Part 1: Foreword
I suppose I’m going to have to explain myself.
One of the most fascinating projects in music history is the ongoing attempt by major music publications to establish a definitive canon for popular music. Leaving aside the spurious notion of even making that attempt in the first place, critic Jim DeRogatis, writing in the book Kill Your Idols, had a somewhat nifty insight into what has made lists like Rolling Stone’s Top 500 songs/albums of all time lists so infuriating; consistency. Even if we allow for slight variances in opinions, he found it quite jarring that these venerated publications would vary their revisions so wildly, observing “Did [downgraded in rank] albums somehow grow “less great”, while the additional Beatles efforts and Pet Sounds got better?”. While this is an incisive barb, I find that even he misses the true reason that these lists always feel so scattershot and uneven: How the lists were compiled.
You see, in order to compile their lists, Rolling Stone, and other magazines too unremarkable to really consider, would ask industry veterans and staff writers to jot down their fifty or so favourite songs and average the results. This would result in goofy mathematical errors like causing the only two Aretha Franklin albums to appear side-by-side, or worse, overrepresentation of certain artists and eras of music. The Beatles are great and all, but having more than twenty spots reserved for them is a bit excessive when compared to the vast wealth of great music out there and released since. Their methodology also managed to neatly sidestep entire genres and important figures without any reason compelling to the reader to do so. As a result you have lists either devoid of Heavy Metal and Rap, or having them represented in a token-like fashion. All of this to allow a staff writer to seriously try and justify Procol Harum’s A Whiter Shade Of Pale’s placement amongst its betters. Even in some great reference books like 1001 Songs You Must Hear Before You Die, there’s never a sense of a singular, sane, voice guiding the experience.
This project has been 18 years in the making, ever since I first encountered Rolling Stone’s Top 500 Albums Of All Time book in my school library around 2004 and started noticing its many flaws. Even my adolescent brain easily noticed the gall of packing so many Beatles albums into the top ten, how so many genres were passed over in favour of some bland white-boy blues guitarist’s anemic output. That broad sense of betrayal of the ideal in my mind (however improperly formed at that point in my life) of what a good critic’s opinions should be: based on sincere evaluation rather than personal favoritism. So I decided to rectify that. I decided to put in the work to compile a Top 500 Songs list of my own. Yes, in short, you could say this playlist has been entirely fueled by spite ever since I was a teenager. My plan was simply to be a singular voice competing against what I perceived as the broad imperfections of the aggregate.
So how do you solve for that? How does one plan to first compile and then write blurbs for 500 songs, a project that seemingly no singular individual has accomplished before? Well first I had to adopt a standard for what a great song even was. I definitely did not want to go down the road of “well a great song is one that is influential”, because that introduced too many variables for any listener to have to care about. Nor did I want to simply aggregate a list of my favourite songs, because that is a fundamental waste of any reader’s time to preach about what you and only you can perceive. So the standard became brutally simple: The song had to impress me as I listened to it, which, thanks to my subsequent training at The Art Institute of Vancouver’s Professional Recording Arts program, was easier, instinctual even. Then I would have each song battle it out in my head, the superior gaining higher and higher ranking. Plus I had to decide on the more objective factors like having the songs be non-instrumental and predominantly in the English language to allow for me to write blurbs that are more understanding of the subject matter and thus more appreciative of a reader’s needs. Then I decided on a cutoff date of Dec 31st. 2019, just so I wouldn’t get carried away with recency bias and as a nice good decade break line. Influence did play a tiny factor , but only as a tiebreaking function, not a foremost requirement. Finally, we had a 500 song base.
Then revisions had to happen. It would often be the case that I would think I had a final playlist sorted out only to listen to a new track that put me in a mental fugue state “Oh, I have to make room for this” and then have to make the brutal decisions on what to cut. But this seemingly endless grind of bloodletting has left me with a slate of songs that I would put up proudly against the music publications of note’s variations on this theme. I allowed the full breadth of popular music’s rich history to envelop and overawe me and the results are a varied swathe of textures and intents. Metal and hip-hop have finally been given their due on this list, as have many songs that have never even sniffed critical popularity until I serendipitously stumbled upon them. Female artists, which bizarrely had less than 200 entries on Rolling Stone’s 2010 list, have full reign here. Quality, it seems, has a diversity all its own. To be sure, there had to be sanity checks, so I used the music publications rankings as at least a starting point, checking and re-checking whether any of their featured songs deserved spots here. Thankfully, after a while I didn’t have a need to sanity check the list anymore, I was quite happy with the results.
Finally, I had to write the blurbs. Far too often it would be the case where you would read a Rolling Stone blurb just to get trivia. Nothing that tells you how the track sounds or how it factors into greatness. This infuriating habit is another reason for the broad disconnect between the readers and the writers who compiled it. So I had to balance a lot of things when writing each and every paragraph long blurb. One, I had to minimize trivia, I actively avoided just quoting the Wikipedia page to fill out space. If a song’s blurb has a bit of trivia that’s uncited, assume I used a commonly searched source, the Wikipedia page, or the Genius page for my information. Second, I had to get to the core sound and purpose of each track, not to get bogged down in numbing recitation of said trivia that no one pressing play cares about. For each and every song here, my strategy was to take what the song was giving me and find a way to make the experience of reading it interesting. I had to wear my thesaurus ragged when doing this by the way. There are only so many ways that you can write the words spectacular or explosive. So I have to humbly apologize in advance for any hyperbole or sense of literary muchness, I genuinely believe these to be among the 500 Greatest Songs ever written, there’s going to be a lot of praise words thrown about and a ton of different adjectives.
Among the 500 Greatest Songs ever. There’s the key language difference that I have couched this entire endeavour in. I didn’t want this to be a “new canon”, merely a proviso to maybe revise some parts of it. I have to be precise in the naming and writing of this playlist as I am keenly aware of the gall of some “nobody” coming out of nowhere to declare the 500 Greatest Songs Ever Made, even more so since that title would put me in the same company of Rolling Stone and their ilk. I’m not that arrogant. I genuinely want this playlist to be a starting point, yes, but one that acknowledges its inherent limitations. Hence “Of the greatest songs ever made”. The language matters.
The sheer mathematical impossibility of anyone ever being able to listen to every song ever made is another issue. Spotify alone has 100,000 tracks added to it every day, so we are approaching volumes of available music that near exponential levels. However, this does provide me with some cover in case a track you really want to be on the playlist isn’t there. I decided on the five hundred number because it was expansive enough to be inclusive and exclusive enough to be competitive, which is why I haven’t matched the 1001 Songs You Must Listen To Before You Die threshold. Even if the song wasn’t featured, if it was in the realm of the top 10,000 in your head or mine, it would still definitely be in the top 99.99999999 percentile of all songs ever released. With that I must add the disclaimer that, unless noted, I am not denigrating any tracks not featured, they merely don’t meet the requirements to be on this list. Don’t despair, the numbers probably agree with your assessment, we all win with math!
Then we have some of the more subjective qualities that are unique to me and my perceptions. For instance, one of my personal observations on how music is consumed and critically evaluated. For so many critics they seem to fall back onto how important a song is or how its lyrics seem to mean more than the music itself. I’ve always had a problem with any approach that places the words of a song above the totality of the whole experience. Listening to great songs is not an exercise in absorbing the importance or meaning of it, but a submission to the Frisson of it all. The vital purpose of a great song should be as self-evident as possible when pressing play. Hence my most subjective take that shaped this entire list: The lyrics don’t matter until the music does. Lyrics do matter, just not enough to elevate them into the utmost component. Anywhere in this playlist where I do lean heavily on interpretations of lyrics, rest assured that they had to pass the music mattering first and foremost beforehand. You can also use the assembled playlist for context when needed.
I hope, after reading all of this, that you don’t get the sense that I was purely fueled by rage when making this playlist. As noted above, it started as an adolescent revenge fantasy that mellowed out over time into more of a musical journey. I thoroughly enjoyed the process of researching, writing and compiling the songs laid out here for your perusal. While this most emphatically is not a ranked list of my favourite songs, many of the songs here have become my favourites over the process of listening to them. It’s hard not to get carried up in the whirlwind of sound that can hit your ears as you hit shuffle or play it in sequence. You’ll run the gamut and come out the other end having been thrilled, seduced, enamored. Fight your way through the maelstrom of heavy metal only to find yourself serenaded by soul. Listen to the “CNN for Black people” as Chuck D called hip-hop and transition into soothing folk-pop. The sounds of the past century enlivening every step as you walk out into the bright and sunny day. I hope you get as much joy and frisson out of listening to and reading this playlist as I have spent making it. And remember, leave yourself open to being surprised, to not being sidetracked or put out of sorts because you don’t see your particular favourite or obligatory picks. Let the power of great music carry you through. And remember…
“I am not in love/ But I am open to persuasion”
-Joan Armatrading
Notes: The formatting of each entry shall be as follows
Song: Song Name/ Name of secondary or alternate track
Artist: Artist of primary version/ artist of secondary or alternate track in order of listed song names
Album: Album or EP or Single or “N/A” of primary track (of either the original album release, the most recent or highest quality version)/Ditto of secondary or alternate track in order of listed song names
I have included secondary or alternate tracks on some entries as a form of needed context/contrast/color. In all cases the primary track is the one included on the playlist.
Stay tuned for Part 2: 500-476
If you would like to listen along, here is a link to the Apple Music playlist and the Spotify Playlist.
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