Rolling Stone's top 500 songs

[Color Me Badd Fan]

The list was updated back in their May 2010 issue.

http://www.the-rock-of-gibraltar.com/Music/10161/rolling-stone-500-greatest-songs-list-updated-2010-rollingstone-greatestsongs-list

It doesn't appear like much changed in the top 50 -- a grand total of two songs that came out after 1980 made the list. The oldest song in the top 50 came out in 1955. I'm not sure what the oldest song is on the overall list, but for the sake of argument, let's just say it was 1950.

Apparently, 96% of the best rock music came out before 1980. Half of the time period covered by the list is only producing 4% of the top 50. Michael Jackson doesn't even appear on the list until #58 with Billie Jean

How many of you out there are huge fans of My Generation (#11) from The Who? Maybe I could understand Baba O'Riley (Teenage Wasteland) or Won't Get Fooled Again but My Generation? Help! from the Beatles at #29?

I will freely acknowledge that the Beatles were the greatest band of all time. But the fellatio can get a bit extreme sometimes when Help! comes in ahead of, say, Stairway to Heaven.

The idiocy of this list isn't only limited to pre-1980 songs that are rated too high. U2's Moment of Surrender (whatever the hell that is) came in at #160. I googled it and apparently it was on the "Take off Your Boots" album that came out last year. It came in ahead of Bohemian Rhapsody, Love Will Tear Us Apart and Back in Black which were all within the next 30 songs.

[I.J. Reilly]

Rolling Stone's relevancy, accuracy, and overall quality declines as I age.

[MarkGrace]

I love lists (if you haven't noticed), and what I love probably even more than the list itself is people's reaction to the list. Reading through the comments section of a list always slays me.

[MarkGrace]

Rolling Stone's relevancy, accuracy, and overall quality declines as I age.

But they have a great feature this month on Obama!

Note: I don't know if they actually have a feature this month on Obama, but since they seem to run one about every other month, it's probably a safe bet.

[Commando]

That was a douchey list chock full of the "token" songs. Was "The Message" really a great song?

[Sleeping in EQ]

Rolling Stone caters to its readership of baby boomers and urban hipsters.

[Non Sequitur]

I don't have a big problem with the list. It takes a couple of generations to see how much cultural significance a song has. It's like when I took Lit classes in college and the most contemporary writer we ever studied was Faulkner.

[Commando]

Rolling Stone caters to its readership of baby boomers and urban hopelessly out-of-touch "hipsters".

FIFY

[wuapinmon]

But they have a great feature this month on Obama!

Note: I don't know if they actually have a feature this month on Obama, but since they seem to run one about every other month, it's probably a safe bet.

I let my subscription end after around ten years of reading it because of this. They've got this brilliant writer named Matt Taibbi working for them, but the caustic tone of his work pervades the whole thing now. It's like a People magazine for hipsters, and their revisionist history started to bug me. They gave Pinkerton a 5-star rating on it's ten year anniversary, but their original rating was abysmal; I remember being a little miffed at the time that it took their readers' acclaim of something for them to reverse opinion. It made me start to wonder about how much music I was ignoring based on their reviews. So, I just listen to stuff for myself now and word of mouth. The days of ratings sites for music are dead I think.

[Color Me Badd Fan]

Sweet Child of Mine at #198. It can't beat out Moment of Surrender (listen to this U2 steaming turd on youtube, how many of you have actually heard this song-- and for those of you that have, how many of you actually give a shit about this song). It also can't beat out Rock Lobster from the B52s.

How Soon is Now comes in at #477. That song barely made the list.

[jay santos]

LOL I wouldn't call Moment of Surrender a steaming turd, but even as a huge U2 fan, I can't justify it anywhere in a top songs list. On U2's last album, it was about middle of the pack for me. U2 has had at least a dozen better songs over its last three albums of the last decade, that most of you have probably never heard. They end their latest concert tour with it, and it is an emotional song done live especially the rap Bono adds at the end.

[jay santos]

Sorry for the U2 tangent, but you started it so it's your fault.

Just looked through the list. U2 has eight songs. Moment of Surrender is the fourth U2 song on the list. Absurd. It's nowhere near the top 20 U2 song. I don't know how long U2 will be putting out albums and doing tours, but I wouldn't be surprised to see Moment of Surrender not make their next tour.

[Color Me Badd Fan]

Sorry for the U2 tangent, but you started it so it's your fault.

Just looked through the list. U2 has eight songs. Moment of Surrender is the fourth U2 song on the list. Absurd. It's nowhere near the top 20 U2 song. I don't know how long U2 will be putting out albums and doing tours, but I wouldn't be surprised to see Moment of Surrender not make their next tour.

Where the Streets Have No Name is a great song live, that didn't make the list, fortunately Moment of Surrender did. Maybe U2 will now replace Where the Streets Have No Name with Moment of Surrender as a staple at their concerts. Thanks for the tip Rolling Stone!

[falafel]

White Stripes have only one song - Seven Nation Army

Radiohead have two: Paranoid Android (about middle of the pack) and Fake Plastic Trees (385).

The Beach Boys have 7 songs, all ranked at 276 or higher.

This list seems very heavily weighted towards older songs. I guess its hard to tell how great a new song is since you don't know if it will have lasting power, but still.

[MarkGrace]

I let my subscription end after around ten years of reading it because of this. They've got this brilliant writer named Matt Taibbi working for them, but the caustic tone of his work pervades the whole thing now. It's like a People magazine for hipsters, and their revisionist history started to bug me. They gave Pinkerton a 5-star rating on it's ten year anniversary, but their original rating was abysmal; I remember being a little miffed at the time that it took their readers' acclaim of something for them to reverse opinion. It made me start to wonder about how much music I was ignoring based on their reviews. So, I just listen to stuff for myself now and word of mouth. The days of ratings sites for music are dead I think.

I don't think they're dead at all. In fact, I think sites for rating music are probably bigger than ever, they've just become more niche (though I think a mag like RS aims to be more broad than a lot of other sites) and have less impact on our decision making. It's funny that you should mention Pink, because a friend and I were just discussing the other day how big of an impact reviews in music magazines had on us back in the day, and that album came up. He was telling me that he was so excited for the follow up to Blue, and then when RS trashed Pink he was devastated and never listened to the album. Having the means to purchase an album was a scarce resource for him, so he poured through reviews on every album before making his purchase because he didn't want to blow his one purchase for the month of whatever.

We kind of laughed about it because now that music is so cheap and accessible, that type of negative review wouldn't dissuade us from picking up an album. For example, on emusic I get 37 downloads (basically three albums) for about $15. If a band I like puts out an album that gets stinker reviews, I'm still going to grab it because at worst I'm out $5 or whatever -- nothing like back in the day where it cost you $15-17 of you hard earned money.

As for the revisionist history, this of course is not a recent phenomenon for RS. They absolutely trashed Zepellin back in the day, and now rate basically all their albums as 5*. It happens and doesn't concern me. In fact, I even like it when people are willing to go back and reconsider something they might have missed on, as perception of these things is constantly shifting.

I've been rereading Alex Ross's most excellent tome on music in the 20th Century The Rest Is Noise, and while the names of many of the composers and works in the first half are foreign to me, what's entertaining is how similar the arguments in and among the makers and taster-makers of the late 19th and early 20th century are to the music debates we still read about in contemporary pop music. Just the other night I was reading the chapter about Jean Sibelius, a Finnish composer in the 1920s and 30s whose work was shunned by critics of the day but found significant popular appeal. Many of these works were later revisited and deemed classics in the genre. Ross states:

Mainstream audiences may lag behind the intellectual classes in appreciating the more adventurous composers, but sometimes they are quicker to perceive the value of music that the politicians of style fail to comprehend. Nicolas Slonimsky once put together a delightful book titled Lexicon of Musical Invective, anthologizing wrong-headed music criticism in which now canonical masterpieces were compared to feline caterwauling, barnyard noises, and so on. Slonimsky should also have written a [I]Lexicon of Musical Condescension[I], gathering high-minded essays in which now canonical masterpieces were dismissed as kitsch, with a long section reserved for Sibelius.

Something similar has definitely happened with Pink, along with piles of other albums. But to me this is just all part of the process, and certainly not limited to music as we see it in basically every aspect of the arts.