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The Top 500
| G-Fafif Jun 10 2006 06:00 PM |
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At Dickshot's mild urging, I share the Top 500 Songs of All Time. All Time is 1972 (the year I began listening to the radio) through 1999 (because the more or less end of the century seemed like a good place to stop). There are various rules and criteria and exceptions to those rules and criteria rationalizations on which I'll happily elaborate if elaboration is requested, but essentially, these are my 500 favorite songs.
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| MFS62 Jun 10 2006 06:24 PM |
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Wow!
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| Edgy DC Jun 10 2006 06:41 PM |
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The only thing "Total Eclipse" and "Bette Davis" share to my ears is a raspy female vocalist.
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| MFS62 Jun 10 2006 06:45 PM |
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And that's why I always associate the two. When I hear one, I think of the other. Why? Because I do. Later
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| DocTee Jun 11 2006 12:10 AM |
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Unless I'm missing it, I see but one song from U2 (Mysterious Ways).
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| Gwreck Jun 11 2006 01:07 AM |
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Very interesting list.
Some very nice picks here...
...and some unfortunate picks. Thanks for posting the list!
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| TheOldMole Jun 11 2006 01:56 AM |
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No Clash?
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| sharpie Jun 11 2006 10:54 AM |
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Wouldn't have many correllaries for any such list I might make but that's what is so great about music -- that so many songs can make a difference to different people.
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| Edgy DC Jun 11 2006 11:55 AM Edited 1 time(s), most recently on Jun 12 2006 08:14 AM |
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"Safety Dance" and "Come on, Eileen" are wonderful songs, even if they were screamingly overplayed. Dexy's is a highly underrated group o' Celtic soul brothers. Radio digging into their deeper catalog instead of beating their lone stateside hit to death would've been welcome. Probably about 200 other acts that's also true of.
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| G-Fafif Jun 11 2006 10:02 PM |
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Good questions and observations all around. I'll try to answer.
It's perhaps the leading example of a song I heard on the radio (right after Labor Day 1990) that I knew nothing about, certainly not the artist or the strangeness of his persona, and just fell in love with the hook. I knew "Under Pressure," but it never did that much for me. This did. Everything about Vanilla Ice was rather loathsome to ludicrous, but damn, I sure did get hooked.
Interesting comparison. I like Bonnie Tyler's song OK, but it's not on the list.
My favorite group ever. Eight hits in the Top 500, second behind Billy Joel, with nine.
Songs, but it's hard to deny that those I was exposed to via video didn't have their videos play a role. It's hard to think of, say, "Safety Dance," without the video.
Correct. I like U2, but "Mysterious Ways," for whatever reason, is the only one of their hits that jumped out at me from the first I heard it. That sort of immediate impact goes a long way.
Long Beach. Don't know if there's any clues to musical preferences there. I think the biggest influence was I was in one of the last classes that was exposed to Top 40 stations when Top 40 inlcuded pop, rock, soul, country, dance, what have you. But Billy Joel of Hicksville was a big influence through my teens and college years.
Lots of 'em. The reason I chose 1972 as a baseline is because that was the first year when I was hearing songs when they were new. It's just not the same to hear a great song from 1959 ("Beyond The Sea") or 1964 ("I Wanna Hold Your Hand") or "Ooh Child" (1970) later on and love it. I've thought about putting together an "out of time" list for those songs I met as oldies plus post-'72ers I heard way after the fact (like "Blister in the Sun") but haven't to date.
When I started working on this, as a Top One Hundred, obviously nothing after early 1996 existed. When I kept adding hundreds, I decided I had to acknowledge time had moved on and with it came songs I loved. As mentioned previously 1999 just seemed a natural stopping point, even though I didn't complete the 500 'til 2002 (April 7, the 30th anniversary of the day I first heard "American Pie"; it was my parents' wedding anniversary and my mother got my father a new radio which he tuned to WNBC, which is why I remember it so vividly). ANYWAY, among my 21st century favorites: "Without Me" by Eminem; "Stacy's Mom" by Fountains of Wayne; "Harder to Breathe" by Maroon 5; "Goldigger" by Kanye West. Those are actually my favorite songs of each of the past four years.
I went with when they were hits. Some songs were released on albums the year before or came out in December but got big in January. I tried to be faithful to Billboard wherever there was doubt.
I kept a very long, year by year list of every song I could think of that I ever liked, which is why it took six years. When the time came to choose, I just whittled and whittled until I got to a hundered. Then I looked them over and started ranking by gut. If artists or years got grouped together or apart, it was coincidence.
No, but one B.A.D. "Rockin' the Casbah" came close.
Very fair point. But I never heard it before 1976 when it was released as a single. I knew it hadn't been recorded that week, but it was a hit single that summer, so that earns it its designation.
More or less. Singles, videos, highly played album cuts, in a couple of cases recognizable songs from Broadway shows. My rule was it had to have been played somewhere that I heard it, where somebody else could have heard it. Didn't want to just pick songs that I heard deep on some obscure album. The overall goal for this was to answer, for my sake, all the so-called canons out there that said what the greatest songs ever were. Those weren't MY greatest songs. These are. My favorites anyway.
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| Johnny Dickshot Jun 12 2006 06:30 AM |
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I first heard this list as a montage of clips on a cassette tape, and was astonished.
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| Edgy DC Jun 12 2006 08:20 AM |
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Yup. If one responded upon first hearing the song, and then it becomes overplayed and derided, one must be honest about how one responded, even if the song is never even reborn with an ironic retro-cool.
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| G-Fafif Jun 12 2006 11:33 AM |
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Wait..."Convoy" isn't cool?
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| Johnny Dickshot Jun 12 2006 11:46 AM |
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There's just something so weird about "We Built This City." Jefferson Airplane were such a serious, progressive, pot-smoking, revolutionary thing, and 10 years later they're making billion-selling "Hooray for rock-n-roll!" hyper-produced video-songs under the name "Starship." It was like they finally matured only to say "Let's go after the 14-year-olds"
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| MFS62 Jun 12 2006 11:48 AM |
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Macarena. fill in your own joke here. I liked that Starship song, too. Later
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| sharpie Jun 12 2006 11:50 AM |
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It would make my list of most hateable songs.
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| Elster88 Jun 12 2006 11:53 AM |
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Why?
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| Edgy DC Jun 12 2006 11:53 AM |
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Some college age guy at the the MOFO (SI Metman?) said "We Built This" was his getting-primped-and-ready-to-head-out song. I think it was the thread announcing that the original Napster had finally come down, and he listed his downloads. He also had Lionel Richie's "Hello."
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| Johnny Dickshot Jun 12 2006 12:15 PM |
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I think he explained -- they sold out their city, their heritage and their sound and fibbed while doing it.
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| ScarletKnight41 Jun 12 2006 12:16 PM |
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When I lived in Boston in the mid-80s they had a local Video station on cable, and they put together a really great video to go along with "We Built This City" based on local Boston images. I always enjoyed the song as a result of that video.
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| sharpie Jun 12 2006 12:17 PM |
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Why?
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| MFS62 Jun 12 2006 12:23 PM Edited 1 time(s), most recently on Jun 12 2006 12:30 PM |
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Any similarities between Gracie Slick and Paul Revere are entirely coincidental. Later
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| Elster88 Jun 12 2006 12:24 PM |
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Eh. I like the way the song sounds. I try not to let the other stuff concern me. ___________________________ Everybody in the entire world would sell out if they had the chance.
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| Edgy DC Jun 12 2006 12:31 PM |
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Interviewer: "What's it like to be back at number one after all these years?"
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| seawolf17 Jun 12 2006 12:33 PM |
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Right, but they built the city. They can sell out if they want.
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| Johnny Dickshot Jun 12 2006 01:00 PM |
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And they were hugely successful at doing it. That makes it all the more "despicable" (Sharpie) or "weird" (me). Don't tell anyone, but I kinda admire how weirdly attractive the whole mess is. As I said, it'd prolly rank higher than 55 on my Top 500 Guilty Pleasures, 1972-99 list.
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| G-Fafif Jun 12 2006 01:02 PM |
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It strained credulity that every station in every city built its own drop-in where the DJ voice came on to call San Francisco the greatest city in the world and then stress over the traffic on the Golden Gate. I remember the WPLJ version added a refrain: "We built this city/New York City/We built this city/on rock and roll..." The Z-100 version had the DJ complaining about traffic on the George Washington Bridge.
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| Edgy DC Jun 12 2006 01:05 PM |
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Z-100 did that while neither they nor Starship were playing rock 'n' roll.
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| G-Fafif Jun 12 2006 01:54 PM |
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An attractive mess is a good description. Messes attract me to songs. The more gimmicks, bells and whistles, the more susceptible I have been to the resulting package. The aforementioned "Convoy" at No. 16 is like that. The No. 30 song, "Wake Me Up Before You Go-Go," another No. 1 that few cop to digging on, is also in that category. That bizarre "jitterbug! call"; the "boom-boom"; the "go-go"; the shoutout to Doris Day of all people; the relentless sunniness; and the CATCHINESS...it all won me over by my second hearing ever of it (on Insterstate 4 between Orlando and Tampa on a Friday afternoon in September 1984, desperately flipping the dial trying to find a Cubs score from Wrigley Field; we can still get 'em!). Not a guilty pleasure. Just a pleasure. A guilty pleasure would be, theoretically, deriving joy from robbing a liquor store.
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| sharpie Jun 12 2006 01:58 PM |
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There was no Z-100 version. Apparently, Starship recorded several versions for different cities. Which makes the song even worse, IMO. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/We_Built_This_City Of the 3 songs mentioned I would rank it: Convoy, Wake Me Up Before You Go-Go and We Built This City in that order.
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| G-Fafif Jun 12 2006 02:04 PM |
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There was precedent for such a cynical ploy. In 1959, Atlantic released a single called "High School U.S.A." by Tommy Facenda in 28 different versions. Each mentioned the names of high schools in 28 different cities/states. With all that regionality behind it, it still only got to No. 28 on Billboard. I'm also reminded of my favorite SCTV bit ever, "Play It Again, Bob," in which Woody Allen (Rick Moranis) talks Bob Hope (Dave Thomas) into starring in a movie of his. After reading the script, Hope doesn't care for Allen's approach to comedy, advising him that when you're in Chicago, you give 'em the Windy City schtick, when you're in New York, talk up the Big Apple, et al. Woody thinks, "I guess I could cut a different version for every city...WHAT AM I SAYING?"
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| Johnny Dickshot Jun 12 2006 02:25 PM |
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I just watched the video thru that Wikipedia link. It's like getting blasted with Cheez Whiz from a firehose.
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| Frayed Knot Jun 12 2006 04:27 PM |
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Count me in the 'Despise' category for 'WBtC'
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| Willets Point Jun 12 2006 04:39 PM |
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I stopped reading at
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| Edgy DC Jun 12 2006 04:43 PM Edited 1 time(s), most recently on Jun 12 2006 04:51 PM |
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I wanted to make a list once of records by AOR acts desperately trying to adapt to the Nu Wave era. Such acts, or more likely their producers, picked up on and adapted only a few traits of NW --- the zombie-like detachment in the vocals (probably founded by Bowie) and the drenching in synths and processed guitars --- missing many of the more appealling traits --- the staccato rhythms, the reggae/ska-borrowed use of the up-beat, the often self-effacing humor, and the delight in a fun pop hook. The Cars were quintessential Nu Wave, but Elliot Easton's guitar wasn't processed any more than Eddie Van Halen's was. (EVH really only used a delay.)
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| Elster88 Jun 12 2006 04:45 PM |
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I think it was just Pressure. But then, I also thought CF meant to say R2-D2.
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| Edgy DC Jun 12 2006 04:49 PM |
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No, you're right. It's "Pressure." Oops. Had Queen on me mind.
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| G-Fafif Jun 12 2006 05:41 PM |
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I have to admit it never fails to surprise me to discover that a song I like when I begin to like it isn't universally well liked. I'm the only sample audience I have, generally speaking. So when I first heard some of these ditties, all I had was "WOW! THIS IS GREAT!" to go on. By the time I find out that the Vanilla Ices, the Wham!s, the Starships and so forth are annoying many people, it's too late to do anything about it. If other people like it, then it's nice to know I'm not alone. But if nobody else likes it, oh well, I do.
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| Johnny Dickshot Jun 12 2006 05:47 PM |
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Unconsciously brand ignorant. Brilliant!
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| Edgy DC Jun 13 2006 12:03 AM |
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Yeah, but you know he's like totally consciously unconscious.
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| ABG Jun 13 2006 10:56 AM |
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I stopped reading at number 7...
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| TheOldMole Jun 14 2006 05:56 PM |
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It just struck me that you don't have "I Love Rock and Roll" by Joan Jett on your list. How is this possible?
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| G-Fafif Jun 17 2006 12:36 AM |
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"I Love Rock & Roll"...I liked it OK. Never a favorite. Probably got a touch sick of it in the winter of 1982. Was overshadowed for my overplayed affections by "Centerfold".
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| Edgy DC Jun 17 2006 09:47 AM |
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"Centerfold" and "I♥R&R" were a momentous time in pop history because one replaced the other with extended runs at number one, giving the rockers the feeling that the world was ours again. They also held a bizarre non-rock song by an allegedly rockin' band ("Waiting for a Girl Like You") at number two for a record 15 weeks.
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| MFS62 Jun 17 2006 11:18 AM |
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Gee, you learn new stuff here every day. That must have broken what I though was the record 14 weeks in number 2 by the Pony Tails' "Born Too Late". It was behind Peggy Lee's "Fever" all that time. During that stretch I thought that any member of the Pony Tails was cuter than Peggy Lee. Later
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| Edgy DC Jun 17 2006 11:59 AM |
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Actually, that makes the list.
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| Iubitul Jun 17 2006 01:29 PM Re: The Top 500 |
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One of my favs - both the movie and the song. Nice to see it included here. I love most of this list - thanks for sharing, Greg.
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| ScarletKnight41 Jun 17 2006 01:38 PM |
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That movie was one of the places where the name Spartacus popped up right around the time that we were deciding upon what to name MK.
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| Iubitul Jun 17 2006 01:53 PM |
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I... am... Spartacus...
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| G-Fafif Jun 17 2006 02:46 PM |
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If you were a celebrity, you would have done it. "That Thing You Do!" was actually released as a single and I heard it played once WALK-FM on LI. That was enough to make it eligible for Top 500 consideration. The movie was the first one we ever rented, rewound and watched again right away.
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| ScarletKnight41 Jun 17 2006 04:22 PM |
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This is [url=http://cybermessageboard.ehost.com/getalife/viewtopic.php?t=3702]the Spartacus thread[/url].
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| Johnny Dickshot Jun 17 2006 05:05 PM |
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The Knack does a nice version of 'That Thing' -- available on their Greatest Hits record.
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| ScarletKnight41 Jun 17 2006 05:14 PM |
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Me First and the Gimme Gimmes also has a punk cover of That Thing You Do.
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