What are the best songs ever? You’d think that would be an impossible list to compile – certainly an impossible CD to mix. Imagine trying to gather the best songs ever onto CD. You’d need a room the size of the Pentagon just to keep them in.
These days, super-huge hard drives let you store more songs than you can comfortably imagine in one place – which makes the prospect of compiling a list of the best songs ever spatially possible, if still a little ambitious. Your real problem lies in defining the list. What are the best songs ever? One man’s “best songs ever” is another man’s audio nightmare. Imagine listening to a list of the best songs ever as compiled by a boy-band fanatic or a devotee of close-harmony mining choirs.
Your question, in defining the list of the best songs ever, has to be this: are there some songs, some pieces of music, that transcend boundaries of taste or fashion? Is there some mark of quality, some scale, you can apply to music in order to say “yes – that qualifies as one of the best songs ever”, whether you like it or not?
What we’re talking about here is classification: the idea that you can somehow identify attributes a piece of music has to have in order to label it one of the best songs ever. These attributes – the “best songs ever matrix” – would be things like sales; common agreement; and something you could call archetypicality. Archetypicality would mean that in order to count as one of the best songs ever a piece of music would need to stand as a perfect example of its genre: so, for instance, “Good Vibrations” by the Beach Boys would qualify as one of the best songs ever on the grounds that it’s a perfect pop song. Whether you like “Good Vibrations” or not, according to this set of “marks” for the best songs ever, would be immaterial. You might hate The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, to cross art forms for a second, but you can’t deny that it functions extremely effectively as a horror flick. Which makes it one of the best horror movies ever in the same way that “Good Vibrations” ought to be one of the best songs ever.
The problem, of course, is that people who like music (and so people who are most likely to be trying to compile a list of the best songs ever) are partisan. Try telling a mid-80s hip-hop obsessive that “Good Vibrations” is one of the best songs ever and see what happens. Maybe the best songs ever are simply the ones we like. In which case, I stand by my claim. “Good Vibrations” is one of the best songs ever. So there.
