accede /əkˈsēd/

On my best days, when I am on the ball, when joy and freedom are unquenchable, it doesn’t matter what happens. No matter what, it’s fine.

a cappella /ˌä kəˈpelə/

I was surprised when young Neo asked me about Hall & Oates, knowing, of course, that they were from my “era.” I couldn’t imagine anything from the realm of 80’s pop music falling on his rather sophisticated music radar, let alone this duo who were frankly kind of square; never regarded by anyone “hip” even in their day. I had little to offer other than a couple album titles worth looking into.

But I’ve always thought Hall & Oates worthy of greater regard, largely for their celebration of the human voice. It is always their voices driving the songs; their two primary instruments. And no, there is no Hall & Oates on my top 100.

academic ˌ/akəˈdemik/

One of my former writing students, Arrawyn, once said to me, in regards to her grade eight exams: “They’re not testing my skills or knowledge, you know. They’re only testing my memory.”

“Worse,” said I. “They’re only testing your short-term memory. You’ll soon forget most or all of it. But at least you’re exercising your brain, which is useful.”

#95: Frozen fire

My high school friend, and neighbor, Mark was often seen and heard roaring about the neighborhood in his peppy 1981 Toyota Tercel, always with one of two songs blasting from it: The Doors’ Break on Through (to the Other Side) or this following song by The Cars. Clearly he was trying hard to market a specific identity for himself. Later, I would buy my first car; coincidently the very same model. But I blasted no songs from it. Oh, I almost certainly would have but I couldn’t afford a powerful enough stereo system.

#95

LET’S GO

By Ric Ocasek (The Cars)

1979, USA

Astutely labelled “another [Cars] double-edged anthem” by famed music critic Brett Milano, it’s one of those songs with extra rocket sauce. You hear what should be the joyful hopping culmination of the chorus followed by – more joyful hopping chorus bits.

Walter Ruhlmann, in The All-Music Guide to Rock called Let's Go "one of the summer songs of the year."

Peak: #5, Canada RPM and #14, U.S. Billboard Top 100. It remains The Cars’ highest peaking song in Canada.  

There’s no question as to the originality of Ocasek’s creation but it is undoubtedly an intentional homage to the 1962 classic of the same name by The Routers:

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abyss /əˈbis/

In Revelations 20:3 an angel hurls Satan into a pit to be imprisoned 1000 years.

Poetic voices suggest that mankind is forever hurled into the pit. I can understand that perspective intimately: that we are forever oppressed by a superpower; under the thumb of Satan: all of our hard-fought evolution at the peril of complete retraction at any given moment.

The dull sleep-world constantly calls to us; seduces us and our instincts always desire to answer. To master a constant vigilance seems impossible, and yet, unless there is a possible transcendence, wherein we may close the door to animal-hood behind us, what else is there to do but fight the good fight? 

#96: Tremelo

Here’s a little segue for us:  Catch My Fall and the Rebel Yell album marked the start of Billy Idol’s superstar period which aligned with my high school period, culminating in 1987 with his cover of Mony Mony which reached #1 in the USA.

It was also notably covered by the Beach Boys and Alvin and the Chipmunks but presumably only the Idol version was widely banned from American high school dances. No such censorship at our school where we danced up and down screaming such custom alterations as “Get laid, get fucked!” in the two quarter notes. I have no idea where this widespread custom started or why. Nor can I think of another example of this odd phenomenon. Could Idol have added these extra lyrics at some live performance and it caught on?  

Mony Mony is a nonsense title. It stands for Mutual of New York. The initials were once prominently displayed atop their office building at 1740 Broadway, prominent on the NYC skyline at the time original songwriters Tommy James and Ritchie Cordell were looking for a catchy title for the new tune, destined to hit #1 in the U.K. in 1968. Like a divine beacon, they spied the sign from the balcony of James’ Manhattan apartment. Mony Mony will not appear in my top-100 list. However:

   

#96

CRIMSON AND CLOVER

By Tommy James (& the Shondells)

1968, USA

I love the dramatic opening of this song, and while I’m not generally a big fan of echoes or stutters, I do find the tremolo effects here, oddly captivating. It was the Shondells’ innovation to extend the effect to James’ closing vocals by running the mic through a guitar amp.

Apparently the title, which denotes James’ favourite colour and flower respectively, had been applied to a previous tune which was scrapped. He may or may not have known about the trifolium incarnatum (crimson clover plant).

Peaked: #1 in USA, Canada, Germany, Switzerland and New Zealand. Oddly, it did not chart in the U.K. At more than five million copies it remains their best-selling song.

It was prominently covered by Joan Jett and the Blackhearts:

#97: Fallin' down whiskey

In 1982 Mick Jagger and Keith Richards attended a party where folks were drinking Rebel Yell Bourbon. One of those folk was a blonded young musician who thought that Rebel Yell would make a great name for his upcoming album. The album would go double platinum (two million sales) with seventy weeks on the Billboard 200 album chart, peaking at #6.

The title song was a hit single and hit music video, as were three other tracks, including Eyes Without a Face and Flesh for Fantasy.

The fourth and final single from Rebel Yell was the only track on the album written entirely by – yes – Billy Idol; and without co-writer Steve Stevens, and that song, in my humble opinion, is the album’s real masterpiece:

#97

CATCH MY FALL

By Billy Idol

1983, UK

It was this song that sent me running to the Burlington Mall to pick up the Rebel Yell cassette and I immediately loved all nine tracks, and I still like them all. But still the highlight, by far, is this chorus where shouts of Catch my fall and If I should stumble alternate with Mars Williams’ spine-tingling saxophone.

Peak: #50, USA

Here’s the official music video. I promise, it’s not silly at all. And there’s a prize if you can correctly count the number of Billy Idol sneers he flashes:

#98: How's my rhythm?

#98

OYE COMO VA

By Tito Puente (Santana)

1963, USA

Featured in National Public Radio’s Top 100 important American musical works of the 20^th century, Puente’s jazzy Latin classic has been covered by notable artists more than a dozen times. Easily the most famous is Santana’s 1970 version (linked above), described as “driving” and “cranked up” with electric guitar, Hammond B-3 organ, rock drum kit and added rock and blues licks.

The opening lyrics, stranded in the title are interpreted, “Hey, how’s it going?” but the connotations change when united with the following line, “Mi ritmo.” In totality, the lyrics mean roughly: How do you like my rhythm? Good! Enjoy! Mulata!

Peak: #13, Billboard Hot 100

Seinfeld character Elaine Benes also lists this song among her favorites in episode seven of season eight, The Checks.

Here, the Coen Brothers employ it in a scene-opener in one of my favourite comedy films, The Big Lebowski:

abuzz /əˈbəz/

Everyone thinks of gossip as something that they don’t do; that the term is reserved for some particular level which they never sink to. Yet everyone does it. I suppose I catch myself at it still, on rare rueful occasions. We're so terrified of being in the dark, of losing an advantage; being disadvantaged. Why is so-and-so absent! Who has applied for the promotion! What did she say about me…! Hey, just between you and me – you can keep a secret, right?

I know I was once mired in this mania and yet I can’t remember what it was like. I just know that now it has become unbearable. It is a dreary unpleasantness to be gossiped at.

Please! Just let me mind my own business! I don't even want to know what people are saying about me! Because the "me" they think I am is not who I am, anyway! But to explain to people why it is folly to try to deal with affairs other than your own, is always a path to nonsense. How do I explain the beautiful peace; the beautiful freedom in simply minding your own business in terms of the social arena; in terms of all this vain recreation we label life instead. So few appear to me to have the potential to achieve this state. I will not waste my time and pat my ego trying to explain to my duller associates why they are being unwise. I will save my good advice for those special persons who are ready to hear it.

abutilon /əˈbyo͞odlˌän/

It was long ago reported that on one of the Galapagos islands, brimming with life, an Eden of flora and fauna, a great variety of flowering plants were present but all were yellow; every single flower on the island a shade of yellow. Even those species of plant which typically flowered in multiple varieties – only the yellow variety was present. This remained a mystery for years, except to some of devout faith who insisted it was not a mystery at all; that science could never provide an explanation and the only possible explanation was that God had chosen this place to be a yellow place. It was proof of God.

It turns out that there may indeed be a great variety of plant life on this island but there is only one breed of bee. And that breed of bee, by the tinkering of random mutation and evolution, only recognizes yellow flowers. Thus no other would be pollinated.

People have a hard time admitting what they don’t know. We leap swiftly to an answer that pleases us and forever fail to notice all the math we didn’t do.

Crop circle enthusiasts will call that phenomena proof of life on other planets because we can’t explain how they are created by any earthly explanation. But that is in no way proof of alien life. The explanation for crop circles may not have fallen into your little hands or mine, but an explanation exists, and whatever it is, it is massively more likely to come from a source, unknown to you and me, but of this planet rather than of one that is light-years away. We are each intimate with only a minuscule slice of the world of Earth, or Minerva, as I much prefer to call it, as much as it soothes our ego to presume otherwise.

#99: The hearts of the young

# 99

FOLLOW YOUR HEART

By Gil Moore, Mike Levine and Rik Emmett (Triumph)

1984, Canada

Here’s a straight-up celebration of rock and irresponsibility anthem if there ever was one. It sucked in the masses, myself included. This was my favourite song ever for about a year through early high school, which is the last place one should be when you’re following your heart (into the depths of despair). Love was unfathomably cruel at that age and none of the absurdities of high school culture were remotely a comfort. Where was Ferris Bueller when I needed him? Oh well! Live and not-really learn…

The lyrics extol the virtues of living for the moment and doing what you feel like. They propose to unify the concept of following your dreams with forgetting about tomorrow. Okay, so we’re talking about extremely short-term dreams I suppose. Look, I never cared about the lyrics, okay! I relished the soaring melody.

Peak: #35, Canada pop chart

The official music video was filmed at the Providence Civic Center in Rhode Island following a live concert where the audience was invited to stick around and participate:

#100: Shrinkage

So Aqualad sends me a link to this article: THE TOP 100 !!!!!! SONGS OF ALL TIME !!!!!

Okay, the headline wasn’t caps lock hollered, nor buried in a plague of redundant punctuation, but it probably should have been. All top-whatevers probably should be. Doesn't it seem like “top 10” or its ilk is the new societal standard template for the recycling of media-bytes into new configurations so that we can re-experience pop culture dynamos in perpetuity (and never have to resort to our own hog-tied creative instincts for artistic fulfillment, nor the imperfect unmarketable endeavors of our weirder spacier friends with that artistic bent)?

I remember when I was young, the odd top-ten list or top 935 songs countdown on the 93.5 radio station actually came with criteria and were thus arranged with some semblance of mathematical legitimacy even if the criteria depended on educated opinion. These days top-ten seems to mean ten selections arbitrarily drawn from the limited perspective of some bozo who offers no reasoning behind his choices and couldn’t if he tried. I’m trying not to perceive this migration as another needle in the haystack of evidence suggesting that the masses of our species are slowly dissolving into a tepid pool of intellectual sludge.

But this was in no way supposed to be a rant…

I actually have no complaint with this rock critic’s exercise. I think he’s upfront that this is an entirely subjective rendering in accordance with his own instinctive ear and not a balanced or academic analysis. And the guy obviously loves music and knows a thing or two about putting the slippery concepts of musical appreciation into very useful words. Well done, I say. I think the usefulness here is not in expert opinion but rather – here are some potentially awesome songs… if there are some you haven’t heard of before, click the link and experience! You might find a new fave!

Should you actually give a damn what his favourite songs are? No. And mine neither. But I think the same usefulness might apply to my own endeavor. Yes, I’m going to heavily feature within this blog, for a while, the plugging of my own top-100 songs. I made the challenge to Aqualad who immediately declined. Naturally he wouldn’t expect to be able to pull a (17-year) lifetime of music observation into his head all at once. “I’d probably be forgetting about a lot of great songs,” he said. And I’m sure that would be true for almost anyone, but it so happens I have been a passionate music-lover and a note-taker by hobby, since junior high so I was well-equipped for this!

I hope you’ll follow along and maybe relive a couple oldies you loved and forgot about or maybe even discover a couple tunes new to you that you’ll be glad you heard.

I started by going through my music collection plus my list of songs I must obtain which I’ve kept up to date since the early eighties, and making a list of the most critical songs – those I knew without a shadow of a doubt belonged in the top 100.

It turns out there are precisely 168 songs that no doubt belong in my top-100.

Wheedling it down to 100 was almost easy. I could confidently separate my top 99 but then about 20 seemed tied for 100^th place. So I had to listen to them all before The Boss finally won out and squeaked into my personal singles hall of fame.

I know what you’re thinking. You’re thinking, To hell with this, there’s gonna be about fifty Rush songs on here.

Well there’s not. Had I been using any kind of academic process at all, there might have been fifty Rush songs on here. But I went with this criteria: Toe-tapping, head-bobbing, torso-swaying catchiness. Thus the songs are generally anthemic, energizing, and/or emotionally captivating. These songs do not necessarily offer the richest listening experiences, but the most addictive. Interestingly, the list contains some of the most structurally shallow songs in my musical awareness along with some of the deepest; both extremes of the scale. In other words, the criteria is this: These are the 100 songs that would cause me to mildly strangle you if you tried gabbing at me while they were playing on the radio. The bluer I would let you turn, the higher the song ranks!

I captured some rather trivial demographics so that we can look at fun patterns:

43% (or 43 songs obviously) were released in the 1980’s. That’s no surprise. I became a teenager in the 80’s and there is nothing like the chaos of puberty to drive one to the solace of one’s headphones and the deepest emotional music connections we generally make in our lifespan.

That leaves 31% from the seventies which, in my humble objective opinion, was probably the peak of mainstream songwriting since the classical age, and 12% from the sixties, which was rock and roll’s golden age, no doubt, and I adore it, but I interpret that (early) sixties rock, in a very general sense, lacked enough sophistication to give songs deep lasting resonance.

Only one 20^th century tune predates the sixties and only one song predates the century. Just nine songs come out of the nineties, the latest from 1997. Very sadly, that leaves just three songs from the last eighteen years! Oddly, two of those three hail from Sweden.

Geographically, I predicted that America would dominate but in doing the research I discovered that more than a few composers I assumed were American turned out to be Canadian or English. The photo-finish breakdown is such:

37% UK

36% USA

20% Canada

7% other.

If Canadian origin seems disproportionately large, I suggest that it stems just a little from genuine culture, not at all from personal prejudice, and mostly from logistics: Canadian radio leans toward Canadian content (per legislation as far as I know) and familiarity breeds fondness.

Style-wise my leanings are quite diverse but this criteria lends itself very predominantly to rock and pop, with meanderings into new wave and the briefest possible flirtations with metal, southern rock, classical and jazz. Alternative is under-represented but then again, alternative music, for me, is largely album oriented and not singles oriented. Grunge is flat-out missing. I once adored it but never has a style had less legs. Nirvana, and more-so their peers, have gone flat with time.   

Presented in reverse order, I give you:

THE TOP 100 !!!!! (personally subjective) SONGS OF ALL-TIME !!!!!

# 100

I’M GOIN’ DOWN

By Bruce Springsteen

1985, USA

I was in the darkroom working on a high school photography assignment while this was playing when I first realized how much I digged it, along with a host of other tracks from the new Born in the USA album. I decided right then I had to buy that album (on cassette) but I ended up dubbing someone else’s copy and put Brian Adam’s Reckless on the other side. That tape became my summer soundtrack that year.

On that same occasion, I also first noticed the lamenting quality of the lyrics (consistent with the album). But I was a rather lamentable teen so it all worked. Previously I had interpreted the music as upbeat and boppy (with one of the late great Clarence Clemons’ most delightful sax riffs carrying the bridge). On the first few occasions I overheard the tune I might have somehow equated goin’ down with gettin’ down. It was quite a while before I picked up on the rude physiological interpretation.

Peaked at #9, Billboard's Top 100

 "…wonderfully exuberant and hilarious."--Debbie Miller, Rolling Stone

"A prime exemplar of the kind of good-time party song that Springsteen and E Street do best, sliding easily through the verses with a ... bouncing rhythm ... and a fun, jumping end."--Caryn Rose, Billboard Magazine


Here's a cute, tidy version by NYC indie rockers, Vampire Weekend.