Rolling Stone’s Top 500 Songs

Can I interest you in a pop punk version? This fella also gives it a spirited, 1980s rock try.

 

Catchy. Too bad that dude is totally unappealing

 

And that's why my post as the very first reply to this thread said music is subjective.

 

"He Stopped Loving Her Today" at 140 is a travesty. The best country song ever.

Good day!

 

203

Knock three times.

 

The most striking aspect of the list is the de-Beatlization of the top of the rankings.

 

Kind of makes sense. If you listened to the radio in the 90s and 00s, there were still plenty of rock bands that obviously owed some kind of debt to them. Now? I think it's more fitting that the Top 10 has less groups, and more outstanding individual artists.

 

I always though music journalists focused too much on how a song "made you feel" and not "why" it made you feel that way. Very few music journalists write about the technical aspects of a song's structure.

 

I’ve talked to people who’ve studied that shit in college and it ruined music for them. Every song is just a chord structure that reminds them of something else. It becomes a game of connecting dots and they become jaded.

I want the wonder. I want to always feel like it is magic.

 

I'd agree with this. I have read two books that dissected the work of two artists, Sinatra (Sinatra! The Song is You! by Will Friedwald) and the Beatles (Can't Buy Me Love by Jonathan Gould) and no matter how well I knew the songs being discussed I found the writing about the musicianship and structure of the songs to often be way over the head of this non-musician. It was just way too technical and scholarly for me.

 

No Styx? Fail.

 

Yeah, I guess I have missed a ton of amazing music over the last 15 years: