Blender mag anti-rockist 500 greatest songs list...let the debate begin..

(And besides, the turn of the '90s all-time top 100 singles lists in Radio On and Why Music Sucks put all those glossy ones to shame anyway.)

Having said that, I don't believe in these immutable lists that never change after three decades.

This is Joe cribbing from Meltzer, obviously. (Come to think of it, Joe had a pazz & jop comment sometime in the early '90s where he *complained* about other critics finding awesomeness in triviality; he added something about "Wiggle It," I think it was, being the only trivial song that year that had an awesomeness in it. Which was a ridiculous thing to say then, and his comments above are ridiculous now -- if "consensus forms around the song that has been around the longest," how come there aren't any songs on the Rolling Stone list more than a few decades old? {I ASSUME there's not, anyway; haven't looked at that list, either.} And I'm SURE there are people out there who'd put "Yummy Yummy Yummy" among their 500 best songs ever. But I guess Joe has to defend the Rolling Stone listmaking method somehow.)

And none of what I say above is to deny that Rolling Stone lists are, like, the easiest target ever. (But what the hell, ready aim fire.)

That's all.

xpost

And the best song since 1980 is "Get Ur Freak On." Everybody knows that.

And of course there's Gary Mulholland's book This is Uncool. Whether that came before or after the ILM thread in question I can't remember.

I used to work at Blender, and have written entries for a couple of Rolling Stone lists. I hold no brief for the mag: Its clear from the pull quotes that any pro-Dylan, pro-Beatles, pro-Stones, and anti-Bush statements from interviewees must be emphasized in order to please Jann Wenner, who has lately taken a greater interest in RS content. Similarly, the since-departed editor of Blender had reflexive interests in anything about sex, drugs, and anything that hinted at the importance of 80s-90s British music culture—he's a vicious english supremacist. Myself and other editorial drones sprinkled what we called "scooby snacks" regarding such things in the text to placate him.

Anyway, RS lists are always completely predictable. But— I was always assured that any results were voted on by artists, bizzers, writers and so on. The only time i suspected that anything fishy was going down was in the "500 greatest albums" list they did two years ago, when a Peter Wolf rekkid (not a J. Geils rekkid) from the '90s appeared: wolf, of course, is a major Wenner pal. But i was assured that this was not monkey business.

What I do know for sure is that any list-making done at Blender while I was there was completely micro-managed by Craig Marks. He and he alone decided what was going in any particular list, with almost no input from anyone else, save one trusted colleague.

Now, this list may have some democratic component to it, but I doubt it, as that was never the way he did anything like that while I was there. CM is very hung up on making Blender the irreverent answer to RS, and he is succeeding on that score. And I'm sympathetic to his view that baby boomers are smug re: how their culture trumps everyone elses.

But Levy's case could have been bolstered by the simple fact that they present their lists as something that 100 or so people voted on (even if that's bullshit and Wenner calls the tune). Those 100 people may be industry scum, but at least its actually representative of something other than one guy's agenda for making RS look stodgy.

I could go on about how CM used to be an almost Stalin-esque alt culture/indie rock partisan while running Spin, until he transformed himself into an advocate for mass-culture stuff like hip-hop and fluffy pop for his current job, but we'll leave that for another day…

i suspect the same is true of many of the regular posters here on ILM, as well many top critics. there are a million former indie geeks now going nuts over gwen stefani. (exhibit a: the whole annie from norway phenomenon.) anti-rockism is the new critical orthodoxy, blender's just reflecting it.

SPIN's 100 Greatest Singles Of All Time (1989)
1. Rob Base & D.J. E-Z Rock - It Takes Two
2. Jessie Hill - Ooh Poo Paa Doo
3. The Rolling Stones - Tumblin' Dice
4. Irma Thomas - It's Raining
5. Guns N' Roses - Sweet Child O' Mine
6. Prince - When Doves Cry
7. The Chiffons - One Fine Day
8. Rod Stewart - Maggie Mae
9. Dionne Warwick - Walk On By
10. New Order - True Faith/1963
11. The Beach Boys - Don't Worry Baby
12. The Shangri-Las - Remember (Walking In The Sand)
13. Doug E. Fresh And The Get Fresh Crew - The Show/La-Di-Da-Di
14. Creedence Clearwater Revival - Green River
15. Elvis Presley - One Night
16. The Smiths - There Is A Light That Never Goes Out
17. Temptations - Just My Imagination (Running Away With Me)
18. Donna Summer - Bad Girls
19. David Bowie - Young Americans
20. Public Enemy - Bring The Noise
21. The Cure - A Night Like This
22. Bad Company - Can't Get Enough
23. Madonna - Borderline
24. Elvis Costello - Lipstick Vogue
25. Gwen Guthrie - Ain't Nothing Goin' On But The Rent
26. Lou Christie - Lightnin' Strikes
27. Modern English - I Melt With You
28. Aerosmith - Walk This Way
29. Smokey Robinson & The Miracles - Ooh Baby Baby
30. Depeche Mode - Behind The Wheel/Route 66
31. Hank Williams - I'm So Lonesome I Could Cry
32. Marvin Gaye - What's Going On
33. Lloyd Price - Just Because
34. Pebbles - Mercedes Boy
35. Aretha Franklin - Respect
36. Madonna - Where's The Party
37. Joy Division - Love Will Tear Us Apart
38. 10cc - The Things We Do For Love
39. Led Zeppelin - Whole Lotta Love
40. Lou Reed - Satellite Of Love
41. Public Image Ltd. - This Is Not A Love Song
42. The Shirelles - Tonight's The Night
43. Rod Stewart - Tonight's The Night (Gonna Be Alright)
44. AC/DC - Back In Black
45. R.E.M. - Don't Go Back To Rockville
46. Bruce Springsteen - Glory Days
47. Jimi Hendrix - Foxy Lady
48. Echo & The Bunnymen - The Killing Moon
49. Van Halen - Running With The Devil
50. Betty Everett - The Shoop Shoop Song (It's In His Kiss)
51. The Kinks - Lola
52. Sam Cooke - Bring It On Home To Me
53. Jackie Wilson - Lonely Teardrops
54. The Replacements - On The Bus
55. Bob Seger And The Silver Bullet Band - Night Moves
56. Mott The Hoople - All The Young Dudes
57. Gladys Knight & The Pips - Midnight Train To Memphis
58. The Pretenders - Brass In Pocket (I'm Special)
59. The Who - Can't Explain
60. Martha & The Vandellas - Heat Wave
61. Janis Joplin - Me And Bobby McGee
62. The Robins - Riot In Cell Block #9
63. Chuck Willis - It's Too Late
64. World Famous Supreme Team - Hey DJ
65. U2 - Pride (In The Name Of Love)
66. The Sex Pistols - Anarchy In The UK
67. Tom Jones - It's Not Unusual
68. David Bowie - Heroes
69. Time Zone - World Destruction
70. The Velvet Underground - Waiting For The Man
71. Bob Dylan - Knockin' On Heaven's Door
72. Bobby Brown - My Prerogative
73. The Four Tops - Standing In The Shadows Of Love
74. Iggy Pop - Lust For Life
75. Tammy Wynette - D-I-V-O-R-C-E
76. Sinéad O'Connor - Troy
77. Squeeze - Slap And Tickle
78. Edgar Winter - Free Ride
79. The Feelies - Away
80. Jackie Wilson - Lonely Teardrops
81. Black Sabbath - Paranoid
82. Exposé - Point Of No Return
83. Dixie Cups - Iko Iko
84. Jethro Tull - Aqualung
85. The Jackson 5 - I Want You Back
86. Elvis Presley - Jailhouse Rock
87. Peter Frampton - Do You Feel Like We Do
88. The Clash - White Riot
89. The Supremes - Someday We'll Be Together
90. The Sugarcubes - Motorcrash
91. The Raspberries - Go All The Way
92. The Smiths - Please Please Please
93. The Beatles - Please Please Me
94. The Cure - Why Can't I Be You
95. The Grateful Dead - China Cat Sunflower
96. Michael Jackson - Don't Stop 'Til You Get Enough
97. The Doors - People Are Strange
98. The Emotions - Best Of My Love
99. Joe Cocker - Delta Lady
100. Killing Joke - Eighties

of course i wasn't saying that the pop-love is a pose. i'm glad we've all come to our senses and learned to enjoy pop music. and glad too that 25 years on, hip-hop gets critical respect. was just saying that many, many people's tastes have evolved in the same way that marks' apparently has.

might also consider that marks' change in taste has something to do with the mags he's worked for. his "stalin-esque alt culture/indie rock" patisanship may have had everything to do with the fact that spin's readership were indie heads. in other words, he was (is?) just being a good ol' market-conscious editor(/hack?), trying to move units.

um..."Memphis"?

ALEX!!!

well, of course not! everyone knows that the ohio express song that belongs on any top-500-of-all-time list is "down at lulu's."

i find it easy to believe that blender doctors their list. i find it hard to believe that rolling stone doesn't. surely j. geils isn't the only jann wenner favor in the history of rolling stone polls.

apparently you do, since you clicked on the thread, r.o.

I'm a lot more interested to see more specific lists by people on this board, like 'Top ten goth vocalists', than some self-appointed tastemaker idiots crowning a single as the best of all time.

Oh well, I'll shut up now.

How in the world did they come up with this? No doubt that it's a great song but it wasn't a single. So this was one of the Cure songs they came up with and on top of that it's in the Top 25. Just curious because it wouldn't be the first song that came to my mind regarding the Cure but yet the whole lot of them voted for this song.

How long do we have to wait until we get to see Blender’s list?

I know but why this song? Weird because I saw a stripper in Los Angeles strip to this song once, fantastic. Maybe they were there that night as well. ;)

Looking back over the list it seems just about every song listed is a single. So it's the Cure who happen to get a non-single and in the Top 25 to boot. I would think it would be "How Beautiful You Are" instead.

I feel like they generally reflect readers opinions to an extent, and I'm sure they give people lots of download suggestions.

37. Joy Division - Love Will Tear Us Apart
38. 10cc - The Things We Do For Love
39. Led Zeppelin - Whole Lotta Love
40. Lou Reed - Satellite Of Love
41. Public Image Ltd. - This Is Not A Love Song
42. The Shirelles - Tonight's The Night
43. Rod Stewart - Tonight's The Night (Gonna Be Alright)
44. AC/DC - Back In Black
45. R.E.M. - Don't Go Back To Rockville

http://web.tiscali.it/fuchsia/bigimages/Anlt.jpg
http://imaginaryboys.altervista.org/english/cure/discography/thumbnails/other06.jpg

Anyway, "Lipstick Vogue" was one that never was a single.

I have never seen what you have posted (picture) and I collected everything from the Cure. Does anyone own this? It does look official though.

God I hate being obsessive about this but it's the Cure and I know this shit. [I]Standing On A Beach[/I] did have some non A-sides like "Other Voices" but it's interesting that this collection did close with "A Night Like This." I'm finally seeing why this song was picked afterall.

veronica moser SPEAKS THE TRUTH as far as those RS 80s/90s lists are concerned re: one voter having veto power over all. no big shock that the results of these polls are fiddled w/. one question: who are the "post-rockist" Blender equivalents of jann wenner's perrenial sacred cows/oldpals like mr. wolf and bozney scaggs?

yeah, those were the days when they wouldn't let me give the spin doctors a higher review rating than jon spencer or pavement (some inconsequential EP in the latter case) because they were seemingly afraid of losing matador advertising dollars (at least that's the best explanation I could come up with), and when I had to make my lead review of alanis's followup album less critical 'cause they were scared she'd back out of a later cover story interview. Back in those days, at least, Spin was always chickenshit about its delusions of hipness, watching its back, running around with its tail between its legs. And as somebody else (Matos maybe?) said above, *Rolling Stone* *never* made me make reviews more positive or negative. (Back then, I was in pretty much every issue of both magazines.) Which isn't to say that Wenner doesn't have influence there--obviously he does; I just never felt it (though "I Want to Know What Love Is" was actually better than lotsa the other songs on the list it wound up on anyway!)

>anti-rockism is the new critical orthodoxy<

right. and hope paltrow will battle out the *darcy's wild life* soundtrack for the pazz and jop title this year, I suppose.

By the way (and I really have no idea whether this has anything to do with a particular Cure song I'm not sure if I've ever heard or not) but B-sides ARE singles, for whatever that's worth.

Interesting. I know I've heard Jim D3ro say he got fired for complaining publicly about Jann's disagreements with his review of the second Hootie album (which is probably cool to like by now, anyway, I suppose -- check olus for making sure their latest was reviewed in the Voice, Mr. Eddy). I've also heard Gr3g K0t say Jann has changed the scores on some of his reviews.

Having had a peak at the forthcoming Blender list I can tell you the same principle's at work. It's pretty fun, nothing surprising, loads of hip-hop. It's also very heavy on shitty hair metal, which seems like grandstanding to me. "Look at us, we're so populist!" Have no idea whether the list was all the work of one or a committee of eds. and writers, though I cant see why it would matter. It's just a friggin list in a glossy mag.

I was gonna copy & paste it here but it gets boring reaaaally quickly

I raised an eyebrow at "Cross-eyed and Painless" ranking in the top 40. I mean I like it, but it's not an obvious TH pick.

And with that, I hereby don't care.

DATS SOME HOMPHOBOC SIHT RIGHT HURRE

"Baby One More Time" is easily as good as "Smells Like Teen Spirit," but neither belongs in a "top 20 songs of the last 25 years" list. It would be nice to finally see a list with the brains to place a different Nirvana song above "Teen Spirit" or a different Britney-era song above "Baby One More Time." ("Genie In A Bottle" anyone?)

I've been unsuccessfully trying to understand the appeal of "I Want It That Way" for many years. And License To Ill is probably the most annoyingly overrated record ever.

"I Want it That Way" might be the best BSB song (that or "As Long As You Love Me," though neither are particularly good) but the N Sync singles of that time--nearly all of them except for "I Drive Myself Crazy" and "God Must Have Spent a Little More Time on You"--were all so much better.

Blender's intro tag for Robbie Fulks's "Let's Kill Saturday Night": "Agit-rocking against Thatcher"

Other FOJs (friends of Jann):
- Boz Scaggs
- Billy Joel
- Mick Jones (the Foreigner guy, not the Clash/BAD guy)

Anytime any of these people are so much as mentioned in RS, keep in mind that a favor is being called in and their presence has nothing to do with pesky things like relevance or newsworthiness.

When I first saw that list, the Peter Wolf stood out. There was virtually nothing recent on the list, but a low profile 2002 album from him somehow makes it? At the time, I didn't know he was such a 'FOJ'. I'm skeptical of any list unless they release all the individual lists on their website and explain the point system.

These stories of calling in favors on doctored lists bring to mind the rock hall of fame which is literally a mini-Capitol Hill:

Singer-songwriter Stevens is the beneficiary of a grass-roots lobbying effort, according to Seymour Stein, the founder of Sire Records and the president of the board of the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.

"From his deathbed, Johnny Ramone sent me a letter advocating that Cat Stevens get in, and he got John Frusciante from the Red Hot Chili Peppers and Eddie Vedder to send letters saying the same thing," he continues."

////////

However, the lobbying within the committee — where one person's influence can get an artist nominated — is another matter. "In the meeting itself, there is some heated debate," says nom-anon #1. "And there'll be someone who's really an advocate for somebody — year after year after year, they'll hone their arguments and make their case. Every year [one nominating committee member] was bringing up ZZ Top. I honestly believed that they would never get in or get past the nominating committee, but he was indefatigable and he got it through. There was a lot of resistance, but he overcame it. It happened just because of him."

"These people really do love rock and roll, and they want to push the things they like," nom-anon #1 says. "But there are also personal and financial agendas as well — and even personal vendettas.

"Let me give you an example," he continues. "[A major hall of fame officer] wanted me to get a favor from an artist, and it was above and beyond what this artist was willing to do, and rightfully so. I went back to this guy and said, 'Look, he doesn't wanna do it.' And he said, 'Well, you tell him he's never gonna get into the hall of fame.' To me, that's an example of how these guys run the hall."

When I first saw that list, the Peter Wolf stood out. There was virtually nothing recent on the list, but a low profile 2002 album from him somehow makes it? At the time, I didn't know he was such a 'FOJ'. I'm skeptical of any list unless they release all the individual lists on their website and explain the point system.

These stories of calling in favors on doctored lists bring to mind the rock hall of fame which is a mini-Capitol Hill:

Singer-songwriter Stevens is the beneficiary of a grass-roots lobbying effort, according to Seymour Stein, the founder of Sire Records and the president of the board of the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.

"From his deathbed, Johnny Ramone sent me a letter advocating that Cat Stevens get in, and he got John Frusciante from the Red Hot Chili Peppers and Eddie Vedder to send letters saying the same thing," he continues."

////////

However, the lobbying within the committee — where one person's influence can get an artist nominated — is another matter. "In the meeting itself, there is some heated debate," says nom-anon #1. "And there'll be someone who's really an advocate for somebody — year after year after year, they'll hone their arguments and make their case. Every year [one nominating committee member] was bringing up ZZ Top. I honestly believed that they would never get in or get past the nominating committee, but he was indefatigable and he got it through. There was a lot of resistance, but he overcame it. It happened just because of him."

"These people really do love rock and roll, and they want to push the things they like," nom-anon #1 says. "But there are also personal and financial agendas as well — and even personal vendettas.

"Let me give you an example," he continues. "[A major hall of fame officer] wanted me to get a favor from an artist, and it was above and beyond what this artist was willing to do, and rightfully so. I went back to this guy and said, 'Look, he doesn't wanna do it.' And he said, 'Well, you tell him he's never gonna get into the hall of fame.' To me, that's an example of how these guys run the hall."

Besides, people who were born in the 1980s have missed all the best music, and have no idea about music at all.

Haha, you so crazy, mang.

joo talking abt. that free jazz band that does garage rock covers? i heard it at a friends, thought it was pretty cool actually.