nme.com - you may find these scenes disturbing - top 100 singles of all time

Four of these are great singles. Four are by bands I don't much care for but are pretty obviously those bands at the peak of what they did. Two are just rotten.

http://www.nme.com/news/103493.htm

Gwen Stefani
Dr. Dre
Romeo
Roots Manuva
Mark Lanegan
Liam Gallagher
Jay-Z
Dave Grohl
Richard Fearless
Richard 'D' James
Dre/Outkast
Arthur Lee
Nick Oliveri
Ryan Adams
Felix Da Housecat
Peaches
Didz
Alesha Dixon
DJ Hell
Robert Harvey
Serj Tankian
DJ Rubbish
Carl Barat
Daniel Kessler
James Murphy
David Holmes
Courtney Love
Nick Pankhurst
Pharrell Williams
Josh Homme
Pink
Albert Hammond Jr.
Kelly Osbourne
James Skelly
Nick Jago
Erol Alkan
Conor Oberst
Miss Kittin
VV
Julian Casablancas
Howlin' Pelle Almqvist
Nelly
Craig Nicholls
Marcie Bolen
Meg White
Mike Skinner
Karen O
Dolf de Datsun
Fabrizio Moretti
Jack White

Re: the cool list - why exactly do Dre and OutKast get to share a spot? I genuinely haven't heard of half these people.

I've made up my mind to go and buy the NME on the way home just for the fun of reading all the hyperbole, so I can post the full list in a bit.

also, the LP was the NME's #1 of All Time back in 1985

the best single of all time is that xtina aguilera single. you know, the one where in the video she's wearing a burka.

THAT ONE!

i mean if you're going to do this charts then obviously only certain songs really fit the bill. i notice 'Whats Going On' is the track people (majority probably being 30-50 yrs old black guys e.g. Trevor Nelson) talk about as their fave of all time and inspiring a movement of sorts and the down to earth, real but powerful sentiment running in the song, and i suppose the whole 'universal' appeal of the message - its a sad song but a song of hope and strength too. all pretty obvious. i guess your criticism could be its possibly trite and over-saturated. in fact its because its so many people's 'cool' favourite of all time that this puts you right off it maybe?

Haha sorry Blueski I don't like "What's Going On" AT ALL.

Not even the cover version with Britney and Destiny's Child???

I don't think it's very cool at all in reputation - it's kind of got the reputation for being a bit worthy and dad-soul. I think if I resent anything around it it's the idea that it represented this huge emotional shift for Motown away from production-line dance music pop and into songs which could Talk About Real Things. Which in my mind is a move away from some of the most psychologically powerful and penetrating love songs of the 1960s into songs which say oh no! the world is bad! oh no! Even then I love the idea of "What's Goin On?" but other state-of-the-world songs which are much much MORE trite - "Sign O' The Times" say, or "It's Alright" - have loads more bite. Maybe WGO isn't trite enough. Whatever the case it's never moved me to more than a shrug.

I should listen to it again though since I seem to wuv ballads these days.

(The charity cover version is better, I will dig up my review of it!)

It's not really better at all, I'd forgotten how rubbish it was until I heard this. Good old Fred Durst though!

good point about '...grapevine' - probably better than 'WGO' for me in fact. i dont know if this is just because the subject matter is less 'heavy' somehow making it more enjoyable or easier to relate to even. musically its fabulous as its more grandiose, even epic, than 'WGO' (perhaps ironically) and i can imagine many people feel Gaye's subtlety and smoothness often paled in comparison to the rawer, unbridled passion of JB's 'Its A Man's World' and other classics

if you managed to get every single person in the western world to vote for their best singles of all time then i'm thinking 'whats going on' would be a lot higher up then 'love will tear us apart' and 'smells like teen spirit' - maybe not i dunno, it certainly sold a lot more copies.

oh and Tom i appreciate your point about Motown's production-line dance/pop and its ability to be just as powerful as worthy socio/politically conscious torch songs...but it sounds like you negate that socio/politically conscious torch songs are not as psychologically powerful or penetrative! and they can say more than just 'oh no the world is bad' just as the production-line pop can say more than just 'i love you, you love me, the world is beautiful' or 'you broke my heart, this sucks'. i get the impression you'd rather hear 100 songs about boy/girl heartbreak than 10 songs about 'the struggles of man'

oh and Tom i appreciate your point about Motown's production-line dance/pop and its ability to be just as powerful as worthy socio/politically conscious torch songs...but it sounds like you negate that socio/politically conscious torch songs are not as psychologically powerful or penetrative!

No, I do think they can be as penetrative - I even gave examples! Roughly speaking though the broader the political focus the less powerful I find them, and it's the same with love songs.

and they can say more than just 'oh no the world is bad' just as the production-line pop can say more than just 'i love you, you love me, the world is beautiful' or 'you broke my heart, this sucks'.

I think it's often in the way they choose to handle detail - no detail or implication thereof, no psychological impact (on me anyway). That said a song can be great without having any kind of impact like that, obviously, and impact needn't be carried in the words sung of course. This is why I think a lot of people do love and feel WGO, because his singing is so lovely and heartfelt on it, and why despite all my words above I'm a little surprised that I don't.

i get the impression you'd rather hear 100 songs about boy/girl heartbreak than 10 songs about 'the struggles of man'

This is true though.

i will admit my love for Unfinished Sympathy has waned over the years, probably a knee-jerk reaction to the way its achieved such heraldry status. like WGO its so many people's favourite which seems to devalue it for me in a way - this is not really an image-conscious snobbish reaction, its more to do with deeper fundamental feelings i have that i want my favourites to be JUST MY favourites - it doesnt make any real sense but there you go. that said i still think 'Unfinished Sympathy' was an immense, deeply reverent and powerful record and if they're gonna pick a token 'urban' track then at least its a good 'un (ha, i wouldve said i cant find anyone who's got a bad word to say about 'unfinished sympathy' as well as 'whats going on' but clearly i'm not getting out enough)

In any case, what is pigeonholed as dance has impacted so widely across the contemporary musical gene-pool by now that you don't really need to be able to dance to a dance record any more than a rock records needs to, well, rock.

Incidentally, I'm not sure the 87 list is necessarily any better or more interesting than the 2002 list - they're both essentially lists of universally-accepted canonical 'classics' with the odd surprise thrown in. If NME had covered soul music to the extent its covered indie/guitar music over the last ten years, to the virtual exclusion of everything else, and then come out with a list like the 87 one, we'd all be whinging about how obvious and boring THAT was.

What about Firestarter or Block Rocking Beats or even Born Slippy?

So the question now is - why *isn't* soul the consensus-quality music that unites all factions any more?

I think Born Slippy or Firestarter or Block Rocking Beats would be far less safe, given the fact they aren't all over totally canonical non dance best of the millennium compilations. Unfinished Sympathy would fit seemlessly into countless non dance circles, the only reason it's "dance" is because of a scene it emerged from and not how it sounds whatsoever. I see potential for debate with Firestarter or Block Rocking Beats and their dance origins but Born Slippy to me is pretty shamelessly dance in the traditonal sense. And that's the kind of record I'd like to see in the top ten, once which didn't compromise the fundamental principles of the genre to the extent where it no longer was of it.

This isn't directly answering your question, but I bet if you selected ten people at random from the street/supermarket/bus queue and played them the top ten records in both lists, I'd be willing to put money on the majority of people preferring the 87 list.

'Unfinished Sympathy' is much more in the vein of the classic soul tracks that dominate the '87 list rather then the mid-late 90s breed of british dance music

ronan your point about 'born slippy' is interesting because I think it was really quite unconventional and not quite traditional given its style and approach. using the Underworld formula but transporting it into the mainstream i thought was bizarre. it was a success but i remember being quite amazed when 'born slippy' went in at number 2, despite the Trainspotting connection - i think Underworld were really out on their own with their tracks then because no-one else was using lyrics like that with hard techno-based dance music and drawing parallels and joining the dots in observing, describing and defining life experiences previously only talked about in rock/punk/indie/jazz/rap/whatever but now contextualised within modern music designed to dance to and so technology-reliant - although i guess the Chemical Brothers and Leftfield were also doing a similar thing on occasion but to lesser extents

(what's also interesting is how rigorously the Rock Classics had been purged: ie another faux-unifying force what "we" all agreed had been toppled from greatness...)

back on the 87 list, isnt 'Kiss' by Prince just so ludicrously high on that '87 list that you cant really take it any more seriously than the 2002 one???

i do think i wouldve been mortified had i been the age i am now in 1987 to read that chart because it just seems that its overly stating that the exciting new scene music of the time was no good compared to all these soul classics...and that just seems a very odd attitude for a mag like the NME, even then, although i suppose it was actually less youth-orientated then

if i was to compile 3 top 100 lists like this:

1) my 100 favourite singles based on how i feel right now
2) my 100 favourite singles based on what i think are actually great singles
3) my 100 favourite singles based on how i felt about them at the time

these would be VERY different

i think the NME lists end up being a combination of those 3 and perhaps thats the fairest way to do it?

(Oh, I forgot to say earlier: great commentary on "Paperback Writer", Roger F)

"Contemporariness" of top tens - [year of chart] - [year of release] (some of my release dates may be wrong tho)

2002:
1. 22 yrs
2. 11 yrs
3. 26 yrs
4. 37 yrs
5. 25 yrs
6. 13 yrs
7. 18 yrs
8. 8 yrs
9. 23 yrs

1987:
1. 20 yrs
2. 15 yrs
3. 21 yrs
4. 1 yr
5. 20 yrs
6. 22 yrs
7. about 15 yrs
8. about 12 yrs
9. 3 yrs
10. 16 yrs

What we can see from this is that both top 10s centre on a 'golden age' of music about 20 years before they were compiled - the current list has a fair span of stuff since then, the 1987 one jumps to the present day but is in that sense more 'up to date'. I think not coincidentally this golden singles era will have been just before the contributing writers got 'properly' into music - i.e. for them it feels freshly legendary whereas for their readers it might feel reassuringly classic.

01. Foo Fighters 'Everlong'
02. Oasis 'Live Forever'
03. Nirvana 'Lithium'
04. The Strokes 'Hard To Explain'
05. The Verve 'Bittersweet Symphony'
06. Nirvana 'Smells Like Teen Spirit'
07. Blur 'Song 2'
08. Coldplay 'Yellow'
09. Kylie 'Cant Get You Out Of My Head'
10. Eminem 'Stan'

the horror!

2. i have never thought of unfinished sympathy as dance music, the idea of massive attack as a dance group is alien to me (in the same way that i find it difficult to think of tricky as hip hop).

Firestarter and Block Rocking Beats i find difficult to think of as dance music too. i see this as rock music (i know theres an implied pejorative here, this is unintended) i never understood the idea that bigbeat was dance music.

oh and gareth - big beat was electronic and rhythmic and played in huge clubs full of e heads, c heads and k heads - thus dance music!

how Britney and Justin have become more 'tolerated' among elitists and critics in general

I'm very glad you mentioned 'in general' when talking about Justin there. ;-)

Neptunes work 2002 as one stop shopping for pop aesthetics' dividing line ie, 'you just don't GET it if you don't like all this', classic or dud?

If "Unfinished Sympathy" doesn't count as dance music, then neither does anything on the first XL compilation.

This is probably a bit of a USA/UK (Ireland really buy anyhow) difference, I mean over here when you say "dance music" you only mean trance or house or techno or the like. In America I suspect this might be different. NOTE:This does NOT mean I consider other genres not to be for dancing to. It's simply the working distinction.

I mean, a less confusing summary of my feelings here might be if I say that for a record which comes from an ELECTRONIC music background, Unfinished Sympathy displays none of the newer character traits of that scene, but relies on older already accepted traits. And my big problem there is that I feel it would be nice if the electronic single they stuck in the top ten DID have repetetive beats, and DID have no lyrics, and WAS part of the newer electronic music scene because at least if this was the case I might not have to think that modern house/techno/whatever else is still a genre for which there is little or no respect. US in that top ten screams cop out to me.

That's one of the reasons I enjoyed the 2 many DJ's mix, in that it restated that dance music wasn't just 4 to the floor sequencer based house/techno (not that there's anything wrong with that) but could also be the Cramps or the Breeders or whatever.

Steve, I know you don't know me and all, but your question made me laugh. Not only have I danced to "Unfinished Sympathy", but I have danced to every track on the _Blue Lines_ album multiple times.

Back in 1994 Depeche used it as an intro tune on their American tour. Coming out of arena-sized speaker stacks, you can bet I danced. It was a warm summer evening and just a beautiful combination of mood, moment and music. There have been other times. :-)

As Pulp are releasing their Hits album and calling it a day (for now), you'd have thought that would warrant some attention. But instead the Cocker interview is tucked away inside, at a page and a half, most of which is taken up by a photo. The piece isn't even referred to on the cover at ALL.

The Strokes cover story is a three page "news" article by Steve Sutherland. The news? The Strokes play a gig in LA and go down quite well. They haven't even got a new record out.

Sample text: "[A bunch Strokes fans]... look so like a band, if you were in A&R you'd sign them on the spot and worry about songs and record sales and shit like that later."

And:
" 'Dr Julian says get fucked up!' Sounds cool. Let's get to it!"

And:
"Join us at the Whiskey later, and provided you're down with a chick on the guestlist..."

Without a hint of irony anywhere.

Just how old is Steve Sutherland?

I recall he was once a champion of Orange Juice in the 80s, that famously anti-rockism band. A band who, like Jarvis Cocker, had a little bit more to say than how great it is to get fucked up and rilly rilly out of it, maaaan.

NME is now officially Darwin's Waiting Room.

But this is the NME. I suppose we should be grateful So Solid Crew aren't on there.

a friend of mine hit the nail on the head when he said that "to sutherland" should be a verb, cf "to dumb down"

[Radio 2 listeners all-time Top 100 singles as announced last weekend (thanks to Tag for - indirectly - drawing my attention to this):

1. Queen - Bohemian Rhapsody
2. John Lennon - Imagine
3. Beatles - Hey Jude
4. Simon & Garfunkel - Bridge Over Troubled Water
5. George Harrison - My Sweet Lord
6. Procol Harum - A Whiter Shade Of Pale
7. Animals - The House Of The Rising Sun
8. Abba - Dancing Queen
9. Beach Boys - Good Vibrations
10. Queen & David Bowie - Under Pressure
11. Kate Bush - Wuthering Heights
12. Pink Floyd - Another Brick In The Wall
13. Police - Every Breath You Take
14. Righteous Brothers - You've Lost That Loving Feeling
15. Band Aid - Do They Know It's Christmas
16. Rolling Stones - (I Can't Get No) Satisfaction
17. Beatles - She Loves You
18. Soft Cell - Tainted Love
19. Beatles - All You Need Is Love
20. Elvis Presley - Jailhouse Rock
21. 10 CC - I'm Not In Love
22 Steve Harley & Cockney Rebel - Make Me Smile (Come Up And See Me)
22 Rod Stewart - Maggie May
24. Roy Orbison - Oh Pretty Woman
25. David Bowie - Space Oddity
26. Sinead O'Connor - Nothing Compares 2 U
27. Beatles - I Want To Hold Your Hand
28. Dexy's Midnight Runners - Come On Eileen
29. Marvin Gaye - I Heard It Through The Grapevine
30. Monkees - I'm A Believer
31. Boomtown Rats - I Don't Like Mondays
32. Beatles - A Hard Day's Night
33. Beatles - Help!
34. Frankie Goes To Hollywood - Relax
35. Kylie Minogue - Can't Get You Out Of My Head
36. Queen - Innuendo
37. Byrds - Mr Tambourine Man
38. Abba - Waterloo
39. Elvis vs JXL - A Little Less Conversation
40. Kinks - You Really Got Me
41. Oasis - Don't Look Back In Anger
42. Elvis Presley - All Shook Up
43. Fleetwood Mac - Albatross
44. Elvis Presley - Are You Lonesome Tonight
45. Bryan Adams - (Everything I Do) I Do It For You
46. Rolling Stones - Paint It Black
47. Nilsson - Without You
48. Elvis Presley - The Wonder Of You
49. Louis Armstrong - What A Wonderful World/Cabaret
50. Ian Dury & The Blockheads - Hit Me With Your Rhythm Stick
51. Abba - The Winner Takes It All
52. Blondie - Heart Of Glass
53. Beatles - Day Tripper/We Can Work It Out
54. Elvis Presley - Can't Help Falling In Love/Rock-A-Hula Baby
55. George Michael - Careless Whisper
56 Beatles - Ticket To Ride
56 John Lennon - Woman
58. Beatles - Can't Buy Me Love
59. Elvis Presley - It's Now Or Never
60. Jimi Hendrix - Voodoo Chile
61. Dusty Springfield - You Don't Have To Say You Love Me
62. Beatles - Yellow Submarine/Eleanor Rigby
63. Human League - Don't You Want Me
64. Roy Orbison - Only The Lonely
65. Bill Haley & His Comets - Rock Around The Clock
66. Beatles - Paperback Writer
67. Jam - Going Underground
68. T Rex - Get It On
69. Slade - Merry Xmas Everybody
70. Sonny & Cher - I Got You Babe
71. Kinks - Sunny Afternoon
72. Bonnie Tyler - Total Eclipse Of The Heart
73 Joe Cocker - With A Little Help From My Friends
73 Abba - Mamma Mia
75 Gerry & The Pacemakers - You'll Never Walk Alone
75 David Bowie - Ashes To Ashes
75 Righteous Brothers - Unchained Melody
78. Beatles - Get Back
79. Abba - Knowing Me Knowing You
80. Madonna - Like A Prayer
81. Elvis Presley - Return To Sender
82. Bangles - Eternal Flame
83 Freddie Mercury - Living On My Own
83 U2 - Beautiful Day
85. Buggles - Video Killed The Radio Star
86. Rolling Stones - Jumping Jack Flash
87. Meat Loaf - I'd Do Anything For Love (But I Won't Do That)
88. Michael Jackson - Billie Jean
89. Scott McKenzie - San Francisco (Be Sure To Wear Some Flowers In Your Hair)
90. Beatles - From Me To You
91. Alice Cooper - School's Out
92. A-ha - The Sun Always Shines On TV
93. Bee Gees - Night Fever
94. Gloria Gaynor - I Will Survive
95. Rolling Stones - Honky Tonk Women
96. Hollies - He Ain't Heavy He's My Brother
97. Beatles - Hello Goodbye
98. Smokey Robinson & The Miracles - Tears Of A Clown
99. Police - Message In A Bottle
100. Billy Joel - Uptown Girl ]

He also championed Duran Duran in MM in the early '80s, as I recall, and while at MM crossed two NUJ picket lines in 1980 and 1984.

There was the time when Mr. Sutherland, having trashed Bauhaus, ended up as an opening act for them by interviewing the band on stage. I'm not sure who was making fun of who there.

When he took over at NME in '92, several writers resigned en masse, including, if I remember correctly, Mary-Anne Hobbs, Stuart Maconie and Andrew Collins.

Head hurts. It sounded like the Dead, right?

When he took over at NME in '92, several writers resigned en masse

!! I was MM through and through, so I hadn't realized this at the time, I just heard he was moving downstairs.

ned you need a damn good thrashing.

Though I may be alone here.