November 26, 2004

The Rolling Stone Top 500

OK, I feel like a whore for even bringing this up - I mean what are these lists but incredibly lazy attempts to get your product(s) noticed - but Rolling Stone is theoretically supposed to be a music magazine, and one oriented towards the concept of rock music in particular, so I've got to ask - why do so many of their top rock songs not rock? "What's Going On" is a terrific song. Absolutely great, and it's reputation as a classic is deserved. But is it a rock song? I think people could debate that point. But that's at least one of the songs you could argue about. There are loads of things here that clearly aren't rock songs - "Imagine"? "Bridge Over Troubled Waters"? Are they trying to be funny?

Posted by armand at November 26, 2004 10:17 AM | TrackBack | Posted to Music


Comments

haven't seen the list, but aren't you hair-splitting? like saying, any top X list of classical music would lack value if it had both an example of baroque and an example of romantic era stuff in the same list.

rock isn't all stuff that, you know, rocks. "what's goin' on," perhaps, deserves a classification as soul or R & B, which one at least could argue are separate genre, and "bridge . . . " is just as easily identified as folk, which also probably is a separate genre, but in sum rock is a phenomenon that cuts a broad musical swath. which is to say that, at the very least, "imagine" is a no brainer on two levels: first, as a "rock" song, and second, as a worthy one of the top 500 of those.

Posted by: joshua at November 26, 2004 09:09 PM | PERMALINK

all right, now i've seen some of the list, and i have this to say:

1) overrepresentation of soul and r & b, which on further reflection is probably not appropriate. otis redding is something else. so is the ray charles that sang georgia on my mind, though on other songs he debatably wandered towards rock, just as he also nodded toward jazz and country from time to time.

2) i'm sorry, but there are like ten U2 songs better than "I still haven't found what I'm looking for," including about half of Joshua Tree, and "Sunday Bloody Sunday" ought to be one of the overall top 10. i mean, the beatles' "In My Life" higher than SBS?

Posted by: joshua at November 26, 2004 09:21 PM | PERMALINK

Of course I'm hair splitting since there's no clear definition of "rock and roll". But as I personally conceive the term, Bridge Over Troubled Waters is nothing of the sort. It is, as Joshua notes, folk - or something like folk.

And I definitely agree with Joshua about I Still Haven't Found What I'm Looking For's ranking. I'll agree with the magazine that One is a better song - but it's far from the only better U2 song. There are many, many, many others that are notably superior - and not just from the albums he notes.

And I hand't even looked beyond the Top 50. I love that Dionne Warwick comes in at #70. That's a classic song and all, but when I think Rock and Roll Dionne Warwick is one of the last names that would ever leap to mind.

Posted by: Armand at November 27, 2004 10:41 AM | PERMALINK

How can I have any faith in a list that has not one Flaming Lips song?!

[stalks off muttering under a black cloud of aging hipster funk]

Posted by: binky at November 28, 2004 04:49 PM | PERMALINK

Rolling Stone hasn't "rocked" since sometime in the early 1970s, and wouldn't know what to do with "rock" if it fell on them.

Just glancing at the top ten, you've got 5 from the 1960s, two from the 1950s, two from the 1970s, and one from the 1990s. Yeah, that's a good list. Idiots.

Posted by: baltar at November 29, 2004 09:09 AM | PERMALINK

Just because I don't feel like doing real work right now, I sorted the dumb list by year:

2 songs from the 1940s.

25 songs from the 1950s.

204 songs from the 1960s.

142 songs from the 1970s.

57 songs from the 1980s.

21 songs from the 1990s (including none from 1998, 1999).

3 songs from 2000 on.

This is absurd. Of all the great rock songs, only 81 have been written since 1980? And two were written by Eminem? One by Metallica (Enter Sandman - even if they deserve to be on the list, that's moronic)? And none - zero - by Van Halen. If you are going to make a list of the best songs in Rock, how can you not included (no matter what you think of them) anything by Van Halen?

Posted by: baltar at November 29, 2004 09:26 AM | PERMALINK

Yeah, the time selection is off. And no Van Halen is pretty weird (says a guy who's not much of a fan). That said, after having looked all the way through the list there were a handful of things about it that I liked - like including "William It Was Really Nothing" as an entry from The Smiths. I think a big part of my problem with this is that the numbers themselves are so strange in certain instances: Don't Fear the Reaper all the way down at 397, Paradise City at 453? And just reading it makes for some laugh-out-loud moments: I Want To Know What Love Is directly above Superfreak? Tupac right before Candle in the Wind?

Posted by: Armand at November 29, 2004 02:58 PM | PERMALINK
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