Numbers

According to Rolling Stone Magazine, The Eagles' Hotel California is the 311th best song of all time.  That makes it almost but not quite as good as Bill Withers' Ain't No Sunshine (#309) but 2 better than Smokey Robinson and the Miracles' Tears of a Clown (#313).  

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.  

Pandering to conventional taste, performatively diversifying while remaining true to the soft rock core on which the institution was built, Rolling Stone presents the list for discussion, in the process padding their content and most importantly generating clicks and selling magazines.  While the list abounds in examples of excellence and includes many of my favorites,  I would say exclusion from it gains a deserving song extra cachet.