subject: The Best Songs Ever Vs. The Culture Of Rock List Making [print this page] The other day I stood in line at a drug store and noticed a magazine. It was a new issue but it appeared to be one that I'd seen seemingly a thousand times before. Rolling Stone, the stalwart but mostly rather stale rock magazine for people who know nothing about rock music had once again compiled a list of the 500 Greatest Albums Of All Time. A very brief flip through as I waited to purchase deodorant and batteries revealed pretty much exactly what I expected. The newest album on the list was the Clash's London Calling released in 1979. Besides that the Beatles and Bob Dylan took up more than half of the top ten. Overall the choices were uninspired and rather troublesome. A kid growing up today will read this magazine, buy all of the same records kids have for the past three decades while music and musical taste as a whole will never move forward.
I for one could not help but feel they had missed the point. In this day of bite-sized attention spans and music being available to everyone all the time on the web, the very nature of an "objective" best albums list seemed pretty much useless to me. Instead I think the song, as in singular songs, album tracks or cuts is what should be focused on, and the pool from which we pull should probably be a little more mercurial.
The whole point of building these sorts of lists is to canonize things and preserve work. This is a great things to do in theory, but just because you listen to the greatest song of all time does not mean you will write the best song ever. In fact, to push the collective musical conversation forward, chances are you have to find songs that have not been sapped of all of their relevant influence. Luckily with the way music is consumed on the internet these days we can listen to songs with a wildly varying collection of styles and sounds. We can hear things that people before us might have never bothered with given that they might have to drop actual cash to hear the record. These days even if something is not one of the best songs ever you can find something worth pulling from it and leave what you didn't like in the dust.
So ignore Rolling Stone lists. In fact, avoid lists all together. Build your own canon and get some inspiration for what could actually be some of the greatest songs of all time.
