One person’s view: “This song is by turns sappy and creepy. It’s like a stalker’s theme song.” – Sheila @ Songfacts
The public’s view: 2.21 / 5.00
You may have heard of the Mandela Effect, which causes inaccurate memories to spread through the population and embed themselves in our culture. One example is the commonly held belief that Humphrey Bogart’s character in Casablanca urges a pianist to “Play it again, Sam.” If you watch the film closely, you will observe that Bogie never quite says those words. His actual line is: “Luke, I am your father.” Sam the pianist was very confused after being told this.
Today we’re going to discuss a related phenomenon of the human memory. A bleak musical event once washed over the United States and disrupted the lives of 200 million people, but then all of them immediately forgot that it had happened. This was a case of collective amnesia, the reverse of the Mandela Effect. Let’s call it the Kenny Nolan Effect.
I began investigating this incident a few years ago after perusing Billboard’s official list of the biggest hits of 1977. I was baffled by the presence of an unfamiliar record all the way up at #6 on the survey, ahead of such famous chart-toppers as “Dancing Queen” and “Hotel California”. Who in the wide world of hell was Kenny Nolan, and what was “I Like Dreamin’”? I had been immersed in pop music and the Billboard charts for nearly my entire life, and yet I did not recognize either the performer or the song. I was determined to find out why this massively successful hit single had completely escaped my notice.
My first instinct was to question Billboard’s data. Maybe this song didn’t really exist, and the magazine had added a fictitious entry to its year-end chart to trip up plagiarists? It was doubtful, however, that Billboard would have risked its reputation by putting a bogus tune all the way up in the top ten for an entire year. When mapmakers place copyright traps in their work, they add imperceptible features like extra squiggles in a river. Billboard listing Kenny Nolan at #6 for 1977 is the equivalent of the Rand McNally Road Atlas plopping a huge new city of 150,000 people onto the Arizona desert and calling it “Surprise”. It’s too absurd and outrageous to be a lie, so it has to be real. Plus, Wikipedia indicates that “I Like Dreamin’” was also a hit in Canada, South Africa, and New Zealand. I wouldn’t put it past Canada or South Africa to go along with a Billboard stunt, but the good people of New Zealand would never stand for such tomfoolery. Clearly, “I Like Dreamin’” was a real song that was popular at one time.
I thought of another possible explanation for why I didn’t recognize this record. Perhaps Kenny Nolan was an avant-garde auteur who gave his songs idiosyncratic titles that had nothing to do with their lyrics? If so, I might have heard “I Like Dreamin’” a hundred times without knowing what it was. However, I was forced to reject this hypothesis after listening to “I Like Dreamin’” on YouTube. The song was not something I recalled ever hearing, and there was nothing pretentious or misleading about its title. The very first line is “I like dreamin’”, and all of the verses are about why Kenny Nolan likes dreamin’. Gosh almighty, does he like dreamin’. If Nolan had wanted to make an unconventional artistic statement, he would have called this song “She Blinded Me with Science” or “Theme from ‘Rocky’”. He did not.
I finally concluded that I almost certainly had suffered many encounters with the song in 1977, but they had not left any lasting impression. “I Like Dreamin’” evaporates from the memory shortly after it is heard. It is like a Snapchat message that disappears upon being read, or a fart that can be smelled only once before dissipating. Even now, just a couple hours after playing “I Like Dreamin’” on YouTube a second time, I can hardly remember anything about it. I am evidently not the only one, as modern popular culture is devoid of any references to Kenny or his hit song. By unspoken agreement, all of society has decided to forget the sixth-biggest record of 1977 and the guy who made it. It is the Kenny Nolan Effect in action.
Now I am listening to the song again so that I can review it, and I have a revelation: “I Like Dreamin’” is mostly just an inferior version of Frankie Valli’s “My Eyes Adored You”. Both songs feature a dude pining for a woman, and they have musical similarities as well. To its credit, “My Eyes Adored You” is sentimental and has some sweetness to it. Valli’s character lived a good life, and his only regret is that he isn’t still with his childhood crush. By contrast, the narrator of “I Like Dreamin’” is pathetic. He keeps dreaming about someone who has either rejected him or who he is too afraid to approach. I get the impression that he sleeps with a blow-up doll and this woman’s photo is taped to the face. It’s depressing and a little gross.
“I Like Dreamin’” never wormed its way into our brains because the memory cells that it needed were already occupied by Frankie Valli’s hit. It’s the same reason why no one remembers Ernest Goes to Africa. That would require pushing Ernest Goes to Camp or Ernest Goes to Jail out of our heads, and we refuse to do it. Nonetheless, Nolan can’t be too upset about the situation. Guess who is listed as a co-writer of “My Eyes Adored You”? The Kenny Nolan Effect may have wiped away the legacy of his monster hit of 1977, but his finances are probably doing just fine.
My rating: 2 / 10
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