2022 Greatest Songs: Part 9 (49-1 Songs)

And in the end ...

*i'll probably have another post, where i list songs i didn't include because i forgot about them which should be on the list, but anyway, here are some good songs ...

And, ok, here is a google spreadsheet https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1HwDT9WUowYKrfr7M_47CaRJxQ18cq9-vklJXwKxhjb0/edit?usp=sharing

49          Crying - Roy Orbison

48          Great Balls of Fire - Jerry Lee Lewis

47          Somewhere - West Side Story 

46          Dancing On My Own - Robyn

45          Get Ur Freak On - Missy Elliott

44          Hallelujah - Jeff Buckley

43          What's Going On - Marvin Gaye

42          You Really Got Me - The Kinks

41          Biology - Girls Aloud

40          River Deep, Mountain High - Tina Turner

39          Johnny B. Goode - Chuck Berry

38          Yes - McAlmont & Butler

37          Don't Worry Baby - Beach Boys

This is my favourite Beach Boys song, and my favourite melody.

36          Alright - Kendrick Lamar

35          Move on Up - Curtis Mayfield

34          Hey Ya! - OutKast

33          Strange Fruit - Billie Holiday

32          A Day in the Life - The Beatles

31          God Only Knows - The Beach Boys

30          Good Times - Chic

29          Family Affair- Mary J Blige

Family Affair’s a perfect song, right? This is, next to Be My Baby, the best intro in popular music.

28          Send in the Clowns - Barbra Streisand/Frank Sinatra

27          Thunder Road - Bruce Springsteen

26          (Your Love Keeps Lifting Me) Higher And Higher - Jackie Wilson

25          Blowin' in The Wind - Bob Dylan

24          Someone to Watch Over Me - Ella Fitzgerald

23          From the Morning - Nick Drake

I don’t feel too silly putting From the Morning by Nick Drake this high up. It is, after all, the final track on the last studio album by Britain’s archetypal posthumously lauded cult artist. It does represent something. But, I should say, this song has, for consistently longer than anything else, been near the very top of my personal favourites. I’ve listed my own favourite songs four times on this blog, and From the Morning has always been in the Top 5, apart from in 2015, when, for some reason, I let it slip down to 21. Can’t think why.

I don’t care what is played at my own funeral, but From the Morning is the song I want to be listening to as the world ends. It is the song of a man who knows and who always knew, who gave the better of humanity its dignity, who could see the beauty even while the sadness took a grip of him. It is a pantheistic vision which helps me feel just a little bit better about the world. A day once dawned, and it was beautiful. Now we rise and we are everywhere. It is the idea of a song reduced to the barest bones, but still emerging hopeful and rewarding. It’s a song I never don’t want to listen to. Then the night she fell and the air was beautiful.

22          Redemption Song - Bob Marley

21          Paper Planes – MIA

I love the song Paper Planes by MIA – MIA’s first album was 18 years ago and there still isn’t another voice quite like hers. This song became massive and made her a global star because of a number of things, including its appearance in a major film. It is really an odd and distinct combination of elements, but I think the bit that really, really makes it, that just unsettles you and makes you smile at the same time is the “some-some-a-some I murder, some-some I let go”, liltingly and innocently sung in that very distinct west London accent, almost posh. To manage to do that, to make one song (MIA has lots of other great songs, but none quite so huge) that is completely sui generis and challenging, but is also a banger, that is what everyone should aspire to.

20          Crazy in Love - Beyonce ft JZ

19          A Change is Gonna Come - Sam Cooke

18          Like A Prayer - Madonna

17          Sitting on the Dock of the Bay - Otis Redding

16          Dancing Queen - ABBA

15          (Love is like a) Heat Wave - Martha Reeves & the Vandellas

14          We Can Work it Out - The Beatles

I know We Can Work It Out is not actually the best Beatles song, but the way it is truly McCartney and Lennon, links the early 60s and late 60s, is joyful and weird, frustrated and conciliatory, simple and complicated, this song explains them for me. Most people would say A Day in the Life is a more perfect synergy of the whole band … and maybe they’re right, but I just love the fact We Can Work It Out doesn’t stop, just hurries to its conclusion.

13          Smells Like Teen Spirit - Nirvana

12          Fight the Power - Public Enemy

11          Tutti Frutti - Little Richard

10          Wichita Lineman - Glen Campbell

9            Going Underground - The Jam

This whole blog 101songs has, from its outset in 2009, been one long attempt to put into words how much I love Going Underground. The feeling I got when I first heard it … you get that feeling not many times in a listening life. I know it is not actually a unique or innovative song, but because it did not start, proceed or end like anything I’d ever heard before when I first heard it in 1993, it still feels fundamental yet shocking to me. If great songs are either pop songs or protest songs, this is both. It is a greater pop song that it is a protest song, but its sound and its form and its urgency sounded to me like a protest from the start, and still does. The Jam were very big. They were three not wildly charismatic working-class kids from a small town, they were in their teens/early 20s, they had four Number 1s in two years, and might have dominated the UK charts throughout the 80s almost as much as the Beatles did in the 60s, if that’s what Weller had wanted and been able to put himself through. He still, clearly, had the songs in him, he just wanted to do it differently. If you’re from the USA, where Going Underground made no impact, fine, it may not be a great song, but here, in the context of what it sounds like, what it achieved, how much it hasn’t paled in the slightest, I think it is right to call it one of the greatest ever.

8            My Girl - The Temptations

When I was 13, My Girl was back in the charts because of the film of the same name, and I was singing it at my desk before an afternoon geography lesson, and a boy called Doug White turned round and told me to stop singing it, and I think, for over 20 years, I held that against the song and believed that meant it wasn’t such a great song, and it’s only really in the last decade I accepted it might have been my singing rather than My Girl itself that Doug didn’t like. Anyway, My Girl is just the most astonishingly good song, isn’t i? Like a combination of the best aspects of Good Vibrations and God Only Knows. It’s a beautiful fact that Smokey Robinson, Motown’s biggest star at the time, wrote it for David Ruffin’s voice, and even though Smokey knew how good it was after he’d written it and was tempted to keep it, still let it go to the Temptations. That’s like Paul Simon with Bridge Ove Troubled Water. The great writer/performer was true to what was best for their song, and so it’s the very best version of the song that exists. Which is not the version I sang in Geography in 1992.

7            Running Up that Hill (A Deal with God) - Kate Bush

6            Billie Jean - Michael Jackson

5            Like a Rolling Stone - Bob Dylan

4            Be My Baby - The Ronettes

3            All My Friends - LCD Soundsystem

This is, there and thereabouts, my own favourite song. It is also considered a great song, though perhaps not truly commercially successful enough to deserve this high placing. So. What can I say to justify it? That it is the Like a Rolling Stone of this century, but with a heart? Something like that.

It must have been tempting to make the music less basic, to do something other than one ongoing piano riff, gradually augmented, getting louder. So, it is a masterpiece of atmosphere, of dynamics, of sentiment. It starts where it starts, gets to where it gets, takes quite a long time, and you don’t want to miss a second.

In a sense, with that simplicity, with the emotional exorcism it contains, it’s rock and roll in its purest form.

It’s an old dude’s song, and I first heard it when I wasn’t really an old dude, but it made me want to be one.

2            Over the Rainbow - Judy Garland

Out with the old.

1            Doo Wop (That Thing) - Lauryn Hill

OK, let me talk, briefly, about the Greatest Song of All Time, which is Doo Wop (That Thing), by Lauryn Hill. It certainly helps its case that I love this song in my bones. It’s one of my favourite few songs in the world, and has been for a long time. I’ve loved it since I first heard it, in summer 1998.

There are many significant things about this song – debuted at US Number 1, first female rapper to do so, one of the first solo women to write and record Number 1 single, one of first debut singles to enter at Number 1, one of the youngest solo Number 1s etc etc. It is a landmark record. It is the first single from a landmark, acclaimed album. But I think this song is greater than the excellent album that it comes from.

It sets the agenda for 21^st century popular music, where black people and women both are seen not just as stars but as auteurs and geniuses. That was still quite rare before this song (my slight grouchiness at modern revisionism I’m sure comes across sometimes, but the fact is my education in rock and roll history very much said that, though everyone had recorded great songs, it was mainly white men that did great albums and were the driving brains behind great records, and it is clearly good that that has changed).

At the same time, it does not reject the past. It draws from the great history of song. It is both a nostalgic song and a futuristic song. It is polemical but kind and even-minded.

No one else in the history of pop music, not Bowie, not Beyonce, not Dylan or McCartney, had the full set of gifts Lauryn Hill had at her disposal right then. The rap is phenomenal, joyful, mind-bending. The singing is perfect. The production, the tune, the structure, the playing, everything.

It bridges every imaginable divide, even that between conservatism and liberalism. It is a song of limitless magnificence. It is, my friends, the Greatest Song of All Time.