So it’s nice to have this bias knocked over, as happened with Hang the DJ: An Alternative Book of Music Lists (Faber & Faber), edited by Angus Cargill. I hadn’t known about the book before Simon Reynolds, who contributed two lists (“Deserving But Denied: Thirty-three No. 2s That Should Have Been No.1” and “The Dirty Dozen: Twelve Great Artists Who Are Terrible Influences”), mentioned the book’s blog on his own. I hadn’t looked beyond a couple of names before my copy arrived; I wanted to be surprised.

I was and wasn’t. Cargill’s jacket bio says that he “lives in London and works in publishing,” and between that and the relatively subdued cover art, with a design and color scheme that give the book the look of the cousin of Paste magazine’s front-of-book, I figured I was in for a very literary time even before I began perusing the bios. By “literary,” I mean lots of indie rock, singer-songwriters, and folk, the styles litfic-folk seem to gravitate toward. Especially since Cargill’s crew is mostly English: judging from an average issue of Uncut, Brits are more in love with Americana than actual Americans, except maybe the ones who handed over their hard-earned to help establish No Depression as a bookazine. A quick thumb-through confirmed that I would be reading quite a bit about the creepy, gruesome, lonesome majesty of Mr. Tom Waits. Whether I’d actually learn anything was iffier. Because that’s how these books are, no matter who writes them: often, lists are where people go to stop thinking so damn hard.

What’s gratifying about Hang the DJ is how seriously its participants took the assignment. Not everything’s a gem–there probably isn’t a newly compiled anthology where that’s the case–but I enjoyed about two-thirds of the book with few reservations, and that counts for a lot. And of course, my reverse-snobbery is rendered pretty much moot. Not all of it, as when Rick Moody tells us that “Martin Rev’s synthesisers were creepier and more industrial in the analogue prehistory of electronic music than what came later when there were racks and racks of keyboards all wired together–in Skinny Puppy or Ministry or Nine Inch Nails or Daft Punk.”

Despite that, I enjoyed Moody’s list, on a great topic: “Get Rhythm: Ten Great Bands without Full-time Drummers.” A lot of the topics were similarly just-left-field-enough to throw new light on things–not (har har) Miriam Toews’ “How Not to Get Laid: The Ten Saddest Tom Waits Songs,” so much as Jack Murphy’s “Jane’s Affliction: Ten Ailments/Accidents That Changed Pop Music History” (Gene Vincent’s bad leg forcing him to adopt a confrontational stage stance, Tony Iommi’s work accident prompting him to tune way down), or Hari Kunzru’s “Yodo-Go a Go-Go! Ten Musical Moments in Revolution,” which sounds boilerplate until you read it: Paul McCartney’s “Give Ireland Back to the Irish” and Cornelius Cardew’s “show-stopping chorus [of], ‘There is the lie of imperialism and reaction/And there is the truth of Marxist-Leninism . . . ’” are both dispatched with a handful of swift, precise strokes.

Both Murphy’s and Kunzru’s lists are numbered 10 to one and are clearly written as countdowns. But most of the lists are counted down as well, even when it isn’t appropriate: Simon Reynolds’ bad-influence list goes 12 to 1 even though they write-ups are arranged chronologically. (He doesn’t seem to think the Byrds’ impact has been any less pernicious than Radiohead’s–the opposite, if anything, since their records have been around longer.) Other things are confusing too. I’ll allow that it’s my Yank provincialism that rendered these my complete notes on the Irish writer Patrick McCabe’s “Not in My Radio Booth: Ten Tunes for Captain Butty”: “?????” As for Snow Patrol frontman Gary Lightbody–great, he wants to write prose like Bono, too. Other singer-songwriters fare better, in particular Tom McCabe, who, writing about female singer-songwriters, is the funniest, most deadpan writer of the bunch. On Feist’s “Mushaboom”: “Feist’s voice and the production of her records are great, but really it’s the dancing in the videos that makes it all irresistible. I’ve never had dancers in my videos. Just rain.”

A few of these lists will probably prompt me to assemble playlists: Jonathan Lethem on the dirty Dylan (on “Cry a While,” from “Love and Theft”: “Included just for ‘late-night booty-call.’ Who does he think he is, Snoop Dogg?”); Andrew Benbow’s Flying Nun roll call; Peter Patnaik’s gruesome rundown of “Female Murder Ballads in the Pre-war Era,” which makes the music sound like the soundtrack to a complete run of Shock SuspenStories. But two stand out, for intrigue in both writing and selection. One is John Williams’ “Sheepshearing: Ten Classics from the British and Irish Folk Revival.” Williams writes so evocatively and with such abundant affection for this stuff that I was disarmed, particularly when he prefaces it by noting, “If you know this stuff, you’ll see it’s pretty much a Sgt. Pepper, Pet Sounds kind of list”—I don’t know it, and I’m curious to now. (Top 3: Anne Briggs, Dick Gaughan’s Handful of Earth, the Watersons’ For Pence and Spicy Ale.)

But there’s nowhere else I could conscionably end this than with John Kelly’s “The Pecking Order: Ten Songs About Chickens.” Anyone who “collect[s] songs about chickens,” as Kelly professes in his intro, is gunning for hero status on my particular island; anyone who adds, “Sad, dark or nihilistic chicken songs simply do not exist,” has my vote sealed and locked in permanent storage. Below is the list itself. The ones I know (1, 2, 4, 6, 8), I adore; the rest, I fully expect to.

1. Rufus Thomas, “The Funky Chicken”
2. Slim Gaillard, “Chicken Rhythm”
3. Samamidon, “Falsehearted Chicken”
4. Dr. Alimantado, “Best Dressed Chicken in Town”
5. Andre Williams, “The Greasy Chicken”
6. The Meters, “Chicken Strut”
7. Dan Penn, “Memphis, Women and Chicken”
8. Cab Calloway, “A Chicken Ain’t Nothing But a Bird”
9. Billy Ward and the Dominoes, “Chicken Blues”
10. Mississippi John Hurt, “C-H-I-C-K-E-N”

Hang The DJ [Official blog]

In May 2007 the British radio station BBC6 conducted a survey of the worst lyrics in pop.

BBC6’s Top 10 Worst Lyrics (listener poll):
1. Des’ree, “Life” (Sony, 1998): “I don’t want to see a ghost/It’s the sight that I fear most/I’d rather have a piece of toast/Watch the evening news.”
2. Snap, “Rhythm Is a Dancer” (Logic/Arista, 1992): “I’m as serious as cancer/When I say rhythm is a dancer.”
3. Razorlight, “Somewhere Else” (Vertigo, 2005): “And I met a girl/She asked me my name/I told her what it was.”
4. ABC, “That Was Then But This Is Now” (Mercury, 1983): “More Sacrifices than an Aztec priest/Standing here straining at that leash/All fall down/Can’t complain, mustn’t grumble/Help yourself to another piece of apple crumble.”
5. U2, “Elevation” (Interscope, 2001): “I’ve got no self control/Been living like a mole now/Going down, excavation/High and high in the sky/You make me feel like I can fly/So high/Elevation.”
6. Toto, “Africa” (CBS, 1982): “The wild dogs cry out in the night/As they grow restless longing for some solitary company/I know that I must do what’s right/Sure as Kilimanjaro rises like Olympus above the Serengeti.”
7. Oasis, “Champagne Supernova” (Creation, 1995): “Slowly walking down the hall/Faster than a cannonball/Where were you when we were getting high?”
8. Duran Duran, “Is There Something I Should Know?” (EMI, 1983): “And fiery demons all dance when you walk through that door/Don’t say you’re easy on me/You’re about as easy as a nuclear war.”
9. Human League, “The Lebanon” (Virgin, 1984): “Before he leaves the camp he stops/He scans the world outside/And where there used to be some shops/Is where the snipers sometimes hide.”
10. Black Sabbath, “War Pigs” (Warner Bros., 1971): “Generals gathered in their masses/Just like witches at black masses.”

Let’s get the ugly part out of the way first: I am in full agreement with No. 10, and no, I do not love Sabbath enough to let them get away with it. I’m not a huge fan, though I certainly like a handful of songs, “War Pigs” being one of them. But I thought the line was stupid when I first heard it, and I’m glad there are still people who haven’t immunized themselves against it over the years thanks to the riff bypassing that particular area of the brain.

“War Pigs” is one of only three songs chosen here that I would have picked out any of those lines from in particular. The others are No. 7 (whose negative properties, inextricable in my mind from a lousy period of my life generally, I discussed in an earlier column about the Modern Rock Top 10 of 1996) and No. 8, which struck me as gauche even when I was in third grade. (Everyone knew nuclear war was easy–it was a matter of two men pushing buttons–that’s what was wrong with it.)

Three others, though, I knew but hadn’t really thought of in terms of lyrics, much less god-awful ones. What I mostly remember about “Rhythm Is a Dancer” is the title phrase, plus the odd “feel the passion” to give the singer more than two notes to sing. It’s not that I’m necessarily surprised the song contains the line, “I’m as serious as cancer/When I say rhythm is a dancer.” It just never jumped out at me. Likewise, the U2 line strikes me as bald description of banal euphoria: more wallpaper than painting, and not much to get worked up over. “Africa,” of course, is total dogshit, so much so I never parsed the verses (being seven when the song came out surely has something to do with this), but on paper, that is some serious D&D-playing loserdom coming out, all right. Good to know that in addition to being the top session cats of the era as well as winning the Grammy Award for Album of the Year for the album containing “Africa,” Toto’s members all aced world geography.

The rest I’d never even heard until I saw this list. I watched the videos for each, and the results were enlightening. Des’ree: she rides a car through the desert. I’d seen this list without the lyric attributions before watching the clip, but it didn’t take long to guess which one this had been nominated for: “ghost/most/toast” is pushing it even if you’re in the breeziest mood of your life. Razorlight: I didn’t know Richard Ashcroft had an understudy. Did England really miss the Verve that much? For god’s sakes, why? On paper, I must admit that, “And I met a girl/She asked me my name/I told her what it was,” is my kind of deadpan mannerist comedy, but hearing this schmoe declaim anything above all those forcefully strummed acoustic guitars buried the offending line for me.

Speaking of confessions, I’ve never heard all of The Lexicon of Love, so the follow-ups I’m even sketchier on. This lives up to Martin Fry’s explanation to Simon Reynolds in Rip It Up and Start Again that he was trying to make the ugliest music he could in response to that album, because this is one sour little pastry. And the “apple crumble” line really is the song’s core, if you will. (I apologize.) Finally, “The Lebanon” not only gets points for those awesome lines fitting perfectly within an equally awesome, er, meditation on terrorism, Phil Oakey gets double points for blueprinting the look Dave Gahan would take to the bank once he stopped cutting his hair a while. They even have the same facial expressions!

Before I open it to the wolves by asking which lyric(s) BBC6’s listeners forgot to include in this Top 10, allow me to indulge yet again my personal all-time favorite bad lyric. It’s from a tune everybody knows: “Your Song,” by Elton John. Take a bow, Bernie Taupin, for this all-time clinker: “If I was a sculptor/But then again, no.” That’s what Taupin should have said! Haw! Anyway, I’ve had my fun: now you have yours. 100 posts by Monday! Let’s do it!

Last week, when I wrote about listicles, I forgot a non-print, but still big and obvious, agent of the format’s spread: cable television. The televised countdown goes back to the ’50s, when longstanding radio favorite Your Hit Parade counted down the Top 7 or Top 10 (depending on the season) songs of the week, as performed by an in-house band and singers. Then rock and roll happened, and bye-bye house bands. This begat the record hop (e.g. American Bandstand and Soul Train and, in the U.K., Top of the Pops), followed by video, which just before MTV led to the syndicated America’s Top 10 and Solid Gold, each using different chart data and methodology to deliver the week’s Top 10. MTV did some of that, too. It also spawned VH1, which started out MOR but soon found its footing when it adopted a campier, retro approach, becoming Nick at Nite to MTV’s Nickelodeon. Which mean, wouldn’t you know, tons and tons of countdowns of the all-time Top 100 thisses or thats.

The one the channel ran last week actually had me a little bit excited, in part because I had no real idea how it would shake out: 100 Greatest Hip-Hop Songs, which ran in five installments. Maybe I would have figured the outcome had I allowed myself to guess, but between having absolutely no time to myself lately and wanting to keep my responses fresh, I watched all of it cold.

VH1’s 10 Greatest Hip-Hop Songs (as aired Friday, October 3)
1. Public Enemy, “Fight the Power” (Def Jam, 1989)
2. Sugarhill Gang, “Rapper’s Delight” (Sugarhill, 1979)
3. Dr. Dre ft. Snoop Doggy Dogg, “Nuthin’ But a ‘G’ Thang” (Death Row, 1993)
4. Run-D.M.C., “Walk This Way” (Profile, 1986)
5. Grandmaster Flash & the Furious 5, “The Message” (Sugarhill, 1982)
6. N.W.A., “Straight Outta Compton” (Ruthless, 1988)
7. The Notorious B.I.G., “Juicy” (Bad Boy, 1994)
8. Snoop Doggy Dogg, “Gin and Juice” (Death Row, 1993)
9. Salt-n-Pepa, “Push It” (Next Plateau, 1986)
10. Kurtis Blow, “The Breaks” (Mercury, 1980)

(You can find the entire list at Stereogum.)

That’s a Top 10 I would never have guessed–“The Breaks” at No. 10? “Push It” at No. 9?—and yet, reading it, I’m not surprised at all. Of course Public Enemy is No. 1: watching in order, I kept expecting “911 Is Joke” to pop up somewhere on the chart’s bottom half. That was the big one on MTV, right? That seemed to determine a few selections: No. 6, with its Symbolic Video; No. 38, Coolio’s “Gangsta’s Paradise,” which makes every part of my body cringe; and No. 25, MC Hammer’s “U Can’t Touch This,” whose talking-head segments seemed the most genuinely strained, as opposed to I-can’t-think-of-anything-to-say-help times 20 strained.

My guesses for the Top 10 mostly took place as the show reached the 30s. That’s one pleasure of this sort of thing: you get to play along. The game was tipped at the top of the final episode when its first selection, Kanye West ft. Jamie Foxx’s “Gold Digger,” prompted the arrival of Chuck D, almost nowhere to be seen in four prior episodes despite his obvious place as one of the most historically attuned rap pros. Surely he could be quotable about Hammer–whom Chuck D has always paid respect to in interviews–and his old tour-mates the Beastie Boys. Their entry–No. 27, “Hold It Now, Hit It”–was not a big hit at the time but has remained an enduring cult favorite, something the producers clearly did a lot of to balance out all that MTV.

Me, I’d wondered if the Beasties might not appear on the second episode, when 3rd Bass and House of Pain placed 70th (“Pop Goes the Weasel”) and 66th (“Jump Around”), respectively. If that sounds overly cynical, I’ll just say I figured they might make the list twice, along with others of their golden-era Def Jam ilk and maybe Jay-Z. (“Hard Knock Life” at No. 11?! Not “Big Pimpin’” or “99 Problems” or even “Izzo”? Come on!) The first episode made me especially suspicious of the way the numbers were running. The list was advertised as having been voted for by viewers, who must have been voting in very controlled patterns to place together three consecutive house/disco-inflected jams: Jungle Brothers’ “What ‘U’ Waitin’ ‘4’,” Wyclef Jean ft. Refugee All Stars’, “We Tryin’ to Stay Alive,” and Heavy D. & the Boyz’ “Now That We’ve Found Love,” Nos. 88 to 86. Come on, guys.

Aside from the usual wan jokes and “hey, I know the words of this very popular chorus too!” talking-head stuff, the clips and artist bios were rather more endearing here than on most of VH1’s 100-best-whatever fare. And more poignant: if you’re looking for a drinking game, wait till VH1 runs this as a marathon and swallow one shot for each time announcer Fab 5 Freddy mentions “the hip-hop nostalgia circuit.” You don’t even have to know the list to figure out who’s on it: Sir Mix-a-Lot (No. 17, “Baby Got Back”); Young MC (No. 47, “Bust a Move”); Tone-Loc (No. 39, “Wild Thing”); Arrested Development (No. 78, “Tennessee”); P.M. Dawn (No. 81, “Set Adrift on Memory Bliss”); Digital Underground (No. 29, “The Humpty Dance”); and 2 Live Crew (No. 83, “Me So Horny”), for starters.

It’s the old school, though, that got to me. (“Old school” has acquired too many meanings for its own good, so let me state clearly that I’m talking about artists who preceded Run-D.M.C.) Spoonie Gee (No. 65, “Love Rap”) walking around New York, head shaved, with a splendid orange-and-brown button-down, or J.J. Fad (No. 72, “Supersonic”) reminiscing about their younger selves, were somehow more poignant than their constantly touring descendants. And of course the Funky 4 + 1, creators of No. 41 (see what they did there?), “That’s the Joint,” still my favorite single of all time. Knowing that Sha Rock, the group’s female MC, does hip-hop bus tours–as does Grandmaster Caz of the Cold Crush Brothers (No. 77, “Cold Crush Brothers at the Dixie”)–makes me want to do something touristy for once in my life. And hearing the group discuss their disappointment at never having made an album gave a little gravity to a show that needed it.

When does a genre reach its breaking point? At which step does it fold into history, no one wanting to touch it, until a re-introduction makes it eligible for lost-classic status? I wonder this about jungle a lot lately. I think I already did back when people thought it was a fad, or when the coffee-table thing came around, or whenever trudgestep exerted its all-powerful hand. Trip-hop will never die because you can dress it in all sorts of nicknames: it’s a masterstroke in that way. Jungle you can’t, not even when you call it “drum and bass.” But surely, I figured, people would remember jungle for its mid-’90s tumult, a breathtaking explosion of sonic creativity, and leave alone the past decade’s overarching sense of “whatever.”

Needless to say, I’ve mostly been wrong so far. I actually like the more recent stuff when I encounter it, which has been more often lately than it has in a decade, thanks to the BBC Radio 1 Top 30 Independent Singles, about which I’ve written here before. But this isn’t about those songs, but some older ones, and about the very different perspectives they offer on the style–different from each other, and different from mine, meaning not stuck in the past as I am.

Well, that’s not strictly true. The first can’t be, by design, since everything on it is more than a decade old, and the magazine I found it in nearly as old. Near the end of 1999, the Los Angeles dance-culture magazine Urb put together a series of lists of its top recordings of the decade: the Top 100 albums (DJ Shadow’s Endtroducing… on top) and eight separate lists for singles, with hip-hop, house, and techno each getting a Top 25 and jungle, trance, abstract, breakbeat, and experimental each got a Top 10; all were listed alphabetically by artist. Here’s Urb’s Top 10 Jungle Singles of the ’90s:

1. 4 Hero, “Universal Love” (Talkin’ Loud, 1994)
2. LTJ Bukem, “Music” (Good Looking, 1993)
3. Jonny L, “Piper” (XL, 1997)
4. Krust, “Warhead” (XL, 1997)
5. Nasty Habits, “Shadowboxing” (31, 1996)
6. Omni Trio, “Living for the Future” (Moving Shadow, 1994)
7. PFM, “One and Only” (Good Looking, 1995)
8. Shy FX & UK Apachi, “Original Nuttah” (S.O.U.R., 1994)
9. Roni Size, “It’s a Jazz Thing” (Full Cycle, 1994)
10. Trace, “Mutant Revisited” (No U-Turn, 1996)

I’d seen this list when it was first published–I’m an obvious mark for this sort of thing, and in 1999 I was still doing a lot of clubbing–but had forgotten about it until the end of May, when I made Portland, Ore., the last stop of a month-long road trip via Amtrak and found a copy at a used bookshop heavy on magazine back issues downtown.

Reading that jungle list again, I had a peculiar response: it seemed too American. By which I mean that while all those songs were as often well known as tracks from crossover albums–the kind American listeners discovered the music through–as they were as singles-unto-themselves. Having listened to them again a few times, I was clearly overreacting. Call it identification panic–just because I can ID the albums and comps many of them first reached me doesn’t mean they weren’t chosen as singles-qua-singles. And call it clinging to a golden age, because the Urb editors got a few of the songs’ release dates wrong, skewing the list to 1996-97 on sight, which is the period where things started moving slower. Looking at it with the dates fixed (thanks, Discogs), it’s heaviest on 1994, a glorious year for the stuff, with the pre-’93 stuff left for the breakbeat Top 10.

Nevertheless, I have my after-the-fact cavils. I like all the tracks at least some, but the harder, darker stuff here leaves me coldest, particularly “Mutant Revisited” and “Warhead.” These are clearly classics, but both records, especially “Warhead,” with its wowing low end and hard one-TWO beat, points the way to the shape of boredom to come, and it’s hard not to hear them that way. “Living for the Future” is a very good record that I’ll never love nearly as much as “Renegade Snares (Foul Play V.I.P. Remix)” or (especially) “Mystic Stepper (Feel Better).”

Cavils are cavils, though, and what I’m most surprised (and gratified) by is how charming much of the more futurist aspects are, even if they’ve acquired a layer of kitsch now that we’re living in the actual future and not the one where ambient drum & bass would take us away like Calgon. I remember vividly the first time I heard LTJ Bukem’s “Music,” because I hated it. It was precisely the kind of softheaded pap I hated about the dreamier end of the post-rave spectrum; I wanted to be wowed loudly then. Today I think it’s remarkable, and for most of the same reasons. You ever see smoke going through laser ring, that weird glassy wisp of green light? The implacable loop at the center of “Music” is the audio version. Back then, this sounded like a bad idea. Today its soupy-eyed idea of the endless tomorrow seems touching, somehow, the way only old science fiction that shows its age can be.

A more recent list is a little wider in its outreach. KMag used to be called Knowledge; it’s a monthly devoted entirely to drum and bass, almost always packaged with a cover-mount mix CD. The July issue was its 100th, and in addition to a career spanning mix by Blame (quite nice, this), KMag asked its readers to send in their Top 5 D&B tracks ever for an overall Top 100. Tallied up, this is what the Top 10 looks like:

1. Fresh & Maldini )E|B( [a.k.a. Bad Company], “The Nine” (BC, 1998)
2. Goldie, “Inner City Life” (FFRR, 1994)
3. Konflict, “Messiah” (Renegade Hardware, 2005)
4. Roni Size/Reprazent, “Brown Paper Bag” (Talkin Loud, 1997)
5. DJ Marky & XRS ft. Stamina, “LK” (V, 2002)
6. D-Bridge & Vegas, “True Romance” (Metalheadz, 2004)
7. Omni Trio, “Renegade Snares” (Moving Shadow, 1994)
8. Ed Rush & Optical, “Gas Mask/Bacteria” (Virus, 1999)
9. LTJ Bukem, “Horizons” (Good Looking, 1995)
10. Shy FX & UK Apachi, “Original Nuttah” (S.O.U.R., 1994)

Given my biases, I should like this list less than I do the Urb one. But I might actually prefer it as a list, if not music. KMag’s records aren’t better overall, but they present a more interesting dynamic range. Not just because they cover a longer span, either: the Urb list seemed to circle around its era without quite tying it together, while KMag’s features items that defined their particular mini-epochs, whether or not I care about them as epochs. (Hello, Bad Company.) I definitely prefer Kmag’s Roni Size and Omni Trio selections to those of Urb, which nabbed the far better Bukem track. (Though you could argue that “Horizons,” with its Maya Angelou sample–from the Clinton inaugural, how ’90s-nostalgic can you get?–and new-age-for-real ambience is more representative of jungle’s oceanic tendencies than “Music.”) But maybe it’s just that this one provides me more of an education. I’ll never care for this stuff the way I once did, but it’s nice to know it’s still around and still moving, whatever its direction.

Twenty years ago was Britain’s “Second Summer of Love,” in which acid house and ecstasy began to hit London club life and charge the charts with homemade variations on American house and techno records. Naturally, the British media has been celebrating. In particular, both Mixmag and BBC Radio 2 have caught the anniversary spirit by issuing a pair of Top 10s decided by their audiences.

To be fair, Mixmag’s list isn’t tied to Second Summer of Love nostalgia, per se. (The magazine took care of that a few months ago with a cover package on acid.) Mixmag celebrated its 25th birthday with its May issue, which offered a Top 5 Tracks list for each of the magazine’s years in operation. The magazine then opened the floor for discussion, asking readers to submit nominations for the best tracks of its lifetime. The results were printed up front in the June issue:

Mixmag’s Top 25 Dance Tunes of the Last 25 Years (reader poll, June 2008):
1. Underworld, “Born Slippy” (Junior Boys Own, 1994; reissued 1996)
2. Massive Attack, “Unfinished Sympathy” (Wild Bunch/Virgin, 1991)
3. Stardust, “Music Sounds Better with You” (Roulé, 1998)
4. Energy 52, “Café Del Mar” (Eye Q, 1993)
5. Prodigy, “Smack My Bitch Up” (XL, 1997)
6. Wink, “Higher State of Consciousness” (Strictly Rhythm, 1995)
7. Laurent Garnier, “The Man with the Red Face” (F Communications, 2000)
8. Liquid, “Sweet Harmony” (XL, 1991)
9. Faithless, “Insomnia” (Cheeky, 1996)
10. Tori Amos, “Professional Widow (Armand’s Star Trunkin’ Funk Mix)” (Atlantic, 1996)

There are few surprises here if you’ve followed dance magazines over the past few years, particularly in England. The dance canon, in many ways, is even more set in stone and immobile than the rock canon, with the second half of the ’90s generally seen as the music’s “mature” period, the way late-’60s/early-’70s rock culture is seen as that style’s peak before punk cleared a different path. Hence, Underworld in peak position–and showing up again on the list at No. 21, with “Rez,” the only artist to place twice besides Thomas Bangalter of Stardust and Daft Punk (”Around the World” finished 11th).

This may be the signature way in which dance culture differs from rock culture, in particular the modern rock Al Shipley writes about: they’re nostalgic for opposite halves of the ’90s. Modern-rock radio is a living monument to the lost promise of corporate grunge and alt; lists like this one genuflect at the moment when dance music seemed to have as much promise as rock once had–and when the music itself seemed bolstered by the idea. Two records in the Top 10 from the decade’s first half defined moments in the second half: “Café Del Mar” standing in for trance’s late-’90s global sweep, “Born Slippy” the biggest film soundtrack luck-out ever. (Ditto 19th-place “For an Angel,” by Paul Van Dyk, which like “Café Del Mar” came back even stronger five years after its release.) Broader-appealing four-four-driven genres–trance, techno, house–were approaching pop accessibility while digging deeper into their own stylistic grooves. Surely that largin’-it anthemic sheen pushed the likes of “The Man with the Red Face” and “Insomnia” and (yep) “Born Slippy,” because all these years later they all still sound dull to me. (Bring it.)

For all the Second Summer of Love’s place in U.K. pop lore, not many of its anthems made it into the Mixmag 25. “Unfinished Sympathy” came too late and isn’t really a rave record anyway (too slow), and beyond that only four records on the list could be said to fit into that period: “Sweet Harmony,” Jamie Principle’s 1986 house anthem “Your Love” (No. 14) and a pair of 1990 records, Orbital’s “Chime” (No. 23) and the Age of Love’s “The Age of Love” (No. 25)–and the latter rode in on Jam & Spoon’s classic remix from 1992 anyway. The only record prior to the Second Summer is exactly the record you’d expect, New Order’s “Blue Monday” (1983), which finished 15th and provided one of the few surprises of the list by not finishing Top 10.

“Blue Monday” also finished, surprisingly, out of the other dance-music Top 10 decided by the people–in this case, the listeners of BBC Radio 2, which has recently devoted a number of programs to its history. But as you might expect, the Top 10s couldn’t be more different: one was decided by the folks who purchase a monthly dance magazine devoted to the minutiae of club life and the other by a people who listen to the radio.

BBC Radio 2 Listener Poll: The Top 10 Dance Records of All Time
1. Michael Jackson, “Billie Jean” (Epic, 1983)
2. Donna Summer, “I Feel Love” (Casablanca, 1977)
3. James Brown, “Get Up (I Feel Like Being a) Sex Machine” (King, 1970)
4. Rhythim Is Rhythim, “Strings of Life” (Transmat, 1987)
5. Alison Limerick, “Where Love Lives” (Arista, 1990)
6. Soul II Soul, “Keep on Movin’” (10/Virgin, 1989)
7. Fingers Inc., “Can You Feel It” (Jack Trax, 1988)
8. Inner City, “Big Fun” (Virgin, 1988)
9. S’Express, “Theme From S’Express” (Rhythm King, 1988)
10. The Charades, “The Key to My Happiness” (MGM, 1966)

(HT to SoulBounce)

This list is obviously more historically inclusive. Broader definition of “dance music,” too–one I agree with even if my basic impulses draw me to usually mean “post-rave” when I talk about the concept. But the interesting thing to me is that this list doesn’t begin with the Second Summer of Love, but ends with it–and that half the selections are fully of it. (”Keep on Movin’,” again, belongs more to the R&B side of things than the house side.) There’s also a marked difference in tone between the late-’80s stuff here, which is full of possibility, and the late-’90s stuff on the Mixmag list, which is fuller of power. One is embarking on something new, the other consolidating its gains. It seems that the BBC voters look back at the Second Summer of Love as a culmination, while the Mixmag readership sees it as the first step toward a culmination to come. I’m sympathetic to both sides, but I have to say I prefer the BBC list simply because the pre-rave records are completely unimpeachable.

Well, most of them. The real surprise of the list, of course, is the No. 10, a 1966 New York R&B obscurity that’s a favorite of Northern Soul fanatics. I’d never heard of the song or the group before seeing this list, largely because I shy away of diving into Northern Soul compilations, of which there are many–I figure I own enough Motown box sets I don’t listen to enough. (Northern Soul is essentially mid-to-late-’60s U.S. R&B tracks that heavily reflect the Motown blueprint and have been forgotten by all but the U.K. faithful.) But sometimes the collectors have a point. Hunting to find an MP3, I discovered one only via a dodgy Russian site–no thanks. I also found it’s on a compilation called Northern Soul Connoisseurs, and I heard it via the YouTube clip embedded here:

Is this really the tenth-best dance record of all time? It probably isn’t the tenth-best Northern Soul track of 1966, in all honesty. The real question is, who organized the get-the-vote-out effort it certainly took to place the song tenth? How many mailing lists were consulted? Was bribery involved? There’s simply no way a song this obscure somehow wound up on a list like this unless some serious ballot stuffing went on. (Has Obama hired them yet? Could he still?)

Still, the point was made–and made well. I like this song tremendously. As the YouTube uploader notes on the clip’s page, the thing keeps unfurling, big and broad and strong, for its entire just-over-two-minutes length. And the visuals definitely enhance the music, from slow-mo images of Northern all-night dancers going for it to the quasi-animated stills of producer Tom Wilson, also behind such other perennial Greatest of All Time records list honorees as “Like a Rolling Stone” and The Velvet Underground and Nico. Those are records I found and learned to treasure after seeing them on lists like this one. It’s good to still find some surprises left in the form.

You’d have knocked over the teenager I used to be by saying so, but goddamn have I gotten sick of listicles. I buy the better-looking ones and spy in on those more obvious, the ones in the big music magazines. I’ve written and/or contributed to a number of them myself, not counting this column; my life was more or less changed by them. So feeling like I’m over them does not come lightly. But it seems more and more as if they’ve hit critical mass. Even Blender isn’t doing them much anymore (as our outed Anonodude has mentioned), which is sort of like Madonna not releasing singles. Maybe the listicle is finally finished.

Or maybe the formula just needs to be put to rest. At this point, listicles–most of them, anyway–have become numbingly predictable. Take Blender’s 100 Greatest Indie Rock Albums Ever list from a while back. The only surprising thing about that was that people were actually surprised by it. Of course No. 1 was Pavement’s Slanted & Enchanted–let’s see, it placed 16th in the Spin Alternative Record Guide’s Top 100 back in 1995, after it had only been out three years. Then it was fifth in Spin’s Top 90 Albums of the ’90s, and fourth in its Top 100 Albums 1985-2005. (I contributed to the latter, though not the Pavement entry.) What were the chances that it wasn’t going to place highly on the Blender list? The listicle has become much the same as the pop charts themselves: mostly the same old shit, over and over again, without any real divergences, and lacking any real individual viewpoint.

That’s the major reason I like the cover package of Signal to Noise’s 50th issue so much. I don’t always read this magazine closely: most of it is about improv and jazz, not styles I know much about, and its out-rock and electronica coverage tends to pass me by, though I’ll note the new issue has an interesting profile of East Orange, N.J., freeform radio station WFMU. (I’ll also note I’ve written one piece for STN, a jukebox feature with Jace Clayton, a.k.a. DJ /rupture, in 2002–the last time they ran one, as I recall. Too bad–I enjoy jukebox features wherever they run. I even like the Seattle Weekly’s recent twist on it, in which artists respond to chunks of reviews of their own albums.) But publisher/editor Pete Gershon is an exceptionally warm guy in my limited email experience with him, and his commitment and enthusiasm are obvious and inspiring. And the Summer 2008 issue has a great premise: “Our Favorite Things: Signal to Noise writers and extended family throw open their closet doors and share 50 of their most-cherished musical possessions.” The Things are not presented in any special order, as far as I can tell, but they’re numbered, so here are the first 10 items chosen (writers in parentheses):

1. Duke Ellington Orchestra autographed photo (John Chacona)
2. Two free jazz posters (Martin Davidson, Emanem Records)
3. Muscle Shoals Sound tee-shirt (Kandia Crazy Horse)
4. Jimmy Giuffre interview cassettes (Alain Drouot)
5. 78 RPM record by unknown artist (Adam Lore, 50 Miles of Elbow Room)
6. Lead pipe left behind at Faust concert (Andrew Choate)
7. Misha Mengelberg’s piano stool leg (Dan Warburton)
8. “Graydog” (Kurt Gottschalk)
9. The Azusa Plane’s “For Claudia Cardinale” 7-inch (Ian Nagosk)
10. Tibetan thighbone trumpet (David Cotner)

You can see where this is going. A lot of the writing rambles–and it should. That’s that this kind of thing is made for. It’s favorites, not “greatest of all time,” and it’s stuff that means to these writers what it could to no one else. So they try to explain why, and in the process, they explain themselves.

This resonates, because much of what and why we love what we do as listeners depends on serendipity–of being in the right place at the right time, ready to have our expectations met or to be blindsided, however it happened. How it happens is the real story much of the time, especially if you’re dealing with stuff that isn’t poised for crossover. And STN’s contributors write as if that’s the starting point, even if they were heading in this stuff’s direction before they knew how the rules were supposed to work. Take No. 38, Erik Davis’ “vintage copy of John Fahey’s The Great San Bernardino Birthday Party LP.” It belonged to his father, a Berkeley folkie whose Kingston Trio titles the eight-year-old Erik never cared for. But he flipped for Dad’s Faheys: “They seemed magisterial and lovely and strange, and the lack of wards let my mind ‘a wander.” Davis’s choice, though, stands in for a missing object, and he puts it in words that are funny, cutting, and jump off the page: “[T]he heirloom I would much rather be writing about here [is] Pop’s old banjo, jettisoned somewhere along the way because my step-mom said it smelled like a goat.”

Such regret is rare here, though. Much of it is unabashedly nostalgic: The Big Takeover editor/publisher Jack Rabid’s salute to his cherished issue of the punk ‘zine Search & Destroy (No. 13) is precisely what you’d expect (”Search & Destroy taught readers how liberating and fun it is to take part in culture, rather than absorbing it passively through endless electronic devices. I hope my own mag does, today”), and nice to read for precisely that reason. Then there’s Susan Archie’s 12-inch by Patti Smith: “I came in contact with Lenny Kaye … I sent him the Goodbye, Babylon box i designed for Dust-to-Digital and he asked what I would like in return. I asked, ‘By any chance, do you have any copies of “Hey Joe”?’”

—

In the spirit of election season, I’m going to give equal time here. The new Blender isn’t unusual, though I enjoyed more of it than usual, particularly Rob Sheffield’s Erasure column. What caught my eye was something written (without byline, as is increasingly the case throughout the magazine’s front of book) about No. 10 in the mag’s monthly 33 Most Wanted Songs in America:

1. Lil Wayne, “Lollipop” (Cash Money)
2. Danity Kane, “Damaged” (Bad Boy)
3. Mariah Carey, “Bye Bye” (Island Def Jam)
4. Clay Aiken, “On My Way Here” (RCA)
5. Vanessa Hudgens, “Sneakernight” (Hollywood)
6. Madonna, “4 Minutes” (Warner Bros.)
7. Three 6 Mafia, “Lolli Lolli (Pop That Body)” (Columbia/Hypotize Minds)
8. Motley Crue, “Saints of Los Angeles” (Motley)
9. Chris Brown, “Take You Down” (Jive)
10. Taylor Swift, “Picture to Burn” (Big Machine)

Over a picture of Swift at a vintage mike clutching a rhinestone-studded acoustic, it says, “Dudes: Let Taylor Swift drive your truck, OK? If you don’t, she’ll write one of her signature breakup songs (like this one) about how she’s going to exact her revenge.”

Here’s what struck me: this is precisely the kind of thing you say about someone who’s been releasing singles from the same album for a year and a half. Which is to say, it’s an explication of how her persona has evolved, as much as on what we think of as its basic premise. You don’t get to write a “signature breakup song” unless you’re on your third one, at least; you don’t get a “signature” anything, usually, until your second album. That’s the difference between paying attention to singles versus paying attention to albums. With albums, you’re absorbing the work as a whole, thus precluding the need to see how its components play out in the public sphere.

This sort of happened to me last year. I bought Rihanna’s Good Girl Gone Bad, played it a number of times, and picked “Don’t Stop the Music” as my favorite long before it had any traction outside of Billboard’s Dance Club Play chart in terms of public recognition. By the time the song hit on the radio, etc., I was unmoved: What took everyone else so long?, I wondered. That wouldn’t be the case with Taylor Swift, were I of the same apparent mind and interests as the Blender blurb.

I’m not sure I am: I haven’t cared much for the little Taylor Swift I’ve heard. But the ongoing drama of pop as public discussion is a lot of its appeal. And I’d argue that a lot of people have gone back to being interested in it because, in part, of the way the diffused listening we’ve been hearing (and arguing) so much about lately. Certainly American Idol’s popularity has helped as well. And it’s obviously in Blender’s interest, as the magazine that most aggressively sells itself to the average pop fan, to discuss it in those terms. Which is fine with me, especially now that they’ve finally gotten rid of that stupid “Your music buddy” tag.

I’ve been traveling all May, starting with a week in New York, with stops in Philadelphia, Baltimore, Detroit, and Chicago before spending a week in the Twin Cities. (Portland, Ore., is next, before heading home to Seattle.) I’ve been seeing a lot of my family while I’m here–and of course I had to play them the Billboard Hot 100 Top 10 of May 24.

The session, as always, took place at my sister Brittany’s apartment in the south Minneapolis suburb of Bloomington, near the scenic Mall of America, following an early-evening, belated Mother’s Day dinner at Red Lobster, fortified by extra to-go bags of cheese biscuits provided by my sisters’ waitress friend. No significant others tolerating us this time–just the loosest session yet, to which Mom attributes thus: “It probably went well because you fed us first.” As usual, I typed everyone’s responses on the fly, occasionally pausing the songs to fill in gaps, and clarifying and/or adding additional commentary after reading through what I had to the group.

Dramatis personae (and their Red Lobster meals):
Lorie, mother, 48: seafood-stuffed mushrooms
Michael, author, 33: garlic shrimp, coconut shrimp, and snow crab legs dinner
Alex, sister, 22: seafood pasta
Brittany, sister, 21: salmon, broccoli, and a baked potato
Veronica, niece, 3: popcorn shrimp

Preface
Michael: Brittany, do you still have that CD I made you of the last Top 10 we listened to?
Brittany: Miguel jacked it from me–straight up. He was bumping it in his car. I asked him, “Where did you get this?” He said, “It’s the Top 10 that your brother did.” I said, “Gee whiz, thanks, Miguel.”
Michael: Does he play it a lot?
Brittany: Yeah! He listens to it all the fucking time. Every time he listens to English [language] music I ask him, “What is this?” It’s kind of ironic that the one that enjoyed that CD the most was the one who’s not from this country.

1. Rihanna, “Take a Bow” (SRP/Def Jam)
Brittany: It’s Rihanna–but it’s not as good as “Umbrella.” Oh, this is the song jacked from Madonna’s “Take a Bow.”
Lorie: I like the music.
Brittany: The piano is nice. I’m just not big into this. She’s done a lot better. What’s the name of the song she did with that guy?
Michael: “Livin’ a Lie,” which is on The-Dream’s album.
Brittany: That’s what they should put out.
Michael: I don’t know why they haven’t. Maybe they’re just trying not to get in her album’s way, even though it’s obvious that “Livin’ a Lie” is the best song on his album.
Lorie: This song is kind of depressing.
Brittany: Depressing because it’s Rihanna and it’s not very good.
Lorie: Why grace the asshole with a song? It’s like that song that goes, “I bet you think this song is about you.”
Brittany: How old are you, mom? “You’re So Vain”? How old is that song?
Lorie: Why shouldn’t I be the age I am?
Brittany: You mean as old as humanity?
Michael: This has been on the charts for about a month, and it jumped from No. 53 to No. 1 in a single week.
Lorie: That’s probably because everyone has spring fever and is going out, hanging around the beach. Everyone dogged their girlfriends, and the [girlfriends] are pissed.
Michael: It’s also not on Good Girl Gone Bad–they’re tacking it onto the “special edition” reissue to try to bilk teenagers into buying the same album twice.
Brittany: That’s fucked up.
Lorie: How can they afford it?
Brittany: [muttering] Welfare.
Michael: You can buy the song individually on iTunes if you have the album already. A lot of artists are doing that now.
Lorie: And politicians.
Brittany: Politicians are adding songs to their [albums]?
Lorie: No–tacking on interests and fees and late charges.
Brittany: Damn you, Hillary. Damn you, Barack. No one gives a shit about the Republicans, so I won’t even dignify them with a comment.
Lorie: McCain needs anger management classes.
Brittany: He needs the fountain of youth. He’s old and bitter. Did you see those commercials with his mother? How the fuck is his mother still alive? He’s like 90!
Alex: Maybe it’s an actress.
Brittany: Maybe it’s a marionette.
Lorie: He’s like 72 now, right? Isn’t there an age where people have to die now?
Brittany: It’s called Botox.
Lorie: It’s called formaldehyde.

2. Leona Lewis, “Bleeding Love” (SYCO/J)
Brittany: I’m going to shoot myself if I have to hear this song again.
Lorie: I’ll do it for you.
Brittany: Someone get me a knife so I can cut my ears off, please.
Lorie: This should be [McCain's] election song: “Keep breathing.”
Alex, Brittany, Michael: Bleeding.
Lorie: Oh. Is this Mariah?
Michael: It’s Leona Lewis.
Brittany: Every female R&B singer is compared to Mariah or Whitney.
Alex: Because she has that high range.
Brittany: She sounds like she’s yodeling. I thought this was Jordin Sparks–I bet she’ll be on the chart, too.
Alex: I thought so too.
Lorie: I don’t like this song at all.
Michael: It sounds a LOT like an early Mariah Carey song.
Lorie: One that I don’t like.
Brittany: So that means it’ll be on the Adult Contemporary chart in nine years or so?
Michael: Leona Lewis is English.
Brittany: She’s Simon Cowell’s protégé. That in itself is bad enough: he created Il Divo.
Alex: Oh god! Don’t even get me started on them. [My boyfriend] Brandon’s mom is obsessed with them.
Lorie: What’s Il Divo?
Brittany: They’re this bad popera group.
Alex: They’re four older guys. They sing older opera type stuff.
Brittany: That isn’t opera. I like opera.
Michael: Apparently the American record company that signed her did so for something like a zillion dollars, at a time when the music industry is in free fall.
Brittany: They thought she was gonna redeem it? Yeah, right.
Lorie: Maybe they just thought she’d make it easier to let go.

3. Lil Wayne ft. Static Major, “Lollipop” (Cash Money)
Alex: Oh god.
Lorie: [The Supremes'] “Reflections”–that’s what [the beginning] reminds me of.
Alex: “Apple bottom jeans, boots with the fur”: I know this song. I don’t like this, though. Oh! It’s the wrong song. I’m thinking of “Low” [by Flo Rida ft. T-Pain].
Brittany: Is this Lil Wayne?! “Cash Money Records reppin’ for the nine-nine and the 2000!” I like Mannie Fresh better. He was a lot funnier to listen to. What’s that song, “Get Your Roll On”? Lil Wayne was like 12 years old when Cash Money Records came out–that’s what I always think about when I hear him. He was like 12 years old with a kid, and his lonely teardrop.
Lorie: A kid? Wow! I’ve been outdone!
Brittany: Yeah–nobody thought it was biologically possible, but it’s been done, Mom.
Lorie: You know what this reminds me of? Rap.
Alex, Brittany, Michael: It is rap.
Brittany: It’s more like a distant relative of rap. What kind of rap did you listen to, Mom, the Sugarhill Gang?
Lorie: No, I listened to that Superman song.
Michael: You mean “Rapper’s Delight”?
Lorie: Yes!
Brittany: That’s the Sugarhill Gang.
Lorie: Oh.
Michael: Wait–do you mean the song about Superman and Lois Lane, or the one about Supermanning that ho?
Lorie: [confused look]
Michael: OK, never mind.
Brittany: I thought about Eminem’s “Superman,” which is worse than anything we could have come up with. I just can’t believe Lil Wayne is still around. Look at all the other little kids who came out around that time. Sammy is apparently doing something. Lil Bow Wow is still around, I guess.
Lorie: Is that a person? A dog?
Brittany: I don’t know if it’s true or just hearsay, but the way Bow Wow got his name was that he was pulled onstage at a Snoop Dogg concert.
Lorie: Who cares if it’s true? Print it anyway.
Brittany: Yeah, it’s the Internet.
Michael: Speaking of the Internet: Lil Wayne’s reputation is a lot different than when he started out. Last year he put out over 300 songs on the web; a lot of people think he’s the best rapper alive. He put out a mixtape called Da Drought 3 that was him rhyming over other people’s tracks; it’s a great album.
Brittany: But he sucked when he came out! He wasn’t good. It could have been who he was with. That’s weird, because nobody else on Cash Money did well. I guess I thought the non-talent ran with the label.
Lorie: What’s the point of making your heart boom-boom?
Michael: What?
Brittany: The fact that it keeps you alive?
Lorie: [indicating stereo] It actually vibrates your chest.
Brittany: It’s called bass, mom.
Lorie: I hate it.
Brittany: You going to listen to “When Doves Cry” for the rest of your life, Mom? Tell me he’s not a sex symbol now, Michael?
Michael: I’m not altogether sure how that works.
Brittany: I know people used to think he was attractive. I didn’t understand it then, and I don’t now. I’m tired of these songs with references to candy. There was “Candy Shop,” and then there was “Laffy Taffy.” [listening] The Vocoder–the first time I heard it, aside from the Funkadelic stuff, was [T-Pain & Mike Jones's] “I’m in Luv (Wit a Stripper).” Everything has it now.
Michael: It’s usually just T-Pain.
Brittany: He’s like Nate Dogg. He was on everything for a few years. Only he wasn’t singing into a machine. And he wasn’t that good, either.
Lorie: How do you know all this stuff? How do you know all these dogs?

4. Jordin Sparks Duet with Chris Brown, “No Air” (19/Jive)
Brittany: Oh, here the fuck it is.
Michael: I want to point out that the song is billed as “Jordin Sparks Duet with Chris Brown,” as if we wouldn’t know it was a duet otherwise.
Brittany: They’re being politically correct.
Lorie: This isn’t that necklace one, is it?
Brittany: What are you talking about? “You’re So Vain”?
Lorie: No, the girl with no neck.
Michael: Oh, neck-less.
Alex: That’s Melinda Doolittle–she was on American Idol at the same time [as Jordin Sparks].
Brittany: Melinda Necklittle.
Lorie: I don’t think this is a bad song, actually. I can’t make the words out.
Brittany: They can’t breathe because they’re in the water without each other, or some shit. It’s like Titanic. Here’s how they could put a twist on this: if they were an arguing couple one of them could be drowning the other one. That would be a lot more entertaining.
Lorie: I don’t get it. Why can’t they breathe?
Brittany: Their love is each other’s air or some shit. It’s really stupid. Did Maya Angelou write this song?

5. Usher ft. Young Jeezy, “Love In This Club” (LaFace)
Alex: Oh my god. These songs are all so ghetto.
Brittany: This one’s actually featuring Brad Paisley. Brad Paisley’s hood. Who is this?
Michael: It’s Usher with Young Jeezy.
Brittany: Usher used to be good. But then after that one club song he made–”Yeah.” That was a good song, but then he kept trying to make club songs and they weren’t as good.
Michael: This is a slow jam, though.
Brittany: Well, it’s called “Love in This Club.”
Michael: I want you to hear Jeezy, because on this song he makes Usher sound like Prince.
Brittany: [Listens to Jeezy's verse] Is he autistic? Since when does it take this long to rap? He’s trying to be all seductive–it’s disgusting. I would never sleep with anybody that illiterate.

6. Ray J & Yung Berg, “Sexy Can I” (Knockout/DEJA)
Lorie: Stop! Rap and pointy-toed shoes have got to go.
Michael: What do those two things have to do with each other?
Lorie: They’re both terrible! Pointy-toed shoes have been in style for seven years. Enough!
Brittany: What are you talking about? You’re wearing Crocs!
Lorie: I just bought them to protest pointy-toed shoes.
Michael: I like Ray J’s voice–kind of early R. Kelly, kind of like Justin.
Brittany: He sounds like Frankie J, who was part of the Cumbia Kings and hten broke off from them and did English [language] songs. There’s a song called “Obsesion No Es Amor” that he turned into an American hit called “Obsession.” It was pretty good. [indicating "Sexy Can I"] I could tolerate this song.

7. Madonna Featuring Justin Timberlake, “4 Minutes” (Warner Bros.)
Brittany: Timbaland?
Michael: With Justin Timberlake and Madonna.
Brittany: Oh, this song sucks.
Lorie: So Madonna’s gonna rap, is that what you’re telling me?
Brittany: She’s gonna rap English-style. She’s gonna rap and then eat crumpets. It’s kind of eerie how similarly Madonna and Justin sound. I don’t know if Madonna’s just so manly or Justin’s just so feminine.
Michael: This sounds either like it’s a reject from Justin’s album that Madonna sang a couple lines on, or like he’s trying really hard to impress her, for some reason. He’s actually putting some back into it, and she’s just lazy.
Brittany: Maybe she should make a record with T-Pain, then.
Lorie: Who allows this stuff on the radio?
Michael: It’s three of the biggest artists out right now.
Lorie: Those guys? This is terrible. If you went to the club, you’d listen to this shit, wouldn’t you?
Alex: That’s kind of the point.
Lorie: I didn’t know any of these people rapped.
Brittany: Nobody’s rapping, Mom!
Lorie: [mocking background vocals] They’re “tick-tocking.”
Brittany: This song didn’t save anything.

8. Mariah Carey, “Touch My Body” (Island)
Brittany: I was waiting for this song so I could talk a lot of shit about it, but after hearing “I’m That Chick,” I don’t have the heart for it. [Mariah sings a line about YouTube] You can catch anything on YouTube. Like if you slept with Mariah Carey you wouldn’t put that shit on YouTube! God.
Lorie: Why?
Brittany: When Mariah Carey takes a shit it’s on YouTube.
Lorie: Oh. I haven’t seen U2.
Brittany: YouTube. She’s so narcissistic. The last 5 videos were her writhing around on a bed. Actually, all her videos were like that.
Michael: Not really. The early videos were narcissistic but also nonsexual.
Alex: Yeah, before she was rolling on a bed fully clothed. Now she doesn’t wear any clothes, or virtually any.
Brittany: Because she’s having a mid-life crisis.
Michael: This reminds me of the Madonna track in the sense that neither of them really sound like they’re doing the stuff that made them famous in the first place.
Brittany: She’s not bellowing, you mean?
Michael: Exactly. Mom, you keep asking about why rapping and singing sound so similar. You remember “Say My Name” by Destiny’s Child? That’s kind of where it began: the singing got really syncopated and rhythmic, so it’s half-and-half. R. Kelly does it too. The thing about Mariah Carey is that she stopped imitating Whitney Houston and, on her last album, started imitating Beyoncé.
Lorie: When will she be herself?
Michael: She doesn’t have a self! She’s a robot.

9. Natasha Bedingfield, “Pocketful of Sunshine” (Phonogenic/Epic)
Brittany: What is this?
Michael: Natasha Bedingfield.
Brittany: No wonder! She’s terrible.
Lorie: I don’t mind this.
Michael: It’s interesting to me that there are two Englishwomen in the Top 10–ever since Amy Winehouse there’s been kind a bunch of British female singers getting over in America–three if you count Madonna’s phony accent.
Brittany: Well, they’re not Amy Winehouse and they need to knock it off. [points to her daughter] Look–Veronica’s screaming at the TV: “Be quiet!” [Bedingfield's] not singing, she’s shouting. [listens to track] There’s a dial tone. I’d hang up on her, too.

10. Danity Kane, “Damaged” (Bad Boy/Atlantic)
Brittany: Is this Danity Kane?
Lorie: Fuck, is this for real?
Alex: She sounds like a wannabe Jennifer Lopez.
Brittany: And that’s bad. First of all, Puff Daddy should not have been successful; second of all, no protégé of Puff Daddy’s should have been successful.
Alex: Puff Daddy was “successful” with Jennifer Lopez.
Brittany: He was “successful” at shooting up clubs with Jennifer Lopez. [the song's chorus comes in] Their brains are damaged.

Here’s a trick question–look at the following Top 10 chart and guess how long ago it was compiled:

1. Colbie Caillat, “Bubbly” (Universal Republic)
2. Sara Bareilles, “Love Song” (Epic)
3. Michael Bublé, “Lost” (143/Reprise)
4. Fergie, “Big Girls Don’t Cry” (will.i.am/A&M)
5. Timbaland ft. OneRepublic, “Apologize” (Mosley/Blackground)
6. Daughtry, “Home” (RCA)
7. Taylor Swift, “Teardrops on My Guitar” (Big Machine)
8. Pink, “Who Knew” (LaFace)
9. Michael McDonald, “(Your Love Keeps Lifting Me) Higher And Higher” (Universal Motown)
10. Alicia Keys, “No One” (MBK/J)

You’ve probably figured it out already: that list was compiled this past week and is therefore absolutely current. Well, sort of. To be strict, it’s Billboard’s Adult Contemporary Tracks Top 10 for May 3, 2008, and the way some of these songs’ other numbers shake out is worth looking at closely. The average A.C. Top 10 entry for this week has spent over half a year on the chart–27.2 weeks. Half of them are also in the current Top 40–and those five have been in the Hot 100 for significantly longer than they’ve been in the A.C. Top 30. Here’s that list again, with the number of weeks each song has spent in the A.C. Top 30 in parentheses and, where applicable, the current position and number of weeks in the Hot 100 in brackets:

1. “Bubbly” (38 weeks) [No. 36; 43 weeks]
2. “Love Song” (15 weeks) [No. 8; 25 weeks]
3. “Lost” (15 weeks)
4. “Big Girls Don’t Cry” (43 weeks)
5. “Apologize” (25 weeks) [No. 18; 38 weeks]
6. “Home” (50 weeks)
7. “Teardrops on My Guitar” (17 weeks) [No. 38; 46 weeks]
8. “Who Knew” (37 weeks)
9. “(Your Love Keeps Lifting Me) Higher And Higher” (15 weeks)
10. “No One” (17 weeks) [No. 33; 33 weeks]

None of this is news, of course. The entire idea of the adult contemporary format is to act as a kind of strainer, filtering out the harsher, weirder elements of pop until what’s left is smooth and can go down easy. Chart-watchers, commentators, and other folks whose job it is to be up to the minute can laugh at this list, and at the A.C. charts generally, as being old and out of it. But being anti-cutting edge is precisely its point. (That’s why it’s a Top 30 and not a Top 100, for starters.) “Bubbly” only took five weeks to make it to A.C., as opposed to 16 weeks for “No One” and 29 for “Teardrops on My Guitar”–maybe beats take longer to settle for A.C. listeners than they do for pop fans. (Ditto twang.)

This fascinates me in part because it’s probably the closest of any of Billboard’s charts to reflect the way a lot of people listen to music, and by “a lot” I mean “nearly everybody.” One of Chris Molanphy’s frequent points of discussion in “100 and Single” is how chart data is gathered and measured, and as interesting and frequently relevant that is to discussing the pop charts in general, it disintegrates in the face of the A.C. charts. However it’s compiled (I’m guessing iTunes sales mean absolute zero; this is almost certainly 100 percent airplay), the Adult Contemporary list is probably the most accurate chart around, in that everything on it is over a year behind the other Billboard charts, and that it contains only songs your mom knows.

I mean no insult by that. Still, I’ll understand if you think I did: music people tend toward the finicky like few other arts or entertainment followers. Partly that’s due to the isolation most of us, superfans or not, enjoy most recorded music in. (The radio may mystically connect us all, but I’d wager that most of us listen to it unaccompanied.) Obviously that one-on-one aspect is an important part of its appeal; even on a packed dance floor or a crowded stadium, the idea that a particular song is speaking directly to us individually is what galvanizes an audience. (The more people who feel they’re being directly spoken to, the bigger the galvanization, not to mention the bigger the audience.) But if people’s relationship with music has grown more peculiar, that’s largely because music has grown peculiar too–not because it’s weird, but because there’s simply too much of it to process easily.

Let me try it this way: For most people, music is akin to sports. Everyone knows the games, the rules, and the big teams; knowing anything beyond that is nitpicking. You can, week to week, pay zero attention to the minor leagues, but no one’s going to blink if you claim to love baseball. It’s perfectly OK to refer to a player who’s spent four years in AA and AAA ball before climbing into the majors as “new.” In this realm, the idea is to get to the majors and shine; it isn’t to make a life’s goal out of pitching middle relief for 12 seasons in Pawtucket.

This reckoning, of course, has nothing to do with how music actually works. In sports, a tiered system like baseball’s major and minor leagues presents an accurate reflection of talent and ability, for the most part. In music, those distinctions are arbitrary: the band you can see at a local dive can be as good as the one headlining an arena, and if you care at all you probably want to keep tabs on both camps and many points between. (Especially if you’re a genre specialist.) In music, all the leagues–major, minor, even foreign when we tune those in–exist on a level field, and there’s a lot more of them, too. In this scenario, the Pawtucket middle reliever’s life goal is both nobler and more commonplace–and given the vagaries of the marketplace, just as elusive as jumping to the bigs and snagging Rookie of the Year.

So right–my analogy went too far. Forgive me. Anything was better than actually listening to “Bubbly” and Bublé.

Even if you’ve written concert or movie reviews, taking notes on TV watching can be exhausting, even if you’ve got DV-R and can pause to your heart’s content. It’s got to do with set and setting. Jotting things down on the fly while in a dark, crowded bar, or while seated in a darkened movie theater, somehow feels less unnatural than doing the same thing in a brightly lit living room, looking at something manufactured for the most passive audience conceivable.

Still, you can learn something from it. The obvious reason I started watching cable network Fuse’s program 10 Great Reasons was that I write a column about Top 10 lists. I kept watching because the show was so irresistibly ridiculous–as ad hoc and seat-of-pants as anything I’ve come across lately, willing to try anything as much out of obvious necessity as carefree spirit. “The show that takes scientific fact, classic literature, and human psychology to let you know it’s OK to learn those crazy dance routines,” went a line from the episode detailed here, which about sums it up. Watching, you start wondering which producers knew which author, astrologist, publicist, and/or ex-minor celebrity tapped to appear as a talking head; which ones they were college roommates with, or which ones dated their siblings or cousins, or what the precise nature of the favors one owed the other might be. (Gambling was involved, I’m almost certain.) Slow things down a bit during a randomly chosen episode and you might start wondering some other things, too.

“10 Great Reasons You Love Girl/Boy Bands”

1. You love a breakout star
2. Everybody wants to rule the world
3. Hotties always come first
4. They dance better than you walk
5. They’re your high school crush
6. You want mass volume arm candy
7. Cheese never tasted so good
8. Harmony isn’t just a great stripper name
9. You love those annoyingly catchy names
10. You like a nice package

By itself, this is a fairly opaque list; it’s there to be fleshed out by a multitude of video clips, talking heads, and stock footage. This episode begins with this voiceover: “Centuries of suffrage came to an end with the Equal Rights Amendment–but that doesn’t stop us from separating the sexes when it comes to boy and girl bands.” That’s certainly news to anyone aware that the Nineteenth Amendment, which in 1920 gave women the vote in the U.S., is distinct from the Equal Rights Amendment, which was never ratified and stopped being eligible in 1979. This sets the tone, as it were.

Soon enough, we get some of those talking heads discussing No. 10, which refers to the attractiveness of group dynamics: an Us Weekly photo editor; a publicist; a former member of 98 Degrees; a neuroscientist; a psychotherapist; and, somehow inevitably, Carnie Wilson. “In Wilson Phillips, I think that Chynna was the hot, pretty one, the lead singer,” she says. “Wendy was the mysterious, sexy one. I was more of the rock.” She frowns, then smiles: “The meat.” Before we have a chance for any embarrassment to sink in, we cut immediately to Daisy Martinez, who hosts PBS’s Daisy Cooks! and says, “When you prepare a menu, you have to have balance. You have to juggle texture, color, smell–you have to be able to juggle all of those elements to come up with a finished symphony.” Visuals: faded stills of diner food that lead, at “a finished symphony,” to a bright promo shot of . . . the Village People, who are precisely what I think of whenever I consider menu planning. Specifically, I think of the “Sex Over the Phone” video, but then I think of that video every minute of my life, whether or not I’m planning a menu.

And today’s special is whoppers. No. 9 is accompanied by Peter Grossman, the aforementioned Us staffer, saying, “People can take credit and pride in the fact that they know that, actually, it’s the N, then the apostrophe, then the S-Y-N-C.” Actually, it’s spelled ‘NSync, or *NSync, give or take entire-word capitalization. This must be why he’s the photo editor. Less factually disputable but equally dubious is financial columnist Laura Rowley’s statement that Wall Street condensations of corporation names are, apparently like boy-band names, “fun to say”–which, if you’re not being fucked over by those corporations on a daily basis, they probably are.

By the time we reach No. 8–which brings in commentary from a vocal coach, an ornithologist, and a political writer who argues sweetly but unconvincingly that “if you’ve ever been to a political rally and everyone’s singing the same song, it can be really powerful”–I had stopped attempting to keep track of the stock footage. It’s used entertainingly, for the most part, giving the show a kind of Behind the Music-meets-Night Flight feel.

But No. 6 was where things got interesting again. Not just because “mass volume arm candy” denotes the musical group as stand-in for group sex fantasies–complete with words from the attractive sexologist and “Personal Pleasure Coach” Dr. Sadie Allison–but because this is where we are introduced to Michelle Moran, who is identified onscreen as a “historian.” Funny, because Moran’s own website introduces her as a historical fiction author, which the last time I checked wasn’t remotely the same thing. Later, discussing the self-explanatory No. 4 alongside the Knicks City Dancers, zoologist/TV host Jarod Miller, author/actor Malachy McCourt, and Fordham cheerleader Casey McCurdy, Moran quickly traces the history of social dancing from circle dancing to square dancing to lap dancing. Yeah, that about covers it.

Down to No. 2, about chart domination, Fuse host Steven Smith notes, “The goal is to be the herpes of the music world.” That’s certainly one way of putting it. But no one is more eloquent on the matter of boy/girl bands’ importance than the aforementioned publicist, Jenn Nuccio of Susan Blond Inc. “The Pussycat Dolls are really hot,” she says about No. 1. “There’s going to be a point where one of them is going to get offered a movie role . . . She should totally go for it.” Please note that Nuccio doesn’t specify which kind of movie one of the Pussycat Dolls is going to be offered a role in.

If you saw my bulging shelves full of CDs, books, magazines, photocopies, and printouts, you might call me a collector. But I’ve never been entirely comfortable with the designation: even when I was 13 and deep into comic books, I wanted to read them more than I wanted to preserve them. Keeping them around was a fringe benefit. The same has been true with music magazines, but it wasn’t always, which is what has lately driven me to eBay to find old copies of Spin. One of my favorite issues was cover-dated August 1990: Jim Morrison against a bubblegum-pink background on the cover. The headline: “35 Years of Rock’n'Roll.” A subhead: “Top 35 Lists of Everything From Guitar Gods to Dead Rock Star Charts.”

I’ve actually had copies of the lists for a few years before getting the whole thing back into my hands: researching an earlier project, I’d photocopied articles from a large number of back issues at the magazine’s offices. Still, it’s far more instructive to see them as part of the entire cover package–especially since I wasn’t able to reproduce one of them thanks to its placement against a dark-grey background. Mark Blackwell and Jim Greer’s “Death as a Career Move” lists the artists who, to that point, had benefited the most from dying: “Rankings are based on amount of sales increase after death of the artist.” Here’s the Top 10, with dates of death in parentheses.

1. Elvis Presley (Aug. 16, 1977)
2. John Lennon (Dec. 8, 1980)
3. Jim Morrison (July 3, 1971)
4. Jimi Hendrix (Sept. 18, 1970)
5. Janis Joplin (Oct. 3, 1970)
6. Roy Orbison (Dec. 6, 1988)
7. Buddy Holly (Feb. 3, 1959)
8. Keith Moon (Sept. 25, 1980)
9. Marc Bolan (Sept. 16, 1977)
10. John Bonham (Sept. 7, 1978)

The full list is 30 long, by the way, not 35–just one way the issue’s package shows its seams. But that raggedness is also what’s most fascinating about it, then and now.

“Then,” I should say, clouds “now” to a great degree. I’d only begun buying Spin a year before, with the issue featuring Flea on the cover, so I’d missed the magazine’s earlier list extravaganza, featuring the infamous list of 100 greatest singles headed up by Rob Base & DJ E-Z Rock’s “It Takes Two,” which had come out a year before. And growing up, I spent weekends in the city with Loretta and Arlene, my great-grandaunts–I lived in the suburbs–and from 13 on I’d begun exploring the city on my own. I purchased the 8/90 Spin after looking for it at about six drugstores up and down Lake Street in south Minneapolis on a great, hot summer day perfect for the long walk. The whole thing made a lasting impression, and it’s almost impossible not to look at the issue now without recalling details of my grandaunts’ house: the enormous oak dining room table, the tan nylon curtains, the screened-off porch where Loretta and Arlene smoked, Kemps vanilla ice cream in the meat locker next to the back door, the wondrous walk-in pantry, painted yellow to offset the white of the kitchen proper.

In 2008, though, the overriding impression is how obvious the issue’s cover concept was the work of Legs McNeil, then a Spin senior editor who oversaw the package. The features–Jim Morrison of course, Esquerita, Les Paul, the Cramps, David Bowie, and Iggy Pop–comprise a pantheon that should click with anyone familiar with McNeil’s and Gillian McCain’s oral history of New York punk, Please Kill Me. So should much of the roughly chronological “35 Meetings of Rock’n'Roll Minds,” which McNeil co-compiled with Holly Holiday and Jennifer Bernstein. (19 of the entries are book excerpts, nine come from old Spin articles, six are described without credits, and at No. 21 is “David Bowie Meets God [unconfirmed].”) Similarly, the Scott Cohen-compiled “35 Seconds That Say It All” is an unnumbered grab bag of interview quotes that make their own singular context. (James Brown, 1987: “Q: Where did the words for your song ‘For Goodness Sake, Look at Those Cakes’ come from? A: From God. Q: What kind of deodorant does the ‘Hardest Working Man in Show Business’ use? A: Right Guard.”)

But “pantheon” is probably the wrong word to use here. What made the 8/90 Spin so engrossing was how untethered to a neat pantheon all this stuff was. This wasn’t mere historicization; there was no bow tying the narrative together. For all of McNeil’s obvious touch, many of these items seemed to come from different direction than the last; that still seems to me like the lifeblood of a dynamic magazine. You might not have a toehold in everything, but the fact that it was all being claimed for the same sensibility was exciting in itself. It helped fill in the background of my increasing obsession with music, and helped teach me how deep and unlimited that background could be.

Reading Rolling Stone talk about old bluesmen was fascinating, but also like homework. Spin’s “35 Blues Guitarists Who Definitely Started It All,” written by Jim Marshall, took the stuff out of the museum and made it seem real, tactile, alluring. (”20. Jody Williams. The unsung hero of many Howlin’ Wolf, Bo Diddley, Otis Rush and Jimmy Rogers records. His solo on Diddley’s ‘Who Do You Love?’ is a lesson in evil.”) Even more jolting was the chronological “35 Greatest Moments in Rock’n'Roll Television,” by Michael Corcoran, whose prize moments of irreverence and outlandishness were brought home by the writing: “32. January 29, 1983: Prince appeared on Solid Gold. Prince brought his entire stage set-up, complete with lights, ramps and backdrop, not to mention eight backing musicians, and then lip-synced ‘1999.’”

Finally, two things. One: while looking for back issues recently I came across this blog post from last year by Marlon James, a writer I hadn’t encountered before. (A Twin Citian, too, though I should note I haven’t lived in Minnesota for nine years.) It’s a little clunky–blogs are like that, mine included–but it sums up well the mag’s appeal before it hardened into an alt-rock bible, as well as its more recent wobbliness, and I like how heartfelt it is.

The other thing is another Top 10–four of them, actually, my favorites of the issue even though it had nothing to do with 35 years of anything. It’s from “Word Up,” a quarter-page front-of-book piece by Gavin Edwards, who would later compile many small books of misheard lyrics. This list is about hearing lyrics right, and tallying them up. Edwards takes the words from all the songs by Madonna, Paula Abdul, Tracy Chapman, and Guns N’ Roses, “count[s] their nouns, exclude[s] the pronouns, and tote[s] up their rock’n'roll vocabularies.” The Top 10 most-used words for each, to that point, are as follows. It may not be all that clever today, but I’ve always loved these lists purely as found poetry.

MADONNA
1. love
2. baby
3. time
4. heart
5. eyes
6. world
7. girl
8. party
9. boy
10. day

PAULA ABDUL
1. baby
2. way
3. love
4. girl
5. thing
6. heart
7. boy
8. fool
9. eyes
10. world

TRACY CHAPMAN
1. time
2. heart
3. love
4. life
5. baby
6. soul
7. man
8. car
9. mountain
10. people

GUNS N’ ROSES
1. love
2. train
3. jungle
4. city
5. honey
6. patience
7. life
8. pain
9. mommy
10. knees