Rolling Stone's top 500 songs: Time after time, they get it wrong
By JUAN RODRIGUEZ, The Gazette
"Yes, they've believed in all the papers / And magazines that defined their folklore ... Everybody come back! / No one can do it like you used to."
Frank Zappa, We're Turning Again (1985)
MONTREAL - There they go again - rewriting history to serve their mythologies and legacy. - By "they" I mean the Baby Boomers, specifically the editors of Rolling Stone, which has published a "special - collector's edition" hailing the 500 Greatest Songs of All Time, chosen by a "blue-chip panel" of critics, musicians and industry nabobs.
From the get-go, the title is preposterous. It's the "all time" part that bugs me; fully 395 selections come from just three decades: 1950s (69 songs), '60s (195) and '70s (131). Implicit is the idea that these boomer golden years dominate musical history, without considering that musical progress is a continuum. By "songs" what they really mean is "recordings" of said songs, so we should be talking about 100 years of recorded 15,000 sound. (They start in 1948, with Rollin' Stone by Muddy Waters.)
Thus the selection gives short shrift to the music that came before and after the cherished youth of boomers. Rolling Stone has totally ignored the Great American Songbook (those witty, sophisticated songs from the 1920s through the mid-50s, by the Gershwins, Cole Porter et al), and slighted the hip-hop culture (which has been around for more than 30 years).
For my money, a great recording always sounds fresh and new, and should say something to the listener in the here-and-now, no matter when it was recorded. There's always something new to notice about a great song and recorded performance, no matter how many times you listen to it.
The most egregious omissions, to my ears, are Frank Sinatra, Leonard Cohen, Frank Zappa, Duke Ellington and DJ Shadow; strange, because they're among the most critically discussed and influential musical artists of "all time." Other unrepresented artists: Bessie Smith, Robert Johnson, Louis Jordan (no rap without 1947's Saturday Night Fish Fry), and the modernists Nick Cave, The Pretenders, Sonic Youth, Kraftwerk, Suite Wilco, Gorillaz - get the message? Yet there's room for Norman Greenbaum's quasi-bubblegum, ultimately cloying Spirit in the Sky, and Elton John's equally banal Candle in the Wind.
There's a collective failure to come to terms with rap and hip-hop, a field that literally changed the language of pop, lyrically and musically. A friend says he doesn't consider rap to be "song craft," but, if anything, it reinvents song craft, the first real change in pop since Dylan and, earlier, Chuck Berry. Spoken-word and storytelling set to tricky beats renders obsolete (and pretentious) the inept "beat poetry+jazz" movement of the '50s and '60s. The field is fascinating, including the so-called crass "bling" style, which says more about money, commerce and ghetto-culture than anything the Holy Troika - Beatles-Stones-Dylan - ever did.
But when the first example of hip-hop culture to make Rolling Stone's list, 1982's The Message, by Grandmaster Flash, with its astoundingly skilled and evocative lyrics, comes in at only No. 51, it's a sure tipoff that something is dreadfully skewed with their interpretation of musical pop culture. I counted only 20 loosely defined hip-hop records - among the Greatest 500 Songs.
Of course, best-of lists invite arguments, so I'll take the bait, starting with the Beatles. There's just way too much of the Fab Four (23 entries). A little paring might've been in order; while Please Please Me and A Little Help From My Friends have their charms, they're dispensable.
Following the knee-jerk picks Like A Rolling Stone (Dylan) and (I Can't Get No) Satisfaction (Rolling Stones) - as good as any picks, I suppose, comes Imagine, by John Lennon, at Number 3, a wish-list ditty so sanctimonious that it makes U2 seem understated! Then again John was a buddy of Jann Wenner, founder of the Stone. The Beatles' opus A Day in the Life, one of the 20th century's great miniature dramas (high or low brow), didn't make the Top 10 (instead: the interminable pseudo-incantation Hey Jude).
Pop music made outside the English-speaking world? Forget it. The Stone's sophisticates may talk a good line about global consciousness, but they don't walk the walk. Not even Serge Gainsbourg's universally understood Je t'aime (moi non plus) makes the grade. (It topped the charts in Britain, but stalled at "soixante-neuf " in the U.S.)
While it is true that post-grunge wannabe boy-wonder groups have come and gone (quickly) over the past 10 years, there has been some great music over that time (if only because there's so much more to choose from). The cream rises to the top, or prophetic edges, in every generation. Yet there are only 21 and 27 picks from the '90s and 2000s respectively.
Yes, I love so many of these songs from the '60s (my teen years); much of it was protean music that remains enormously influential. But when you're stuck in the rut of nostalgia, there's no inclination to examine history judiciously, see the present, and look ahead.
