit that's good' you need hindsight. Folks who think of all the cool music of the 80s these days are remembering the good hits. Not all the junk that was the vast majority of it in between those few gems. A few times I've listened to collections of 'actual 60s music' and not the remembered gems and it's the same for "boomer music" - for every classic we remember there was a pile of absolute junk that rose to the top of the charts for a bit and then was quickly forgotten.

I came to a similar conclusion when my wife got satellite radio for her car. They'll play the top 40 songs from, let's say 1987, and quite a few of them just sound like generic 80s music we'd hear in the background of a movie. Like I don't remember the song at all despite it being in the top 40 for a few weeks.

 

[Ryujin]

I’ve so much vinyl I forget what I have

I had something like 250 albums and EPs, dating from the '60s through the '90s, but got rid of them a couple of years back.

Except for the two 78s that I had, ; Heartbreak Hotel and All Shook Up. They were my father's and my sister felt entitled to them, as daddy's girl, so she swiped them out of my collection.

 

[Whizbang Dustyboots]

This is literally what I thought the thread was about. Doesn't @darjr have a thread about misunderstanding thread titles? Welp. This is my entry haha.

That's the other thread.

 

[Kichwas]

Young men, of all generations, and all eras, suck. Gen Z women are just smart enough to talk about it in public, rather than suffering alone.

I always found the whole Incel claim that blames women for 'blocking them' or claims they aren't attractive to women to be patently absurd.

Granted when I was a young guy I was a bit of a looker and most of my high school friends were female (took me a few years into adulthood for some of them to fess up that they'd been trying to get my clueless attention...). I've always found women friendly, but not just to me.

After all I also was a gamer and had several gamer friends who through either bad luck or bad habit looked like they'd lost a fight with a train or smelled like they were hosting their own zombie apocalypse inside their drawers... and these guys, back in the genX days, had no trouble finding women to talk to or date.

"Somehow" while the guys I would game with looked and in one case also smelled like the poster boys of an Incel advert or a 'loser gamer geek' meme, they had winning personalities. I think half of that "somehow" was growing up before the Internet went public, and the other half was having good parents to teach them how to behave around women.

The whole "Incel culture" is a self inflicted wound, driven by social media nutcases.

I'm not so sure GenZ women are talking about it more just because. More that they're dealing with a bunch of self-harming men who have "abandoned the field" on the orders of the people they follow parasocially.

 

[Clint_L]

For me it's popularity, measured in sales, streams, buzz, and so on. Whether or not I like it is irrelevant, as is critical consensus. All of the Billboard Hot 100 #1s have to be considered hits, even though their quality varies wildly.

As previously mentioned, something can be a hit within its niche, as well, but only with that qualifier attached. So you wouldn't call the #1 polka song of 2013 a "hit" unless you were clearly specifiying "among polka fans, meaning sales are measured in hundreds rather than hundreds of thousands."