Karen Carpenter, a singer capable of great nuance and empathy and sadness, gets absolutely no space to show what she can do on “Please Mr.

But they’d never done less with their source material than they did on “Please Mr.

Postman.” They’d even devoted an entire side of their 1973 album Now & Then to new versions of oldies, strung together by a fake old-timey radio DJ. The Carpenters had recorded plenty of covers before “Please Mr. After all, background music was what the Carpenters did. It forced its way into your brain, refusing to become background music.īut that’s how the Carpenters treated it. Postman” had been powered by an adrenaline-charged yelp. And as for the song itself, the original “Please Mr. When heard in context, this was not a simple starry-eyed teenage-longing song. Postman,” and a decade later, he made What’s Going On. Marvin Gaye had played drums on the original “Please Mr. It must’ve made for a real symbolic victory: A black-owned label - one staffed with black singers and songwriters and session musicians - crossing over to white audiences enough to take that top spot. That means that it marked the beginning of a sea change within popular music. Postman,” from 1961, was the first Motown single to hit #1. Postman” was just pure numbing airlessness - a childish callback to what must’ve felt like simpler times. So the success of the Elton John version had something to do with the bittersweet lost promise of the Beatles era, which must’ve still felt like an open wound in 1975. “Lucy In The Sky With Diamonds” was a call-back to the only-just-dead psychedelic era, and Elton John got actual Beatle John Lennon to sing and play guitar on his cover. They got over on pure nostalgia, on no merit of their own. In both cases, the 1975 covers added absolutely nothing to the originals. Postman” as being Beatles covers, since the Beatles had done “Please Mr. Postman.” (In between those two songs, Barry Manilow hit #1 with “ Mandy,” a cover of a not-iconic song from 1971.) In fact, it’s possible to think of both “Lucy In The Sky With Diamonds” and “Please Mr. Two of the first three #1 hits from 1975 were covers of iconic ’60s songs: Elton John doing the Beatles’ “ Lucy In The Sky With Diamonds” and the Carpenters doing the Marvelettes’ “ Please Mr. (We had a #1 hit from the fucking Jonas Brothers this year.) But nostalgia has never been stronger in pop music than it was at the beginning of 1975. Nostalgia has always been a force in pop music, and it probably always will be.

And it’s also funny when you think about how the kids of the ’70s were absolutely not defending themselves against the ’60s. “The kids of today should defend themselves against the ’70s.” That was Eddie Vedder, singing on Mike Watt’s 1995 song “Against The ’70s.” The problem, as Watt and Vedder saw it, was that the ’90s were drowned in a certain sort of ’70s nostalgia that was choking off the power of the era’s youth culture: “It’s not reality / Just someone else’s sentimentality.” It’s funny to think of that song now, when we’ve been living with ’90s nostalgia for as long as we have. In The Number Ones, I’m reviewing every single #1 single in the history of the Billboard Hot 100, starting with the chart’s beginning, in 1958, and working my way up into the present.

Carpenters please mister postman