Rolling Stone has updated their list of the 500 best songs. You might think the definitive music magazine would have a pretty good handle on the best music ever. But the last time Rolling Stone compiled the list in 2004, Hotel California was Number 49. Had 5 million more plays on Classic Rock radio made the editorial staff come to their senses this time around? As testament to advances in taste since the first list was compiled, Tears of a Clown didn't even make the 2004 cut. Can we at least agree that Bill Withers' 1971 classic is objectively better than Bob Dylan's Visions of Johanna, which rose from 404th place in 2004 to only 317th in 2021? Let's not be hasty. Ain't No Sunshine had fallen 29 spaces in the intervening years, from 280th place in the earlier ranking.
The top 10 alone reveals the loose nature of what is great according to the magazine. Hey Jude was 8th on the list in 2004. In 2021, at number 89, it's not even in the top 3 Beatles' songs. Two songs in the 2021 top 10 (Missy Elliott's Get Ur Freak On from 2001 and Fleetwood Mac's Dreams from 1977) existed in 2004 but appeared nowhere on the earlier list. In all, 49 slots in the new list were assumed by songs that were released after the original list was published; 207 songs from the original list were replaced by songs that already existed but were passed over the first time around. Both lists reinforce the prejudice of the elderly that the quite distant past is top heavy with greatness. While the newer list is slightly more relaxed about more recent songs, two decades later, the epicenter of greatness has shifted forward from 1971 only to 1977. Songs appear twice on both lists (e.g., both Bob Dylan and the Byrds' versions of Mr Tambourine Man appear on both the 2004 and the 2021 list) so it’s clear that the category the magazine is ranking is not actually composition but production.
Given the flux of the rankings, it's worth a ponder: are there 500 songs that belong on any list? Five hundred of anything is a lot; and a look at some of the titles that made one or the other of the lists (Tiny Dancer, Tears in Heaven, Kelly Clarkson's Since U Been Gone, a song called Springsteen by someone named Eric Church) strongly supports a notion that standards may have been overextended to pad things out. But looking for songs that didn't make the cut in either year (Nat King Cole's Route 66, Parliament's Knee Deep, Laurie Anderson's O Superman, Beethoven's Ode to Joy, the B-52's Give Me Back My Man) you quickly come to the realization that if you are going to take the idea seriously, there aren't enough places on a 500 place list for the greatest songs of all time.
Granting that the nature of the task is arbitrary, Rolling Stone has taken a canonical approach, updating their criteria to reflect tastes and advancements (and regressions) in the culture, taking care to pander to a variety of sensibilities while ensuring an appropriate diversity in representation of the artists and genres selected. The cumulative effect is one that could be expected from so prominent an institution: the cultivation of a conventional taste.
Number 1 this year is Aretha Franklin's Respect-- rising with a bullet from Number 4 in 2004. I've liked Respect and Aretha Franklin since I first heard the latter belting the former the very year that Rolling Stone was born. But I find myself bristling at the notion that the Number 1 Best Song of All Time is an actual thing. What makes a song the best? Surely it can't just be the one most people like or the one that has made the most money. Should it be the most technically and musically complex? Or should it be devastatingly simple? Should the lyrics be challenging, persuasive, poetic, novel or should they be immediate, already in your head? In my experience 'best' is an attribute that has no relevance to the impact a piece of music has in in my life. As a dabbler in song-making myself on occasion, the best of mine have a strong accidental element to their construction. If in some parallel universe one of my personal favorites were selected for the Rolling Stone list I don't know whether I'd recognize it as a personal artistic achievement or as something more akin to winning a lottery.
This summer, I confess I was wrapped up for a bit in the controversy over Sarah Brand's Red Dress. While most of the discussion around it centered around whether Brand, a Californian working on a Masters of Science in Sociology at Oxford was offering the unconventional tune sincerely or as bait in a cruel and twisted experiment, I was easily won over by the confident originality of it. I enjoyed the challenge of the listen and found Brand's microtonal performance hitting my ears like honey. More than once it has infected my brain and inspired me to cogitate on its theme of society's resistance to irrepressible outsiderhood. It defies ranking, certainly by the likes of Rolling Stone. Is it a great song? In my book, maybe.
I realized today re-reading a couple of emails that I seem to have developed severe OCD of the mouth when it comes to business communications. My sentences seem to end with the assumption that the reader has already forgotten how they started, so I keep repeating words—I shun pronouns and substitutions. This is a bit extreme but it’s something like this: Instead of saying “Skippy asked me to bring the book I borrowed from him when I come to visit.” I say something like “Skippy asked me to bring the book that I borrowed from Skippy in the past which is currently at my house, so that when I next come to visit the house that Skippy asked me to visit I also bring Skippy’s book to it, it being the house that belongs to Skippy also that he asked me to visit and I said yes to, i.e., to the visiting question, and I also said yes to the bringing of Skippy’s book when I come to visit question as well. Thank you.”
This is yet another example of my dwindling faith in and growing questioning of the givens of social interaction (along with my increasing uncertainty about a growing list of many other previously assumed pillars of reality: the weather, politics, entertainment, science). The manifestation of the corrosion of my faith in sacreds and standards is not necessarily always going to be conscious, but on the contrary is more likely these days to be an unconscious organic outgrowth of a crumbled foundation. To take spelling for instance: once upon a time I was a paragon of the art. Now I find my writing is prone with errors. I make mistakes of speed and carelessness like everybody, but more and more it's an excess of care and attention that's the culprit. It's not that I don't know how to spell a word, but that I find myself second-guessing, and third and fourth and even fifth guessing, and all too frequently as I discover only in retrospect coming down on the wrong side again and again.
It's not as if I'm wrong about the arbitrary nature of orthography and grammar. In the absence of an authority in whom to place your trust, how do you decide what's right? I blame authority for my crumbling trust in authority.
By the way, in case I didn't make clear, in my example above, the "he" in the second sentence refers to Skippy. Not to Truman Capote.
I've developed a habit of watching a daily youtube vlog in which the proprietor solves the day's New York Times crossword puzzle. Puzzles debut, courtesy of the app that provides them on my phone, the eve of the day they are dated, so I have done them by the time I watch the vlog. For me it's painless therapy in a way to watch someone else struggle with a theme or with the idiosyncrasies of a puzzle constructor's clues when my struggle is behind me. Sometimes it's akin to group therapy for post traumatic stress disorder. The host of the vlog is a slightly faster solver than I am, especially considering he is talking his way through each clue and publicly exposing his strengths and weaknesses to a variously indifferent group of strangers. He's a much younger fellow, an expatriate who lives in London and I've observed that he has expertise in areas that I lack and vice versa. Popular culture references that I require every cross for fly off his fingers. On the other hand, he was flummoxed recently by how a "Latin American spread" could be a "HACIENDA." He had heard of a hacienda, but "spread" to his way of thinking had nothing at all to do with it; and I admit when he passed up "_ACIENDA" for the 5th time refusing to throw down an H in the blank until he was sure it could be nothing else, I was yelling at my screen. It wasn't until the next day, when he shared a youtube comment someone had posted on the prior day's video explaining the sense that the constructor intended for "spread"-- a sprawling farm or estate-- that he half-heartedly accepted the legitimacy of the clue, although he insisted the usage was in his experience expiring. This was news to me.
Cogitating a bit on the difference in our perceptions of this sense of "spread", I developed a theory about why the word might have struck a millennial as out-of-date. Could it have anything to do with the way that student debt has meant that many of his generation are not purchasing homes until much later if at all? For my generation, by the time we were his age (I assume he's in his early to mid 30's), many more of us were homeowners*. Many of us had probably ironically referred to our dwellings as "spreads" taking a post modern cue from our parents for whom the concept was familiar from the formerly more ubiquitous genre of the Western, and from whom we'd already overheard the joke when we were youngsters. Had his generation not been paying attention at their parents' boring get togethers with other parents or, had they, simply by having no opportunity to wield it, let the usage atrophy?
Hours later, I myself encountered a word I'd never heard in a passage from Naomi Klein's 2007 paradigm changer, The Shock Doctrine:
Ajay Kapur, the former head of Citigroup Smith Barney’s global equity strategy group in New York, encourages his clients to invest in his "Plutonomy basket" of stocks, featuring companies like Bulgari, Porsche, Four Seasons and Sotheby’s. "If plutonomy continues, which we think it will, if income inequality is allowed to persist and widen, the plutonomy basket should continue to do very well."
Kapur and colleagues revived an obscure word coined in the Gilded Age of the late nineteenth century, 'plutonomy', for use in a number of bullish reports for upmarket investors circa 2005, highlighting the novelty of the weird effects of unfettered growth in wealth at the very top in contrast to the very bound and constricting prevailing conventions of economy so familiar to the rest of us down here in the trickle down gutter. One massive financial meltdown later-- that as usual came out of the hides of everyone but the culprits whose amoral greed made it happen-- and the word fell out of favor. Those papers have been disappeared from the web, but not before they could be recapped by John Sidor at Leadership Thoughts Blog. The Shock Doctrine for those who may be unfamiliar tells the story of how this lopsided distribution of the planet's wealth wound up in one very small corner of the population-- it was essentially through years of violent application of a particularly religious ideology, the fundamentalist sect of neoliberalism whose pope was Milton Friedman. Folks of my generation may remember the kindly old elf of capitalism from his Nobel Prize in Economics (the annual vanity prize that economists award to themselves to try to persist the notion that they are actually contributing something valuable to human knowledge) which seemed to entitle him to a best selling book and PBS series, Free to Choose, in which he pimped the free market to an America as yet reverberating ever more faintly with the more equitable Keynesian effects of FDR's New Deal. They may not recall how he cut his teeth advising Chile's General Augusto Pinochet on how to combine the brutality of a regime wrested in a violent coup (with the participation of the CIA at the formerly secret urging of Henry "Dr. Kissinger" Kissinger on behalf of Richard Nixon) from the popular and popularly elected socialist Salvador Allende in 1973 with a particularly brutal austerity that ravaged what had been a democratizing Chile for nearly 2 decades. For Chileans who had wanted Allende and not a Generalissimo, it was hell; for Friedman it was an experiment, and to his mind, a successful one.
Closer to home, Friedman fucked with the rest of us thanks to the aggressive ascension of true believers and useful idiots of both parties, from Reagan, through Clinton, the Bushes and beyond. With the collapse of the Soviet Union, the painful implementation of neoliberal capitalism across the globe including in the last remaining communist superpower China, and the defeat of organized labor in the US, free market capitalism was declared the victor, and history was declared to be over. After 50 solid years of living under this theocracy, I've decided that caring that people get what they need even if they are poor† is for chumps. Also that I'm a chump.
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| Wish I knew who to credit. Wish I'd thought of it. |
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* Mentally put scare quotes around the "owner" portion of that word.
† As an undergraduate in a large university at the dawn of the Reagan era, I knew an older fellow, a regular presence in the circle that revolved around a roommate who was vastly more social than me. Andrew was a bachelor and perpetual auditor of classes who made his living playing piano for the recitals and auditions of instrumentalists in the music school. While most of us were destined for other places (even though some of us like myself didn't know what we were doing and would never figure it out) he had been there for years and you could be certain would be there years longer, surely drifting in and out of whatever circle of cool people he found himself invited into. I'll never forget and have long wanted to work into a post a comment he uttered in frustration one day discussing his latest tribulations with some creditor or bureaucracy interrupting his pursuit of a well lived life to grub for money or to place a financial obstacle in front of a modest ambition. "They won't let you be poor," he said. He was right. They won't let you be poor. To be happily poor in this wretched age is the most beautiful and insane and doomed ambition.
