posted on Monday, September 26, 2005 7:18 AM
by
Endie
More musical listage
Last week, while writing about Kerrang's annual lists of "greatest albums", I strayed as far as The Rolling Stone's list of the top 500 songs of all time. My initial reaction was boredom, followed by disbelief and a hint of anger. Let's call it frustration, actually: anger is surely too extreme a response.
But still... Look at it. Does anything grab you? I mean, apart from the fact the Rolling Stone's top 500 songs starts with Dylan's "Like a Rolling Stone", with the number two being by the Rolling Stones. I'm not certain that they're entirely focussing on the music here, nor am I sure that the voting system supposedly involved really threw up such serendipitous results.
The real story is that this list was clearly made by boomers. They liked music from the 50's to the 70's. They even liked some of the stuff their kids played to them in the 80's But since then, well, it's just a racket, isn't it? And that dance and hip-hop nonsense will never last: just a flash in the pan.
So in the top 200 songs you have five tracks from the 1990s. There are only three songs from the last five years. Three out of five hundred?!? Two of those are from Eminem, clearly satisfying the "new music" and hip-hop quotas in one (the other is Hey Ya by Outkast. The five chosen from the 90's in the top 200 are informative in themselves: REM's Losing My Religion, U2's One, Sinead O'Connor's cover of Prince's Nothing Compares 2 U, Nirvana's Smells Like Teen Spirit and Beck's Loser. These are just the type of songs you'd see on the iPod of a fat, late-middle-aged A&R man from RCA, althuogh he'd usually skip Beck when it came on in shuffle mode at the gym.
So it is that you find September Gurls by Big Star; One Fine Day by the Chiffons;It's Your Thing by the Isley Brothers and dozens more tracks now usually available in compilations advertised on daytime television with the words "remember, Greatest Easy listening Hits volumes one to nine are not available in the shops." But you'll be hard-pushed to find anything from the alternative scene beyond token entries for the Smiths, The Cure and the Pixies. Nor should you go looking for rap outside Eminem or the easier "soul" stuff like R. Kelly. I'm not Green Day's biggest fan, but they have several singles that could hold their own in there. Faith No More should have at least one single in the list, probably From Out of Nowhere or Epic. The failure to include any one of a number of hits by Cypress Hill is shocking. If the Foo Fighters were too recent for the compilers, surely Iron Maiden were not. Iggy Pop's Nightclubbing is surely a better candidate than Muddy Waters' Mannish Boy. Pearl Jam's Jeremy might just about be considered worth an entry, whereas Sly and the Family Stone's Thank You (Falettinme Be Mice Elf Agin) might arguably struggle to justify its place.
Most glaring of all, The Smashing Pumpkins' Tonight, Tonight isn't there. Nor are any of their other tracks. And surely The Pogues merit a place. Even the Americo-centric Rolling Stone panel must have heard of The Fairytale of New York?
And if you think that i am being deliberately obscurantist and pretentious, then how about this: why are there no songs from the Spice Girls, probably the most influential "band" of their decade? I hate them, and I admit that the influence in question was horrible to the point of malignance - a hundred manufactured bands - but it was great pop, nonetheless. And no worse or more commercial than the equally manufactured Motown pop that dominates large portions of the "official" list.
Put it this way: I imagine that Jeremy Clarkson, the man whose enthusiasm for well-pressed jeans and a bubble perm almost single-handedly destroyed the place of denim in the UK in the 90s, would happily admit to owning 450 - at a minimum - of these tracks. Insert your own mid-life crisis-afflicted national celebrity here.