I plan to wrap up the sixth of my decade lists tomorrow. It may be the last one I do for at least 7 years. I don't think I could tackle the 40s. It's just too hard to figure out what was actually released when. For instance, I haven't included any Charlie Parker in my 50s list. I'm pretty sure his recordings I like best are from the 40s, but I don't doubt that there were some terrific live versions from the early 50s I could have included if I had a more full appreciation for his whole discography.
Another issue with the 50s, which I expect would be even more challenging in the 40s, are the songs that were recorded by many artists. It's one thing for me to say I like Elvis Presley's "Mystery Train" better than Junior Parker's original because I know both versions well, or that Pat Boone's "Tutti Frutti" could be ignored entirely in favor of Little Richard's "Tutti Frutti". I also had no problem in the 70s preferring Elvis Costello's "What's So Funny Bout Peace Love and Understanding" to the Brinsley Schwartz original. With the standards from the 30s and 40s, I know the songs more than I know the individual performances and it's often hard with re-issues to sort out recording dates from release dates. I've tried to stick with release dates for these countdowns.
If you're looking for any of the 6 countdowns, they're located here:
1950s (top 400)
1960s (top 500)
1970s (top 500)
1980s (top 500)
1990s (top 300)
2000s (top 300)
If you're extra-interested in the process for making these countdowns, there's a four part interview located here:
part 1 - including the question what makes your lists different?
part 2 - including the question what is the ranking process?
part 3 - including the question which decade was the easiest?
part 4 - including the question what sort of feedback have you received?
Special thanks to Jack at SaltInWound for doing the interview two years ago. They haven't been among my more popular posts, but I really enjoyed it myself, and it helped me think through some aspects of the process that ultimately affected the 1960s and 1950s lists.
Showing posts with label best songs of the decade. Show all posts
Showing posts with label best songs of the decade. Show all posts
Saturday, January 26, 2013
Thursday, July 7, 2011
The Making of a Best-Songs-of-the-Decade List: An Interview (Part 2 of 4)
Part 2 of the interview
Q) How do you listen to the songs? Do you already own most of them? Youtube? Purchase? Nefarious means?
A) I purchase all my music. I feel strongly about that. I’m not rich, but I have a good enough job that I can afford to infuse some money into the recorded-music economy. I say the “recorded-music economy” specifically because I don’t get out to a lot of shows, and I think it’s recorded music more than live music that’s endangered by free downloads. I don’t like Youtube. I’m a music listener, not a music watcher, and I’ve also never invested in nice speakers for my computer. Listening to music on the computer just makes me grouchy, and not a good counterculture-punk-rock sort of grouchy.
I own everything that’s on any of my lists. For one thing, iTunes playlists are central to how I do my organizing and ranking, but, for another thing, how can I say it’s one of the best songs ever if I can’t even be bothered to buy it myself? As a vinyl-lover, I was kind of a late adopter with CDs. I think it was the realization that a bunch of hard-to-find prog rock was available on CD that got me to buy a CD player in 1990. I continued buying used vinyl at that point, but very little new vinyl. Working on this project definitely made me happy with my choices to buy CDs instead of vinyl. I do like listening to music on a turntable, but I like having all my music with me on my iPod even better. Now, I think I probably spend about as much on mp3 downloads (mostly eMusic) as I do at record stores (mostly Amoeba).
Q) What is the ranking process? Is it mathematical in nature? Or just based on feel?
A) I start with the big unsorted list of candidate songs in an iTunes playlist, and then one by one I drag and drop them towards the top of the list to roughly where I think they belong. As I’m doing this, I try not to dwell too much on precisely where they belong. There are songs that are obvious top 40 contenders and there are others that are obviously borderline for making the list at all. The overall list has to start to take shape before I can get too far into the head-to-head rankings.
Generally, during this drag and drop process, there will be songs that I pass over and over as I’m dragging other songs past them, and I realize they were ranked too high. There are other songs that act sort of like firewalls that other good songs get stuck behind, and I realize those songs were ranked too low. I try to correct for those sort of misrankings as I go. Since I’m doing this in iTunes, I frequently listen to the songs as I’m dragging and dropping. Songs with great intros can shoot up the chart fast, and songs with great intros and annoying singers (think Rush or Journey) can move up and down by as much as 100 places as I’m listening to them.
Q) How do you listen to the songs? Do you already own most of them? Youtube? Purchase? Nefarious means?
A) I purchase all my music. I feel strongly about that. I’m not rich, but I have a good enough job that I can afford to infuse some money into the recorded-music economy. I say the “recorded-music economy” specifically because I don’t get out to a lot of shows, and I think it’s recorded music more than live music that’s endangered by free downloads. I don’t like Youtube. I’m a music listener, not a music watcher, and I’ve also never invested in nice speakers for my computer. Listening to music on the computer just makes me grouchy, and not a good counterculture-punk-rock sort of grouchy.
I own everything that’s on any of my lists. For one thing, iTunes playlists are central to how I do my organizing and ranking, but, for another thing, how can I say it’s one of the best songs ever if I can’t even be bothered to buy it myself? As a vinyl-lover, I was kind of a late adopter with CDs. I think it was the realization that a bunch of hard-to-find prog rock was available on CD that got me to buy a CD player in 1990. I continued buying used vinyl at that point, but very little new vinyl. Working on this project definitely made me happy with my choices to buy CDs instead of vinyl. I do like listening to music on a turntable, but I like having all my music with me on my iPod even better. Now, I think I probably spend about as much on mp3 downloads (mostly eMusic) as I do at record stores (mostly Amoeba).
Q) What is the ranking process? Is it mathematical in nature? Or just based on feel?
A) I start with the big unsorted list of candidate songs in an iTunes playlist, and then one by one I drag and drop them towards the top of the list to roughly where I think they belong. As I’m doing this, I try not to dwell too much on precisely where they belong. There are songs that are obvious top 40 contenders and there are others that are obviously borderline for making the list at all. The overall list has to start to take shape before I can get too far into the head-to-head rankings.
Generally, during this drag and drop process, there will be songs that I pass over and over as I’m dragging other songs past them, and I realize they were ranked too high. There are other songs that act sort of like firewalls that other good songs get stuck behind, and I realize those songs were ranked too low. I try to correct for those sort of misrankings as I go. Since I’m doing this in iTunes, I frequently listen to the songs as I’m dragging and dropping. Songs with great intros can shoot up the chart fast, and songs with great intros and annoying singers (think Rush or Journey) can move up and down by as much as 100 places as I’m listening to them.
Q) What qualities are you looking for in a song? i.e. What makes one song "better" or "worse" than another?
A) I decided a while ago that there really isn’t any such thing as good music and bad music. I didn’t think that when I was a snobby college radio station music director, but I think it now. No songs are really any better or worse than others, with the possible exception of Kenny G. There are only songs I want to hear again really, really soon and songs I don’t want to hear again anytime soon. That’s definitely not the only criteria, but there’s really heavy weighting given to how psyched do I think I’m going to be to hear that song come up on random play on the iPod.
A problem with the how-soon-do-I-want-to-hear-it criteria is that there are great songs that I’ve already heard a thousand times. I don’t even think there’s any hyperbole when I say “a thousand times.” I really try to listen to those songs with fresh ears and think about what I’d think of them if I hadn’t heard them so many times. I don’t know if that’s even possible, but it’s what I pretend to myself I’m doing. There’s also the issue of what other people think. If my wife really likes a song, mostly I like that song more myself because when it comes on, I know both of us are going to be happy. It can’t be that only she likes it. I have to like it first and foremost myself, but, if she likes it too, that’s a bonus. It subconsciously sways me to being happier to hear that song playing, and I’m not going to deny myself that happiness. It’s the same with my kids. My 6-year-old loves Pinball Wizard and learned all the lyrics and you better believe it’s going to be high on my 60s list.
I definitely care a lot more about the music than the lyrics. There are way, way, way too many rock critics that can’t write a review without trying to tell you about every silly thing the singer is emoting through his or her mediocre lyrics, and they have to quote whatever couplet they found that best exemplifies this point even if it’s the worst song on the record. Good lyrics definitely improve a song and lousy lyrics can diminish an otherwise great song, but pop songs are mostly about the hooks and the riffs, the grooves and the choruses, getting the blend right between the familiar and the unexpected.
Some songs definitely get bonus points for being groundbreaking and other songs lose points for being derivative. Songs that are on great albums probably get a bit of a boost and occasionally lead to some of my more idiosyncratic choices. For instance, there’s a Sloan song in my top 5 of the 90s that didn’t even make it onto Sloan’s greatest hits record, but Sloan was one of my favorite 90s bands and Navy Blues was probably my favorite record of the 90s, so the particular song that I liked best on that record may have gotten an unreasonable boost.
In terms of the head-to-head rankings, when I got to the point of finalizing the list, I found a number of issues a bit challenging. On the 80s list, especially, I was a little surprised at how many hardcore songs made it to the top of the list. The thing is, when you put a great hardcore song up head-to-head with a great new wave song, it’s kind of hard to not envision the hardcore song kickin’ the new wave song’s ass. A great new wave song can’t get beaten by a so-so hardcore song, but, if they’re both great, the one that’s faster and louder and grittier just has an unfair advantage. I can’t totally justify it, but I definitely experienced it.
The head-to-head comparisons between serious jazz and everything else are tough too. What in the world does it mean to say that Martha and the Muffins’ Echo Beach is ever so slightly better than myfavorite track by the David Murray Octet? In cases like that, I just have to fall back on my how-soon-do-I-want-hear-it-again rule, which trumps all the absurd notions of greatness that sometimes prevent us from liking what we honestly like the most. I had to make exceptions for the 70s list. Classics like “Stairway to Heaven,” “Tangled Up in Blue,” and “Imagine” aren’t properly ranked according to how soon I want to hear them, so some intangible notion of those songs’ perceived greatness definitely pushed them up the list. Having said that, “Imagine” is definitely one of those songs that’s way too high on most critics’ lists because of the lyrics. Yes – the lyrics make an impressive statement, but the song as a whole is simply not Lennon’s best. Lennon knew how to rock and that song doesn’t rock. I think I’m already regretting including it in my top 100. It was #3 on Rolling Stone’s best of all time list, incidentally.
Putting top 40 songs up side-to-side with obscure recordings was also tough. Listening to them side-by-side, the polished musicianship of some of the top 40 hits can make some of my obscure personal favorites sound a bit shambling. This is one of the ways in which making a highly personal idiosyncratic list competes with a desire to have the list withstand at least a bit of external scrutiny. Bargepole is one example. I thought they’d be higher on my 80s list, because I absolutely love their record “Sodbuster.” Bargepole was one of many bands I discovered through some big record buys at a store in Toronto called the Record Peddler that had a ton of super-cheap vinyl from UK indie labels during the mid 90s. Ultimately, though, when I had to play it side-by-side against a lot of other songs that are better known, I found it just didn’t stand up quite as well as I expected. A lot of obscure bands are, I have to admit, obscure for a reason.
Both novelty songs and songs that were novel were hard for me as well. Robert Wyatt’s Soup Song is one of my very favorite songs from the 70s. It really embodies the name of my last radio show, “Pleasant Mutations” (WRUW-FM Cleveland ’92-’94), and I’ve always loved the fact that the vocals are expressed from the point of view of a bacon sandwich. When it came to deciding what did and didn’t make the cut for the top 40 though, I think the bacon sandwich perspective became more of a hindrance than an advantage. Another hard one was Jerry Reed’s Semi-GreatPredictor. The song has very little in common with anything else Jerry Reed did and the lyric “He views the world with vision and with tact. He ponders human fate and then profoundly states that infinity will take up all the slack.” Check me out, quoting couplets like the rock critics for whom I supposedly hold so much disdain. Because I have so much respect for Jerry Reed’s musicianship, demonstrated on dozens of other songs, I didn’t feel like I could make “Semi-Great Predictor” the highest ranking Jerry Reed song on the list and it ended up much lower than I expected. I’m listening to it right now. I’m really not comfortable with the choice I made on that one, but there’s plenty to cause discomfort in terms of the choices on the list.
Some other surprises included Wings. The Wings albums are so disappointing compared to the Beatles records, it’s easy to forget that pretty much every one of them had at least one really great song. Because of the obvious comparison to the Beatles, I really don’t think Wings gets enough respect. On the 80s list, I was a little surprised that “Back in Black” didn’t end up higher. I think the “Back in Black” I hear in my head when it isn’t playing is better than the actual song. It’s also one of those cusp-of-the-decade songs that might well have charted higher for me if it were evaluated next to the songs of the 70s than it did compared to the songs of the 80s. Songs that were somehow archetypical of the decade generally got some bonus points, either consciously or subconsciously. Andy Gibb’s “Shadow Dancing” ended up a whole lot higher than I would have anticipated. I didn’t even like that song that much in the 70s, but it’s a remarkably well done song that marks the final days of an era. It was one of the last Gibb brother songs before “Tragedy” and “Too Much Heaven.” I thought one of those songs would make the list, but the singing is just too annoying to stand even if “Tragedy” has a great hook.
Parts 3 and 4 of the interview will follow in future posts
A) I decided a while ago that there really isn’t any such thing as good music and bad music. I didn’t think that when I was a snobby college radio station music director, but I think it now. No songs are really any better or worse than others, with the possible exception of Kenny G. There are only songs I want to hear again really, really soon and songs I don’t want to hear again anytime soon. That’s definitely not the only criteria, but there’s really heavy weighting given to how psyched do I think I’m going to be to hear that song come up on random play on the iPod.
A problem with the how-soon-do-I-want-to-hear-it criteria is that there are great songs that I’ve already heard a thousand times. I don’t even think there’s any hyperbole when I say “a thousand times.” I really try to listen to those songs with fresh ears and think about what I’d think of them if I hadn’t heard them so many times. I don’t know if that’s even possible, but it’s what I pretend to myself I’m doing. There’s also the issue of what other people think. If my wife really likes a song, mostly I like that song more myself because when it comes on, I know both of us are going to be happy. It can’t be that only she likes it. I have to like it first and foremost myself, but, if she likes it too, that’s a bonus. It subconsciously sways me to being happier to hear that song playing, and I’m not going to deny myself that happiness. It’s the same with my kids. My 6-year-old loves Pinball Wizard and learned all the lyrics and you better believe it’s going to be high on my 60s list.
I definitely care a lot more about the music than the lyrics. There are way, way, way too many rock critics that can’t write a review without trying to tell you about every silly thing the singer is emoting through his or her mediocre lyrics, and they have to quote whatever couplet they found that best exemplifies this point even if it’s the worst song on the record. Good lyrics definitely improve a song and lousy lyrics can diminish an otherwise great song, but pop songs are mostly about the hooks and the riffs, the grooves and the choruses, getting the blend right between the familiar and the unexpected.
Some songs definitely get bonus points for being groundbreaking and other songs lose points for being derivative. Songs that are on great albums probably get a bit of a boost and occasionally lead to some of my more idiosyncratic choices. For instance, there’s a Sloan song in my top 5 of the 90s that didn’t even make it onto Sloan’s greatest hits record, but Sloan was one of my favorite 90s bands and Navy Blues was probably my favorite record of the 90s, so the particular song that I liked best on that record may have gotten an unreasonable boost.
In terms of the head-to-head rankings, when I got to the point of finalizing the list, I found a number of issues a bit challenging. On the 80s list, especially, I was a little surprised at how many hardcore songs made it to the top of the list. The thing is, when you put a great hardcore song up head-to-head with a great new wave song, it’s kind of hard to not envision the hardcore song kickin’ the new wave song’s ass. A great new wave song can’t get beaten by a so-so hardcore song, but, if they’re both great, the one that’s faster and louder and grittier just has an unfair advantage. I can’t totally justify it, but I definitely experienced it.
The head-to-head comparisons between serious jazz and everything else are tough too. What in the world does it mean to say that Martha and the Muffins’ Echo Beach is ever so slightly better than myfavorite track by the David Murray Octet? In cases like that, I just have to fall back on my how-soon-do-I-want-hear-it-again rule, which trumps all the absurd notions of greatness that sometimes prevent us from liking what we honestly like the most. I had to make exceptions for the 70s list. Classics like “Stairway to Heaven,” “Tangled Up in Blue,” and “Imagine” aren’t properly ranked according to how soon I want to hear them, so some intangible notion of those songs’ perceived greatness definitely pushed them up the list. Having said that, “Imagine” is definitely one of those songs that’s way too high on most critics’ lists because of the lyrics. Yes – the lyrics make an impressive statement, but the song as a whole is simply not Lennon’s best. Lennon knew how to rock and that song doesn’t rock. I think I’m already regretting including it in my top 100. It was #3 on Rolling Stone’s best of all time list, incidentally.
Putting top 40 songs up side-to-side with obscure recordings was also tough. Listening to them side-by-side, the polished musicianship of some of the top 40 hits can make some of my obscure personal favorites sound a bit shambling. This is one of the ways in which making a highly personal idiosyncratic list competes with a desire to have the list withstand at least a bit of external scrutiny. Bargepole is one example. I thought they’d be higher on my 80s list, because I absolutely love their record “Sodbuster.” Bargepole was one of many bands I discovered through some big record buys at a store in Toronto called the Record Peddler that had a ton of super-cheap vinyl from UK indie labels during the mid 90s. Ultimately, though, when I had to play it side-by-side against a lot of other songs that are better known, I found it just didn’t stand up quite as well as I expected. A lot of obscure bands are, I have to admit, obscure for a reason.
Both novelty songs and songs that were novel were hard for me as well. Robert Wyatt’s Soup Song is one of my very favorite songs from the 70s. It really embodies the name of my last radio show, “Pleasant Mutations” (WRUW-FM Cleveland ’92-’94), and I’ve always loved the fact that the vocals are expressed from the point of view of a bacon sandwich. When it came to deciding what did and didn’t make the cut for the top 40 though, I think the bacon sandwich perspective became more of a hindrance than an advantage. Another hard one was Jerry Reed’s Semi-GreatPredictor. The song has very little in common with anything else Jerry Reed did and the lyric “He views the world with vision and with tact. He ponders human fate and then profoundly states that infinity will take up all the slack.” Check me out, quoting couplets like the rock critics for whom I supposedly hold so much disdain. Because I have so much respect for Jerry Reed’s musicianship, demonstrated on dozens of other songs, I didn’t feel like I could make “Semi-Great Predictor” the highest ranking Jerry Reed song on the list and it ended up much lower than I expected. I’m listening to it right now. I’m really not comfortable with the choice I made on that one, but there’s plenty to cause discomfort in terms of the choices on the list.
Some other surprises included Wings. The Wings albums are so disappointing compared to the Beatles records, it’s easy to forget that pretty much every one of them had at least one really great song. Because of the obvious comparison to the Beatles, I really don’t think Wings gets enough respect. On the 80s list, I was a little surprised that “Back in Black” didn’t end up higher. I think the “Back in Black” I hear in my head when it isn’t playing is better than the actual song. It’s also one of those cusp-of-the-decade songs that might well have charted higher for me if it were evaluated next to the songs of the 70s than it did compared to the songs of the 80s. Songs that were somehow archetypical of the decade generally got some bonus points, either consciously or subconsciously. Andy Gibb’s “Shadow Dancing” ended up a whole lot higher than I would have anticipated. I didn’t even like that song that much in the 70s, but it’s a remarkably well done song that marks the final days of an era. It was one of the last Gibb brother songs before “Tragedy” and “Too Much Heaven.” I thought one of those songs would make the list, but the singing is just too annoying to stand even if “Tragedy” has a great hook.
Parts 3 and 4 of the interview will follow in future posts
Tuesday, July 5, 2011
The Making of a Best-Songs-of-the-Decade List: An Interview (Part 1 of 4)
This is the first of four posts with a Q&A about the making of the four best-of-the-decade lists I've made so far. Thanks to Jack Silbert for suggesting the idea, posing the questions, and lightly editing some of my answers.
Q) Who are you, what is your background in music, and what are these lists you've been compiling?
A) I’m a statistician in the Bay Area of California. I’ve pretty much always been a math geek first and a music geek second, but music listmaking is where I find balance and happiness.
My first minimum wage job (11th grade) was working as a sales clerk at the Musicland at Prince George’s Plaza. I had been subscribing to Billboard magazine for several years at that point, having discovered that Casey Kasem was not the only way in which the top 40 could be revealed to me. I predicted each week’s top 40 as a hobby, so ordering the 45s was pretty much an ideal job for me.
When I went to college at Carnegie Mellon, I immediately got involved with WRCT-FM and served as the music director from 1985-1987. One of my “innovations” as music director was to make an honest top 35 to report to CMJ and Rockpool, the trade journals that tracked college radio playlists. We didn’t have a rotation or anything silly like that, so we had to tally by hand every single play that records from the “new bin” received. I think people started playing a lot more stuff and more varied stuff from the new bin once they realized that we were reporting an honest playlist instead of what the major labels were pushing me to report over the phone.
During grad school at the University of Michigan in the early 90s, I met my wife at WCBN. The next stop was Cleveland, WRUW, doing my last, and probably best, radio show, Pleasant Mutations. In 1994 I bought a banjo and an amp, and joined a band with some friends in the Department of Biostatistics and Epidemiology at the Cleveland Clinic. We recorded a few songs at Noise New Jersey with Kramer before I moved to California. Somebody none of us knew made a youtube video of one of the songs recently.
I recorded a few songs by myself on 4-track after moving to California, but mostly I moved back into being a listener. Since 1998, I’ve been making a mix CD called “Nothing But Good Things” (NGBT) that I send out to a small group of friends. Because of my lasting affection for Casey Kasem, for NGBT #40, I decided to do a countdown of the last decade in the style of American Top 40. I even inspired somebody else to do one.
When I started deciding on my top 40 of the 00s, I made a big iTunes playlist of candidate songs, and it just got bigger and bigger. At some point I decided to type up a top 100, even though the mix CD was only going to be a top 40. Next thing you know, I’d ended up with a top 300.
Making the list was a lot of fun, so a few months later I made a top 300 of the 90s and eventually progressed to the 80s and the 70s. I’ll definitely plan on the 60s sometime in the next year. I don’t know if I can do the 50s justice.
Q) What makes your lists different than other music-countdown lists we've seen?
A) One important thing about my lists is that they’re all song lists. I find that there are a lot more lists of best albums or best CDs than there are lists of best songs. As a former DJ and as somebody who really fell in love with recorded music via 45 singles, I’ve always been more about the song than the album. Random play on the iPod has made songs more relevant and albums even less relevant. Also, if somebody sees something on the list that sounds interesting and they want to check it out, that’s a lot easier with a song than a whole record. You don’t have to pay as much to download one song, or, better yet, call up a DJ and request it.
The other thing that’s unique about the lists is the size and variety of them, coming from just one individual. I think individuals often make top 10 lists or top 20 lists or occasionally top 40 lists, but usually it’s just magazines or music websites that make longer lists. The longer lists always feel a bit homogenized, probably because there are committees or consensus involved, and the personal lists never go very deep. I also see a lot of personal lists on Amazon where people list their 20 favorite records and 4 or 5 of them are all one band. Yay – you like that band a whole lot – who cares? I know I’ve got some overrepresented artists and genres on my list, but I think my one-song-per-album rule keeps that in check, and my one-song-per-artist-in-the-top-40 rule helps too.
Q) How do you begin one of your lists? Do you just start jotting down songs? Do you consult other lists? Tell us about the research process.
A) The 2000s were the easiest to start because pretty much all of the music I liked in the 2000s was already in my iTunes library, and none of the date tags were for the wrong decade. I’m obsessive about rating my music in iTunes, so the starting point was just a smart playlist of 4-star and 5-star rated songs from the 2000s. Next, I began dragging and dropping songs from the smart playlist into a regular playlist, picking out no more than one song per album and only picking out songs that I thought could reasonably be in a top 100 list. The fact that I ended up with more than 300 songs that I originally thought could be in a top 100 list may suggest just how subjective the difference is between what’s #100 and what’s #300, or it may just mean that there’s even more music that I really love than I guessed myself.
The 1990s were a little harder than the 2000s. I was still buying a fair number of 7” singles in the 1990s, and I realized as I got into the list that there were quite a few that I hadn’t gotten around to digitizing. I was an early adopter with CDR decks and I still have one, along with a turntable and a tape deck. It doesn’t get a ton of use anymore, but making the lists was a nice opportunity to rediscover my vinyl and also get it archived digitally.
The 1980s were the hardest. I think about a third of my 80s list was vinyl that I digitized while making the list. I’ve repurchased a lot of my favorite 80s music on CD or digital download, but there’s tons of great music from the 80s that hasn’t been released digitally to my knowledge. The 80s were also a big challenge because of all of the bad date tags for digital downloads. The iTunes store is the absolute worst with that. Why do I care what the year of the digital release was? Why did they set up a cool feature like smart playlists and then sabotage it with bad date tags?
I do look at other lists, but I’m looking at them mostly for possible omissions as opposed to paying very much attention to their rankings. I’ve always used lists to inform purchases. I remember going to Musicland when I was in the 6th or 7th grade and trying to buy “Heart of Glass.” The clerk hadn’t heard of it and said he didn’t think they had it. I indignantly informed him that it was already #1 in England (I always liked the non-U.S. charts when they printed them in Billboard). I think the first time I bought an album I hadn’t heard, but purely because it was on a bunch of best-of-the-year lists, was R.E.M.’s “Murmur.” That set me on a path of buying a lot more music using the same approach.
In terms of specific sources, one thing I looked at was the Rolling Stone Magazine top 500 songs of all time. It’s helpful because it has some very popular and really great songs that I’ve just never gotten around to buying. Even if I really like a song, if it seems everpresent by simply living life, I haven’t felt a real need to get it loaded onto my iPod. I went ahead and bought some of those songs while making these lists. I also look at the Robert Christgau books, which are nice because they’re organized by decade. For the later decades, the Pitchfork lists are good to look at. I also enjoy perusing individuals’ listmania lists on Amazon. Some of them are dreadful, but the Amazon software engineers mostly know what they’re doing with how they’ve programmed the suggestion for other lists you might like.
Another invaluable source on my music book shelves is my collection of Joel Whitburn books. I have about 10 of them for various genres. They give the peak and weeks on chart for every entry on various Billboard charts. Obviously, I haven’t used it yet for the decade lists, but I really like his Pop Hits 1940-1954 book. It has a very short section in the beginning that does a nice job succinctly summarizing the battle over formats (78 vs. 45 vs. 33-1/3) in that period. The 33-1/3 7” single fought as valiantly as the betamax video tape would 30 years later.
Continue to part 2 of the interview, or skip to part 3 or part 4.
Q) Who are you, what is your background in music, and what are these lists you've been compiling?
A) I’m a statistician in the Bay Area of California. I’ve pretty much always been a math geek first and a music geek second, but music listmaking is where I find balance and happiness.
My first minimum wage job (11th grade) was working as a sales clerk at the Musicland at Prince George’s Plaza. I had been subscribing to Billboard magazine for several years at that point, having discovered that Casey Kasem was not the only way in which the top 40 could be revealed to me. I predicted each week’s top 40 as a hobby, so ordering the 45s was pretty much an ideal job for me.
When I went to college at Carnegie Mellon, I immediately got involved with WRCT-FM and served as the music director from 1985-1987. One of my “innovations” as music director was to make an honest top 35 to report to CMJ and Rockpool, the trade journals that tracked college radio playlists. We didn’t have a rotation or anything silly like that, so we had to tally by hand every single play that records from the “new bin” received. I think people started playing a lot more stuff and more varied stuff from the new bin once they realized that we were reporting an honest playlist instead of what the major labels were pushing me to report over the phone.
During grad school at the University of Michigan in the early 90s, I met my wife at WCBN. The next stop was Cleveland, WRUW, doing my last, and probably best, radio show, Pleasant Mutations. In 1994 I bought a banjo and an amp, and joined a band with some friends in the Department of Biostatistics and Epidemiology at the Cleveland Clinic. We recorded a few songs at Noise New Jersey with Kramer before I moved to California. Somebody none of us knew made a youtube video of one of the songs recently.
I recorded a few songs by myself on 4-track after moving to California, but mostly I moved back into being a listener. Since 1998, I’ve been making a mix CD called “Nothing But Good Things” (NGBT) that I send out to a small group of friends. Because of my lasting affection for Casey Kasem, for NGBT #40, I decided to do a countdown of the last decade in the style of American Top 40. I even inspired somebody else to do one.
When I started deciding on my top 40 of the 00s, I made a big iTunes playlist of candidate songs, and it just got bigger and bigger. At some point I decided to type up a top 100, even though the mix CD was only going to be a top 40. Next thing you know, I’d ended up with a top 300.
Making the list was a lot of fun, so a few months later I made a top 300 of the 90s and eventually progressed to the 80s and the 70s. I’ll definitely plan on the 60s sometime in the next year. I don’t know if I can do the 50s justice.
Q) What makes your lists different than other music-countdown lists we've seen?
A) One important thing about my lists is that they’re all song lists. I find that there are a lot more lists of best albums or best CDs than there are lists of best songs. As a former DJ and as somebody who really fell in love with recorded music via 45 singles, I’ve always been more about the song than the album. Random play on the iPod has made songs more relevant and albums even less relevant. Also, if somebody sees something on the list that sounds interesting and they want to check it out, that’s a lot easier with a song than a whole record. You don’t have to pay as much to download one song, or, better yet, call up a DJ and request it.
The other thing that’s unique about the lists is the size and variety of them, coming from just one individual. I think individuals often make top 10 lists or top 20 lists or occasionally top 40 lists, but usually it’s just magazines or music websites that make longer lists. The longer lists always feel a bit homogenized, probably because there are committees or consensus involved, and the personal lists never go very deep. I also see a lot of personal lists on Amazon where people list their 20 favorite records and 4 or 5 of them are all one band. Yay – you like that band a whole lot – who cares? I know I’ve got some overrepresented artists and genres on my list, but I think my one-song-per-album rule keeps that in check, and my one-song-per-artist-in-the-top-40 rule helps too.
Q) How do you begin one of your lists? Do you just start jotting down songs? Do you consult other lists? Tell us about the research process.
A) The 2000s were the easiest to start because pretty much all of the music I liked in the 2000s was already in my iTunes library, and none of the date tags were for the wrong decade. I’m obsessive about rating my music in iTunes, so the starting point was just a smart playlist of 4-star and 5-star rated songs from the 2000s. Next, I began dragging and dropping songs from the smart playlist into a regular playlist, picking out no more than one song per album and only picking out songs that I thought could reasonably be in a top 100 list. The fact that I ended up with more than 300 songs that I originally thought could be in a top 100 list may suggest just how subjective the difference is between what’s #100 and what’s #300, or it may just mean that there’s even more music that I really love than I guessed myself.
The 1990s were a little harder than the 2000s. I was still buying a fair number of 7” singles in the 1990s, and I realized as I got into the list that there were quite a few that I hadn’t gotten around to digitizing. I was an early adopter with CDR decks and I still have one, along with a turntable and a tape deck. It doesn’t get a ton of use anymore, but making the lists was a nice opportunity to rediscover my vinyl and also get it archived digitally.
The 1980s were the hardest. I think about a third of my 80s list was vinyl that I digitized while making the list. I’ve repurchased a lot of my favorite 80s music on CD or digital download, but there’s tons of great music from the 80s that hasn’t been released digitally to my knowledge. The 80s were also a big challenge because of all of the bad date tags for digital downloads. The iTunes store is the absolute worst with that. Why do I care what the year of the digital release was? Why did they set up a cool feature like smart playlists and then sabotage it with bad date tags?
I do look at other lists, but I’m looking at them mostly for possible omissions as opposed to paying very much attention to their rankings. I’ve always used lists to inform purchases. I remember going to Musicland when I was in the 6th or 7th grade and trying to buy “Heart of Glass.” The clerk hadn’t heard of it and said he didn’t think they had it. I indignantly informed him that it was already #1 in England (I always liked the non-U.S. charts when they printed them in Billboard). I think the first time I bought an album I hadn’t heard, but purely because it was on a bunch of best-of-the-year lists, was R.E.M.’s “Murmur.” That set me on a path of buying a lot more music using the same approach.
In terms of specific sources, one thing I looked at was the Rolling Stone Magazine top 500 songs of all time. It’s helpful because it has some very popular and really great songs that I’ve just never gotten around to buying. Even if I really like a song, if it seems everpresent by simply living life, I haven’t felt a real need to get it loaded onto my iPod. I went ahead and bought some of those songs while making these lists. I also look at the Robert Christgau books, which are nice because they’re organized by decade. For the later decades, the Pitchfork lists are good to look at. I also enjoy perusing individuals’ listmania lists on Amazon. Some of them are dreadful, but the Amazon software engineers mostly know what they’re doing with how they’ve programmed the suggestion for other lists you might like.
Another invaluable source on my music book shelves is my collection of Joel Whitburn books. I have about 10 of them for various genres. They give the peak and weeks on chart for every entry on various Billboard charts. Obviously, I haven’t used it yet for the decade lists, but I really like his Pop Hits 1940-1954 book. It has a very short section in the beginning that does a nice job succinctly summarizing the battle over formats (78 vs. 45 vs. 33-1/3) in that period. The 33-1/3 7” single fought as valiantly as the betamax video tape would 30 years later.
Continue to part 2 of the interview, or skip to part 3 or part 4.
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