Vanity Fair is celebrating its 25th anniversary at present, and as is custom in 2008, they’ve decided to honor their legacy by foisting a bunch of arbitrary “best of” lists onto the public. Instead of the Top 25 Songs Listing Reasons That Graydon Carter Is The Most Important Man In New York, VF throws a curveball and brings us 25 “best” songs hand-picked by the magazine’s editors. Said songs are supposedly the defining tracks of… well, of the Vanity Fair demographic, who must only consume culture that was made between the Berlin Olympics and the introduction of the compact disc. The most recent entry, sole song from the ’80s, and lone hip-hop candidate is Grandmaster Flash’s “The Message” (1982); Elvises Costello and Presley are represented, as are the Beatles, the Beach Boys, the Stones, and Sinatra. (Not even VF fave Madonna made it in there.) Pretty much if you thought about any song you’d ever heard in a commercial for airlines, baby-boomer retirement plans, or expensive cars, you could cobble together the list, or an approximation of it.

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