Everything is good now.
149 Cannonball - The Breeders
148 Dry the Rain
- The Beta Band
147 Mannish Boy
- Muddy Waters
146 Can't Get
You Out of My Head - Kylie Minogue
145 Strawberry
Fields Forever - Beatles
144 Have
Yourself a Merry Little Christmas - Judy Garland
143 Mmmbop -
Hanson
142 Hound Dog -
Big Mama Thornton
141 Umbrella -
Rihanna
140 Suite: Judy
Blue Eyes - Crosby Stills Nash
139 I’m Waiting
For The Man - The Velvet Underground
138 Heart Of
Glass - Blondie
137 This Land is
Your Land - Woody Guthrie
136 Heroes -
David Bowie
135 Runaway -
Kanye West
134 Buffalo
Stance - Neneh Cherry
133 Pressure
Drop - Toots and the Maytals
132 Who Knows
Where the Time Goes - Fairport Convention
131 Stormy
Weather - Billie Holiday
130 I See a
Darkness - Bonnie "Prince" Billy
129 The Only
Living Boy in New York - Simon and Garfunkel
128 Ever Fallen
in Love - The Buzzcocks
127 Stan -
Eminem
126 Stand By Me
- Ben E. King
125 The Trapeze
Swinger - Iron and Wine
124 Losing You -
Solange
123 Maps - Yeah
Yeah Yeahs
122 Once in a
Lifetime - Talking Heads
121 Roll Over
Beethoven - Chuck Berry
120 Blitzkrieg
Bop - The Ramones
119 Wonderful
World - Sam Cooke
118 America -
Simon and Garfunkel
117 The Street
Where You Live - Nat King Cole
116 Young Hearts
Run Free - Candi Staton
I heard Young Hearts Run Free last summer at the
fairground. You know what the sound of fairgrounds is – loud and banging and
brutal. A lot of the songs they play are worst-case scenario, but then, when me
and the kid were on the dodgems, they were playing Young Hearts Run Free by
Candi Staton, and I thought “this is a different level”. It’s really a great
song, I think it’s underrated. Of course, it’s a disco banger, but it’s got a
real poignancy and maturity to the lyrics, and Candi Staton is one of the great
singers. I had a Candi Staton collection years ago, her singing songs like In
the Ghetto and Stand By Your Man, and they were SOOO much better than the more
famous versions.
They talk about sad bangers these days, don’t they, with
Dancing On My Own being a classic example, but Young Hearts Run Free is a
pretty definitive original sad banger.
115 Glory Box -
Portishead
114 Waitin' for
a Superman - The Flaming Lips
I think one of the greatest, most underrated “moments” in
popular music, was the turn-of-the-century Americana centred on the production
of Dave Fridmann. Over a three or four year period, there were a number of
stunning songs and beautiful albums, a distinct sound that drew from the past
and influenced the future, a prophetic understanding of the century to come
that stands the test of the time and is not seen that much elsewhere. Not all
the productions were Fridmann’s – he did Mercury Rev, Sparklehorse, Flaming Lips,
not to mention the Delgados, Mogwai, Low and Sleater-Kinney, but also we’re
talking Grandaddy’s The Sophtware Slump and a couple of Wilco albums, amongst
other things.
I went off Flaming Lips later, for a while, but, of all
of it, I think the definitive song is their ‘Waiting for a Superman’, a song so
beautiful and increasingly sad it’s hard to shake. Somehow, it seems to hint at
this cultural century’s growing superhero obsession which now dwarfs all else,
as if, as a culture, we have handed ourselves over to the idea that some
all-powerful being might come and save us from ourselves, but it was always
just too heavy.
113 I Want You
Back - Jackson 5
112 There She
Goes - The La's
111 The Rat -
The Walkmen
110 In Between
Days - The Cure
109 It's a Sin -
Pet Shop Boys
108 The Mercy
Seat - Johnny Cash/Nick Cave
107 Genius of
Love - The Tom Tom Girls
106 The Weight -
The Band
105 In the Still
of the Night - The Five Satins
104 Blueberry
Hill - Fats Domino
103 Cheek to
Cheek - Fred Astaire
102 Maria (West
Side Story)
101 Crazy -
Patsy Cline
100 Every Time
We Say Goodbye - Ella Fitzgerald
99 Suspicious
Minds - Elvis Presley
98 Hard to
Handle - Otis Redding
97 Gimme
Shelter - Rolling Stones
96 Penny Lane
- Beatles
95 Born to Run
- Bruce Springsteen
94 You've Got
a Friend - Carole King/James Taylor
93 Respect -
Aretha Franklin
In 2021, when Rolling Stone magazine updated their Top
500 songs of all time, Respect by Aretha Franklin had moved up to Number 1,
which seemed like a solid enough choice, although, in a way, I’ve never really
been able to hear Respect as intended. I’m sure I first heard it in 80s
adverts, or in parodies, or bad covers, or on soundtracks, and so I just never
had the moment of being excited, or inspired, by it.
When I first heard Franklin singing Think, which will
have been when I was 17, it did for me what Respect did for other people, and
I’ve always much preferred it as a song. Respect came first, and is the more
dominant song, has the greater back story, has more to hook on to, of course.
It’s interesting to think about how much our early encounters with a song drain
it of its impact. I think ‘Satisfaction’ was another one, I think it was on a
Marathon advert – if we don’t realise things are meant to be classic songs, it
can take us by surprise when we find out that they are.
92 Palante -
Hurray for the Riff-Raff
91 Jolene -
Dolly Parton
90 Mercy Mercy
Me - Marvin Gaye
Songs that suffer on these kind of lists are ones that
are on a truly great, consistent album. All the songs on Blue are 9 out of 10
or above. A Case of You seems to be the one that mainly gets picked out, but
River, Carey, The Last Time I Saw Richard, Little Green … if those had been the
standout tracks on mediocre albums, they’d be listed as all-time classics too.
It’s easy for people to pick on Both Sides, Now as a great Joni Mitchell song
because it’s so much more noteworthy than everything else on Clouds.
I noticed this in Rolling Stone’s recent revised Greatest
500 songs of all time, where this happened a lot. What’s Going On was in the
Top 10, and Mercy Mercy Me, from the same album, was nowhere to be seen …
… some songs stand out from albums, and that’s a good
thing, but sometimes artists make a great album and they don’t want anything to
stand out from it. Mercy Mercy Me is a companion to What's Going On, but they're still both so perfect in their own right.
89 Life on
Mars? - David Bowie
88 Sabotage -
Beastie Boys
87 Why Do
Fools Fall In Love? - Frankie Lymon and the Teenagers
86 Ol' Man
River - Paul Robeson
85 Let's Stay
Together - Al Green
84 Take It
With Me - Tom Waits
It’s funny to me that I hadn’t heard Take It With Me when
I made the list in 2014. In some ways, that’s the best possible indicator of
how perennially incomplete this process is.
Hadn’t heard it at all, though I deemed myself, to some
extent, a Tom Waits fan. This is my favourite Tom Waits song now, and one of
the loveliest songs you will ever hear. People in the know will have it at
their wedding or their funeral, for sure. Is this the closest we get to Tom’s ”actual”
singing voice? Does that matter? He writes a lot of songs full of love and
empathy, it just often seems like it’s disguised. This song is a standard in
waiting. Sinatra would do it and turn it into a hit in bygone days.
83 Summertime
- Ella Fitzgerald
82 Oh Boy -
Buddy Holly
81 Groove is
in the Heart - Deee-Lite
It's funny that Groove is in the Heart tied with Number 1
in 1990 with Steve Miller Band’s The Joker - I think I’ve always put them
together, even though they hardly sound the slightest bit similar. I’ve always
seen them as groovy sui generis one-offs.
Groove is in the Heart still sounds modern, sounds near
enough the cutting edge, so coherent for all the different elements, so joyful.
It’s a song that surprises you by being at the top of your most played songs
list, but it’ll just go anywhere and never let you down. Some of the very best
singles are done by artists who only manage the magic once, and it is, in a
way, the fact that they only managed it once that makes it so, like, every time
you choose to listen to the song, you’re plucking something beautiful out of
the ether that barely exists except within those four minutes. Then you forget
til you’re surprised again by its brilliance the next time.
80 Blind
Willie McTell - Bob Dylan
Blind Willie McTell has been my favourite Dylan song for
a few years, but that aside, I have to find a reason for its elevated placing. So
that reason I’m giving is that it represents “the whole story, not just the
presented story”. Dylan has always been ahead of the game when it comes to retrospectively
letting you know that the album and the songs that you first hear were not the
whole story.
Reissues, outtakes, rerecordings, are now big business,
but it has not always been thus. Everyone knows Dylan left a lot of his
greatest songs (and recordings) off albums, and Blind Willie McTell is the
greatest of those. So it is not just a magnificent song, it represents
something important in the developing story of popular music.
79 Green Light
– Lorde
It is interesting to me that, although music criticism
appears to have been democratised, & pop as opposed to rock music is dominant
critically and culturally, it continues to be tastemakers who, oxymoronically,
define what a great “pop” song is. What I mean – consider Dancing on My Own by
Robyn and Green Light by Lorde, feted as among the two greatest pop songs of
this century.
Pop songs they definitely are, you can’t call them
anything else. And yet, neither were actually all that popular. Dancing On My
Own did fine, but didn’t really crack the US chart at all (yes, I know, it’s
had enduring streaming popularity etc). Green Light was an active commercial
failure, the comeback single from a teen sensation who’d had a Number 1 from a
previous album, only making Number 20 or so in both the UK and US. Pop as they
are, it is still taste rather than commerce, primarily, that deems them great.
Which they are, of course. But “pop” is really hard to
pin down, even now.
78 Lean on Me
- Bill Withers
77 Blue Suede
Shoes - Carl Perkins/Elvis Presley
76 At Last -
Etta James
75 You've Lost
That Loving Feeling - The Righteous Brothers
74 I'm so
Lonesome I Could Cry - Hank Williams
73 Singin' in
the Rain - Gene Kelly
72 Superstition
- Stevie Wonder
71 Bills,
Bills, Bills - Destiny's Child
70 (Reach Out)
I'll Be There - The Four Tops
There’s a joyous 2019 documentary called ‘Hitsville: The
Making of Motown’, which does not let the bad vibes in. Berry Gordy and Smokey
Robinson are the masters of ceremony, and their 60 year friendship shines
through. But my favourite bit is when various talking heads are recalling the revue
shows the many Motown acts used to take part in, the friendly rivalry between
the Temptations and the Four Tops (the Temps and the Tops) to be the stars of
the bill, and Otis Williams, the last surviving original member of the
Temptations, is saying that he always felt his band had the upper hand, with
their slicker dance moves, but then says admiringly, “but Levi Stubbs was noooo
joke!” and it cuts to Stubbs, drenched in sweat, leading the Four Tops on
‘Reach Out I’ll Be There’, and really, it’s one of the best things you will
ever see. What a singer, what a song.
69 The Way You
Look Tonight - Fred Astaire
68 Good
Vibrations - The Beach Boys
67 He's
Misstra Know-it-all - Stevie Wonder
66 Being Alive
(Company)
65 White
Christmas - Bing Crosby
64 No
Surprises - Radiohead
63 Bridge Over
Troubled Water - Simon And Garfunkel
62 Waterloo
Sunset - The Kinks
61 Think -
Aretha Franklin
60 Who Do You
Love? - Bo Diddley
59 When the
Haar Rolls In - James Yorkston
Two extremely long songs to consider, both about water in the air – Purple
Rain by Prince, and When the Haar Rolls In by James Yorkston. Purple Rain is
Pitchfork’s Greatest Song of the 80s, and in Rolling Stone’s 10 Greatest Songs
of All Time. When the Haar Rolls In is a song with 41K views on youtube (which
is not very many, number fans), the title track to a 2008 album that hopefully
sold, at best, a few thousand copies.
When I made this list in 2014, WTHRI was, ridiculously,
in the Top 50, while Purple Rain was, ridiculously, nowhere to be seen. Yet,
though I can be sensible and pretend objectivity with lots of things, there is
no part of me that wants to, or even can, change that. What’s the point of my
gratuitously giving Purple Rain some solidly but not excessively high position,
when I think it’s a fake song, a robotic facsimile of a song. I leave WTHRI
high, because it represents the idea that there are objectively perfect songs
(even though we all have an idea of what that objectively perfect song is, and
I seem to be the only person for whom WTHRI is it), notwithstanding popness and
protestiness.
I have reacted the same way to Purple Rain, and nearly
all Prince songs, since I was a child. Like it was something that was in the
vicinity of what I could love but never what I could love. I think about, and
focus on, Prince, a lot, because he belongs in rarefied air, in modern
criticism, alongside Bowie, Kate Bush, Bjork, Beyonce, still the Beatles, Joni
Mitchell, Stevie Wonder … I’d say that’s pretty much it, where their genius,
their combination of fame and affection and acclaim is overwhelming and pretty much unchallengeable, and I get
it with all the others, indeed I fully embrace it with most, but with Prince, I
genuinely, despite myself, feel like it’s all a con. Weird, innit. So, the
point is … this is my list. It’ll never not be my list, as much as I’d like to
pretend it’s not. James Yorkston’s way better than Prince.
58 A Case Of
You - Joni Mitchell
57 Gimme Some
Lovin' - Spencer Davis Group
56 In
California - Joanna Newsom
55 Son Of A
Preacher Man - Dusty Springfield
54 The
Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll - Bob Dylan
53 Sweet Child
O' Mine - Guns 'N Roses
52 Both Sides
Now - Joni Mitchell
51 Yesterday
- Beatles
50 Moon River
- Audrey Hepburn
No comments:
Post a Comment