24 February 2012

#97: The Notorious B.I.G. - Juicy (Pete Rock Remix)



The Notorious B.I.G. - Juicy (Pete Rock Remix)
from the "Juicy" Single 12", 1994


There are rappers who had more technical acumen than Biggie Smalls, who put together more complex rhyme schemes and could speed up their raps into frantic tougne twisters. But no one ever rapped slow as well as Big did--giving us a chance to really hear every word, syllable and inflection, with a flow that sounded like water over the beat.

I didn't really listen to hip-hop in high school, and so I missed Ready to Die when it dropped, much to my detriment. While lots of rappers had spun stories of crime, coming up off the streets, and making it to the big time, no one had ever done it the way Big did--wrapping his life story in to his own experiences as a rap fan.* "Juicy" is remarkable not for the boasts or stories of excess (and the video, while brilliant on its own terms, does the glitz and glamour of a West Coast video somewhat clumsily), but because he grows up through hip-hop. For a guy's whose life was about as different from mine as possible, I feel like I knew exactly how he felt about his relationship with pop music the moment I first heard this song, because like me, he leaned on the experience of being a fan to get him through the worst of it.

And speaking of the worst of it, while I think that authenticity is a poor criteria for evaluating art, it's hard to deny that this line...

Born sinner, the opposite of a winner/
Remember when I used to eat sardines for dinner

...is the most poignantly bad-ass moment in hip-hop lyric history.

But if you really want to know what's so tremendous about this song, look no further than this video, where Pete Rock (who came up with the original beat) participates in a discussion panel about his work. Check out 37 seconds in, where Rock and all these other well-known producers start to groove on the beat. A line of hip-hop royalty, bobbing their heads uncontrollably, captured by the song. Anything so good that it makes the guy who made it lose his shit is worth your time.



Critics and the internet intelligencia are divided on the relative merits of the "original" mix versus the Pete Rock "remix" (although, as Pete tells it, the "remix" was actually his original demo for the track, while Puffy bit the sample--Mtume's "Juicy Friut" for the album version). I'm certainly not going to go to the mattresses for the remix, but I'm partial to the thump and snare of Pete's version. Puffy's is probably more true to the sample, but it also sounds vaguely dated to me--not in an especially bad way, but lush, in a very particular early 1990s way. Pete's drums are, as always, timeless, and mesh even more seamlessly with Big's delivery than original. And it just sounds more New York.

And if you don't know, now you know.

*Yes, I know "Juicy" isn't the first song tell this sort of story. KRS-One's 1993 banger "Outta Here" does something similar (and KRS's personal story is even more deeply connected with hip-hop than Biggie's because KRS helped to create the core sound and vocabulary of gangsta rap), and Common's "I Used to Love H.E.R." came out around the same time. But while both are great songs, neither really captures the joy of "Juicy"--the pure happiness of Big's story of turning hip-hop into a new life ("Birthdays was the worst days/now we drink champagne 'cause we thirsty").

-Brandon

22 February 2012

#97: The Stooges - Down On The Street



The Stooges - Down On The Street
from Fun House, 1970


I don't have much to say about this one, actually, so I'll keep it short; it's not tied to any specific memory or time and place. All I know is that it makes me so very happy when I put it on. Why? That riff, at home with the best of the dirty blues, and Iggy's vocals. He always sounded like a madman in those early days. Sure, there are other places where he sounds more insane, but I'd argue that he never sounds as dangerous as he does here.

If you ever get the chance, pick up The Complete Fun House Sessions, which gives you 19 different takes of this song (and the others on the album as well). It's fascinating to listen to the minute progression and realize how much skill and practice it takes to come off as this unhinged. I probably wouldn't have included this track in the top 100 if I hadn't gone through The Complete and realized just how much I loved it.

21 February 2012

#98: Broken Social Scene - Anthems for a Seventeen-Year-Old Girl



Broken Social Scene - Anthems for a Seventeen-Year-Old Girl
from You Forgot It in People, 2002


During my first year in graduate school, I lived alone in a 500 square foot basement apartment down at the end of Pinckney Street in Madison. It had, among other features, a mostly obstructed view of Lake Mendota and the narrowest galley kitchen ever built. I had just moved away (about 165 miles up on Highway 151) from the first girl I'd ever really loved, exchanging her company for a ever-ending reading list of books and a set of classes that made almost no sense and in which I felt constantly inadequate. It was the first time in my life I'd ever really lived along (because, let's face it--Kim moved in to my apartment at Coe in early October the year before and never really left), and even though Madison wan't a big city in any real sense, it was all fairly overwhelming for me.

Aside from the school work and the long separation from Kim (punctuated by her semester in Madagascar), there are two memories from that year that really stick out in mind, 9 years later. The first is the slow transformation of Madison in my mind's eye, from of the scene the half-remembered and frantic visits I made as a high schooler during trips for various academic events into the place I ACTUALLY LIVED. That record store on State Street that I remembered in a glassy haze, like a fuzzy photo print, and the Jane's Addiction record Jed Dawson bought there right before we had to get back on the bus in 1996? I walked past that place on my way to school now. Everyday, my walk to work brought me past places I had dreamed about visiting for months at a time while I was in high school. The record stores were a constant distraction, and I let my guard down an awful lot that first year.

B-Side Records, Madison, Wisconsin

The other is less concrete, but no less important to me. I remember the way that the sun would come in off the lake on Saturday and Sunday afternoons in my apartment, catching me pacing the living room with a book in my hand, or sitting cross-legged on the scuffed wood floors next to my old mini stereo, shuffling CDs I bought down at the B-Side or the (late, lamented) Sugar Shack. This was the last year of my life when I had regular, easy access to both a dual cassette deck and a steady supply of cassettes, and I made the last real, honest-to-god mixtapes of my life on that floor in that apartment, taking all the new songs and albums from my time in the (not so big) city, shuffling them up, and sending them back on to Kim, 15 or 16 at a time.

The best mixtape I made that fall featured a fuzzy, druggy, and incredibly precious song from Broken Social Scene's second record called (somewhat awkwardly, like almost everything related to the band's early iteration) "Anthems for a Seventeen-Year-Old Girl." In her distorted, pitchy singsong, Emily Haines came through loud and clear, telling the boy exactly what she wanted from him:
Park that car, drop that phone,
Sleep on the floor, dream about me

Emily Haines

Along with the song's slow, sunny, banjo-laden crescendo, it was Haines' repetition of those simple phrases--over and over, like a mantra for warding off distracted lovers--that attracted me so strongly. Getting used to Madison, and school, and the rest of my life while keeping up the first real long-distance relationship I'd ever been in, my nightly talks with Kim were full of distraction. Work, and long walks, and more work, and the bars all beckoned for me (as did friends and college life for her), and as the months went by, we became short with each other over the phone, trying and mostly failing to keep up the easy intimacy we'd forged at Coe.

My mixtapes, and this song in particular, were like my own promises to her that at some point, no matter what else happened, I'd be able to give her my full attention--with occasional visits ("park that car, sleep on the floor"), but also with a real life together without those phone calls and distraction and distance, some day.  Despite almost 5 years of marriage, we're still working on the proximity thing.  But when I hear this song, I still think of that apartment, Madison, those phone calls, and those mixtapes.  And I still dream about her.

-Brandon

#98: Neil Young - Tonight's The Night



Neil Young - Tonight's The Night
from Tonight's The Night, 1975


Tonight's The Night was my introduction to Neil Young -- I'm not sure what that says, but I feel like it should mean something. See, I was a budding music geek when I got to college with a fairly sizable collection for a pre-napster teenager, but it was full of classical music and nu-metal. (Sometimes I still pull out the Rammstein (who do not make this list) to remember that things do in fact get better.) Then I met Lee and Brandon and suddenly had access to all this new music, their tastes as 'refined' as anyone I met, and I quickly expanded my palette.

I'll wait until the top 5 to get to the full conversion story. I'm not sure where this album fits in the story except that it's one of the first albums Brandon introduced me to, and I spent so many hours listening to it.

I feel that this album is great in spite of itself; it surprises me that it's so critically acclaimed (it's one of Rolling Stone's 500 greatest albums and one of the 1001 Albums You Must Hear Before You Die and Christgau giving it an extremely rare A). What I mean is, the 10 middle tracks -- excluding the two parts of the title track -- are so understated it feels like none of them can stand on their own, that they all need to be there for any sort of vision to take hold.

Except the magnificent title track. I can honestly say that I would not have given the album more than a passing listen if it didn't lead off with one of the best songs I've ever heard. And in the pre-digital file age, when we still listened to CDs, this meant that to listen to the title track, I was pretty much going to have to listen to the rest of the album.

Tonight's The Night is as bleak as pretty much anything else on this list, and would make the short list for any depressing mixtape. It doesn't sound that way: the riff -- sounds like it's comprised of bass playing single notes -- is fairly upbeat, accented by guitar lines from Nils Lofgren that wouldn't be out of place on any other mid-70s rocker. There's even a piano solo sounding like a slowed down Jerry Lee Lewis piece. I'm surprised it hasn't been sampled multiple times. It's good music, But it's everything else that makes it great.

So, Neil Young releases Harvest in 1972. It eventually goes multi-platinum, becoming the best-selling album of that year, making Young into a bona-fide superstar. It's a fine album, I don't particularly care for it outside of a couple of tracks, but I'm not going to hate on anyone who loves it (unless it's the only Neil Young they like, because c'mon man). Then two friends die of heroin overdoses: Crazy Horse's guitarist Danny Whitten and roadie Bruce Berry and, apparently, this kind of mass fame didn't suit Young all that well. So, in 1973, he records Tonight's The Night the album, opening with the title track, which explicitly outs the theme:

Bruce Berry was a working man
He used to load that Econoline van
A sparkle was in his eye
But his life was in his hands.

The record label refused to release it, shelving the album for two years, hoping Young would record something commercially viable, something that would capitalize on the success of Harvest. He didn't. (Young would later be sued by his label for making music that didn't sound like "Neil Young"... which is one of the most badass anecdotes I know of in popular music.)

It's obvious why the label was apprehensive. Just listen. There might be a single or two here, something that could get the masses fired up. But not the lead track.

And that's one of the things that makes it great. I was deliberate when I called the track bleak: this is grief, alright, the darkest before it gets better, where depression gives way to, well... This is one great "fuck it" to everything from one of the great "fuck it" songwriters. This is fatalism as it should be; not quite acceptance because that assumes too much impotence, but the fight against ...whatever, winnable or not, since the fight is all that matters.

-----
The album ends with "Tonight's The Night -- Part II". It's good, more ramshackle and off-key than Part I, but for the most part pretty much the same song. It provides a good counterpoint to the original, inverting just enough to keep the listener unbalanced.




-Lin

19 February 2012

#99 : Hans Zimmer - You're So Cool



Hans Zimmer - You're So Cool
from True Romance OST, 1993


More than any song on my list, this one takes me back to a a singe moment--a very particular night of my life. When I went to Cameroon in 2000 (Jesus Christ, 12 years ago), I had a fairly good idea that my life would be changed by the experience, but I'd be a fool to tell you that I was certain that I'd come out the other side as a professor of African politics. For that reason and others, my semester in Cameroon was one of the most important short chunks of time in my life--a period that influences my life every single day.

While there are a lot of people and a lot of memories that mean a lot to me from that time, the days and nights I spent with my two best friends --Dahveed Benson and Gustave River--were probably the most important. Dahveed was (is) my old camp counselor and sometimes boss at the Concordia Language Villages, as well as the former director of the study abroad program in Cameroon that I attended. Gustave was (at the time) his best friend--a rastafarian, reggee musician, and tailor with exceptional talent as a songwriter and clothing designer.

Despite being on sabbatical during my semester abroad, Dahveed was around for most of it, and it was with his help that I had most of my great adventures--his introductions to hundreds of Cameroonians across the country who knew before the rest of my group arrived in our sweaty blue minibus to ask for "Hubert," his urging that I take chances with food, travel, and crazy situations, and his beer. Oh, the beer. I ow my career as an Africanist to Dahveed more than anyone else.


So what of the song? My best, most memorable night in Cameroon was a simple one, about a month into the program. I'd been in country just long enough to have a twinge of homesickness, and Dahveed was getting ready to go on his own sabbatical adventures. So we decided to have a night in, with no pressure--no French, no planning or studying, no being "on" as very visible foreigners--just a case of Cameroonian beer and Dahveed's movie collection, sent to him film by film from the US by family and friends.

That night we watched his favorite move at the time--True Romance, a 1993 dark comedy and romance starring Christian Slater and Patricia Arquette, and written (mostly) by a then-barely known Quentin Tarrantino. The movie is about one of the most beautifully beknighted and inconvenient love affairs in the history of cinema--the nerdy comic book store clerk played by Slater and his hooker with a heart of gold-turned wife Arquette, on the run from the mob with a bag of stolen cocaine. It's not a perfect move, by any means--although with star appearances by Christopher Walken, Gary Oldman, and Val Kilmer, it ain't bad. But what's so great, so memborable about the film is its wonderful use of a mix of score and pop music--songs by Chris Isaac and Soudgarden mixed with Hans Zimmer's glockenspiel masterpiece, "you're So Cool." The song, which is a simple and clean, minimal, even, bit of echo-y percussion that builds to a slow climax over about 3 and a half minutes, plays ofer the opening and closing monologues given by Arquette's character, Alabama, a perfect match to her coquettish voice.

Despite the violence and gore predicated on Slater and Arquette's mad courtship and drug deal gone bad, the song ties their love into the narrative, giving it an emotional center in their relationship that many Tarantion films, with their hipper soundtracks full of jarring pop, lack. Over the next four hours, we watched it twice, Dahveed stopping on key scences to recite the dialoge, and me memorizing the scenes bit my bit. The night ended with a crazy drunken walk down to Gustave's tailor shop (where he was still working away at 2 AM on an old black Singer machine), more beers, and an even more drunkenly prepared can of potted French Cassoulet that Dahveed had brought over in his luggage several years before. It tasted of Heinz baked beans and duck fat, and it was brilliant.

Since that night, I've probably watched "True Romance" 30 times, each evoking memories of that night and a life I can't ever go back to. Dahveed and I are both married (he has two lovely young boys). I've never been back to Cameroon, and Dahveed left in the mid-2000s, burnt out on illness, ornaizational hassles, and a little witchcraft. Gustave, who meant so much to me that a picture of him and I still hangs in my living room (over my liquor cabinet, fittingly) disappeared in Amsterdam in 2004 (I think), jumping his travel visa and eventually making it to the US as an undocumented immigrant and asylum seekeer (asylum from what, we were never sure). My buddy Andre tracked him down in New York years later, but he wasn't the same--drugs, or hard living, or something else had made him into a person we didn't know any more.

There's no going back to the simplicity and (for me, at least) innocense of that first month in Africa, learning about what I loved and thinking about where it might lead. But that night, drunk as I was, that movie, this song (and even that cassoulet) were all perfect.

-Brandon

17 February 2012

#99: Uncle Tupelo - Moonshiner



Uncle Tupelo - Moonshiner
from March 16-20, 1992, 1992


In 2005, I once listed Moonshiner as my favorite song. It's not, obviously, but without the methodological benefit that good data management allows, it was the first song I could think of that stood a chance of being my favorite.

I'm guessing that at least a solid 10% of the songs on my list are drinking songs in one way or another (and I had to cut one of my favorite drunk songs due to the constraints of the project!) but no one does the genre as well as Uncle Tupelo. (Another of theirs will appear later in this list.) I think the general ethos is succinctly described in their song Life Worth Living:

We're all looking for a life worth living
That's why we drink ourselves to sleep.

And another line in I Got Drunk --

You spend half your time just staring into a beer
What you need, you know, you can't find here

-- that hits close to the same meaning; but, for years, I thought the line was "staring into a mirror," and I still like that better.

Moonshiner isn't a Tupelo original but an older folk song covered most notably by Dylan, the Clancy Brothers, and Cat Power. None of these other versions can match the devastating power of Farrar's delivery. While I was never able to really get into Son Volt (significantly preferring Tweedy's Wilco) I rank Farrar exceptionally high on my list of favorite vocalists. The single thing that makes good singers great is not technical ability -- this is what American Idol and its clones miss -- but the relatability of not only the singer to listener but the singer to material. Basically, when Farrar sings

I spent all my money
On whiskey and beer
...
If whiskey don't kill me
Lord, I don't know what will

he sounds like he means it, like he knows exactly what that implies. Given the stories and Tupelo's other work, it's not hard to believe that Farrar believed he'd drink himself to death.

When you're young, drunk, and depressed, it's not hard to believe that whiskey is the way out, whether or not you want it to be.

The song is simple and self-explanatory in both music and lyrics, with little wasted movement. Three verses comprising an effective biography:

The first, the scene: a moonshiner who has dedicated his life -- not just professionally but mentally -- to drink.

The second, the existence: daily moving among drink and drinkers, wanting better. I've always taken the focus on women as another contradiction, with the drinking being both the reason for loneliness and the reason to not try and make things better.

The third, the end. What I think temperance always misses is the comfort that drink provides, that it makes the world smaller and easier to handle. It's easy when all you want and need is a drink:

Let me eat when I'm hungry
Let me drink when I'm dry
Two dollars when I'm hard up
Religion when I die

The whole world is a bottle
And life is but a dram
When the bottle gets empty
Lord, it sure ain't worth a damn

The best drinking songs are those that make you want to drink more and never drink again. The best drinking songs make you into a Kierkegaardian [Drunk] Knight of Faith, to believe that both are good and both are possible.

(The best drinking songs make you make references like this. I am not drunk enough yet to continue the metaphor.)

Of all the versions I've heard of this song, the Cat Power one is (a distant) second:



-Lin

#100 - Pere Ubu - Nonalignment Pact



Nonalignment Pact - Pere Ubu
from The Modern Dance, 1978

Since Lin decided to start with the delicate and minor-keyed "Via Chicago," it seems fitting that I should open with a thick slab of raucous noise--Pere Ubu's "Nonalignment Pact," the first track from their 1978 debut LP, The Modern Dance. Beginning with a series of shrill, almost painful shrieks from one of Allen Ravenstine's synths before dissolving into a nearly rockabilly guitar riff and the full-throated ravings of vocalist David Thomas (one of rock's few truly unique singers), "Nonalignment Pact" picks up where Pere Ubu's handful of early singles ("30 Seconds Over Tokyo," "Final Solution") with the late, lamented Peter Laughner started--with the sub-romantic ravings of a heartbroken Thomas, trying to figure out where it all went wrong.

I wanna make a deal with you, girl
get it signed by the heads of state
I wanna make a deal with you, girl
get it recognized 'round the world.

Recognizing (as any decent scholar of international relations would) that the status of love depends upon the recognition of the community (isn't it obvious that Ubu would be constructivists?), Thomas begins and ends this song with the simple request that his ex-girl engage in a credible commitment to leave him the hell alone. The song careens on from there, at one point featuring Thomas's trademarked unhinged warble as he half scat-sings her "thousand other names." Naturally, these entreaties leave him winded, confused, and alone, barking out into the chaos and screaming again for her to just leave him alone. It's also fairly dance-able, in a spazzy, pogo and swing your arms around kind of way.

Ubu are a major touchstone for me, and not only because they're Ohio's number one all-time rock band. Back when I was young, impressionable, and still trying to figure out what punk rock was, David Thomas and Peter Laughner (who died before Ubu could record this record, but who will be making a return appearance in a later post) were among the first to show me that what I thought punk had to sound like was wrong, narrow, and no fun at all. The Modern Dance, along with Ubu's first singles (collected on the Terminal Tower compilation) were post-punk before there was punk, pushing boundaries that the NYC types didn't even realize existed. More than anything else, the joy I still get bopping up and down to this song late at night (and, in one memorable instance, tried to make up for my lack of interest in more conventional forms of parter dancing by urging my then-girlfriend, now-wife to join in) is the joy of knowing that we can make anything into punk, as long as we sing it with enough feeling.

-Brandon

15 February 2012

#100: Wilco - Via Chicago



Wilco - Via Chicago
from Summerteeth, 1999


The last few tracks added to my top 100 list were amazingly difficult but the choice ultimately came down to what I thought was more important for this project: the songs I've loved longer or the songs I love more now. I picked the former, though I can't really say way. All I know is that if I had made this list 9 years ago, Via Chicago would be in the top 20, and that was good enough for me to make sure it made it in.

I don't care what it's actually about; the opening lines

I dreamed about killing you again last night
And it felt alright to me
Dying on the banks of Embarcadero skies
I sat and watched you bleed

and the wikipedia article can lead to an interpretation of a mangle relationship. For me, this is a song about homesickness, occupying the same emotional place as I'll Be Home for Christmas but without being a crappy song about Christmas.

And literally: I grew up out west and my family still lived there when I moved to the midwest for college and stayed for nearly a decade, living between 3 and 5 hours from Chicago. Nearly every trip back to the family involved a connecting flight through O'Hare. But the song invokes more the return trip, the sense of loss of something good. Every leaving -- to go back to the place without family, the place that for better or worse, was my real home -- came with a dose of sadness and thinking about the roads not taken. The hardest choices are not between good and evil or bad and worse but between good and good.

In that way, it's also cleanly associated in my mind with the process of growing up or the even more ineffable realization that we're responsible for our decisions and their consequences.

I printed my name on the back of a leaf
And I watched it float away
The hope I had in a notebook full of white dry pages
Was all I tried to save

Via Chicago has this melancholy and slight confusion to it. The prominent minor keys do the heavy work, but it's all the little touches, too. The short piano break starting at about 2:55. The feedback present throughout the song, providing an almost unnoticed sense of unease, which becomes more and more pronounced towards the end of the song, until it threatens to derail everything a minute early. But then everything drops and it's just an acoustic guitar and Tweedy singing, "I'm coming home. I'm coming hone."

-Lin

14 February 2012

Top 100 Songs: Introduction (Part 2)

What Lin said.

Well, not exactly. Like Lin, I'm looking forward to a writing project that lets me reflect on a set of songs that I already feel like I know from the inside out. Rather than focusing passing judgement, I'm looking forward to being able to think again about why these songs are still so important to me, in most cases years after I first heard them. As an assistant professor still trying to find his feet (and get his tenure), I rarely have the time to sit and enjoy listening to music without some sort of ulterior motive--background noise when I read or write, to entertain, or to take the edge off a long walk to work. Despite the fact that I'll almost certainly have to turn in my music snob card for admitting it, I'd rather spend that time contemplating the grace, power, and perfection of these 100 songs than off on a search for the next new sound.

I've made lists like this before. Somewhere, it's possible that my friend Liz Mathews still has a CD of my "twenty favorite songs" circa 2003--a list heavy on The Lemonheads, and light on songs longer than 3 and a half minutes. I can't say that my process was as rigorous or systematic as Lin's. I don't really have data on what I listen to most often, or a rating system that's anything more than an ad hoc testament to how I feel sometimes at 1 AM and still flipping though old songs. Like with my own research, I made my list inductively, by pulling together a short list of my 15 or 20 absolute favorites and listening to them in epic late night sessions, seeing what they make me want to hear next.


The list is mostly guitar music, and I regret that I've not been able to get more, genre-wise, out of my dedicated Pitchfork reading from 2003-7. But it also reflects my efforts to get deeper into musics the indie set had left behind in the early 2000s--old blues, country, and soul songs, and the wonderful, half-forgotten bits and pieces I found there. My songs are, at first glance, older and more temporally disbursed than Lin's, reflecting that I was always better at digging music up after the fact than I was at following it when it was coming out.

When I finally got 100 songs in to some sort of rough order, I was surprised by what I saw. Old favorites from college were gone, replaced in some instances by deeper cuts on the same albums. When I read the list to Kim over the phone, she was at turns surprised by my revisionism (the songs that ended up making the cut by some of our favorite artists surpised me as much as they did her) and by my fidelity (my top ten has changed a lot less over the last decade then I expected). Ultimately, I found that what makes a good song for me hasn't changed all that much--I just know a lot more songs.

--brandon

13 February 2012

Top 100 Songs: Introduction

One of the big realizations that the "listen to every critically acclaimed and personal desired album from 2010" project gave us was that neither Brandon nor I are particularly good at creating new content on a consistent basis. Personally, I blame a life that exists outside the internet, so I'm not too worried. We're going to do this new project, though, and it'll work much better. As I mentioned quite a few times, the hardest albums to review were the middling ones, the okay-but-not-great, the ones that weren't actually bad enough to pan.

Here, though, we're going to each go through our top 100 songs. So we've agonized over our lists and checked them multiple times and I think we're good to go.

And a thanks to our devoted readers, willing to put up not only with months of nothingness, but also the complete navel-gazing that is a project like this. These are not the 100 best songs out there. They're not necessarily "100 songs I think you should know." They are 100 songs each that mean something to us. We are connoisseurs of music and have spent years and many dollars in pursuit of knowledge of the subject. In that there may be some value to you, if only that it may introduce you to songs you don't already know. But no guarantees: one of the things that I learned in making my list is that I leaned very heavy on my formative years of music geekdom -- high school and college. Perhaps this shouldn't be surprising.




Which means, you might already know all the songs on my list. (I'm not sure what's up with the outliers in 1970 and 1975 except that each year has one album represented twice. I also find it interesting that while the highest concentration is in the high school and college years, there are no songs from the year I graduated the former and started the latter.)

Very early on, Brandon suggested that we limit the list two only two songs per artist, otherwise our lists would be heavily skewed to our favorites and three quarters of the list would be from a half dozen artists. This wasn't a "hard" ceiling, as there were allowances for post-breakup bands, guest spots, and things like this. Essentially we just went with what made sense. This was my working definition:

* Uncle Tupelo, Wilco, and Son Volt count as three separate bands.
* CSN&Y is the same as CSN, but solo Young is different, even if the CSN&Y song is a Young song.

Quibble if you want, but it's the spirit that counts. Besides, I don't think there are any edge cases on my list.

I have a lot of tracks: one hundred songs counts as less than one-third of one percent of all tracks I have rated. I've been diligent for the last two years to rate every song I listen to -- which made compiling my list somewhat easier. So I queried my collection for everything with the highest rating. After culling the duplicates, I was left with 1651 songs. I went through this list, dividing them into four categories:

1) YES -- the songs that have to be included
2) PROBABLY -- the songs that should be included
3) MAYBE -- the songs that should be included, if I have room
4) NO -- the songs that aren't in the top 100

I took artist discographies as a whole and made sure that I only marked up to two tracks per artist yes, probably, or maybe. Even doing this, I was left with 157 YESs alone. Then, through this list, I marked "the ones that absolutely have to be included or else this entire project is a sham"...which gave me 81. Then I spent a few days agonizing over choosing 19 tracks from 76.

So, yeah, here we are. While the top 100 may be slightly different on a different day, I think it's as accurate as it possibly could be. I'm a little sad that it doesn't show a great deal of diversity: the only two pre-1960 songs are both classical works; country, blues, and rap are all under-represented. There's no reggae or jazz. There are artists I love that aren't represented at all (Old 97's, Leonard Cohen) but there are artists that I think have only one non-crap song (Xzibit). But it is what it is.

-- Lin