I saw a meme going around the various social websites of “listing your personal canon of twenty songs,” and while this is a little self-indulgent I thought it might be fun to do here. So here are twenty songs, only one per artist, with a little bit about each. In a couple cases I’m really repping the song writer and I am noting those cases in parantheses. Aside from the very first one, these songs are not in order.
A prejudice I’ve never really aired here (I think?) is that I find almost all writing about pop music terrible. Almost everybody writing this stuff—or at least the stuff that makes its way to me—doesn’t really know how to talk about music itself so they talk about everything else: a song’s cultural position vis-a-vis other songs, star image, their feelings, branding, whatever. I’ve been reading some histories of pop music and the descriptions of music in these books are absolutely unbearable. Everything’s “big” or “shimmery” or “pop perfection” or whatever.