Friday, May 22, 2009

CANON FODDER: Frequent commenter Victoria (best efforts have yielded no Internet versions of her famed theme song, from the Princess Marguerite commercial) sent along this baffling list of 913 essential songs, from Pittsburgh's WYEP. It's numbered, so it seems to be ranked, but ... I don't know. It's not just that I disagree, for example, that if you were to distill all of pop music down to a single essential song, that song would be "Closer to Fine." I understand that for earnest white women of a certain age, that's probably right, and if this were their list, okay. But the list doesn't seem to have a perspective at all, really. It's just a list of songs, most of which seem entirely inessential for most purposes. I mean, I'm a Wilco fan and I don't think "Heavy Metal Drummer," supposedly the 8th most essential song of all time, would even belong on The Essential Wilco. We can do better.

So answer this call to arms, and let's define our terms. We're teaching an introductory course on popular music to a lecture hall full of space aliens. We must come up with a syllabus, a survey of the songs that are essential for an understanding of modern popular music -- not our favorite songs, and not songs that illustrate the history of pop music, but rather the songs that are essential to any understanding of popular music.

Choose no more than five songs, and don't pick any songs that anybody else has already picked. Let me start: Satisfaction; Stairway to Heaven; Roxanne; London Calling; Smells Like Teen Spirit.

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