Top songs everyone has to hear at least once

I am a regular list maker, including song- and playlists. Want to create a false sense of productivity? Feel anxious? Bored? Stuck? Stressed? Make a list. You'll feel better.

I started making mix tapes as soon as I had access to my first cassette player with a record button. I make an annual playlist of mostly new music, which I share much more widely than it needs to be, not just to music-loving friends, but sort of in lieu of holiday cards. I also have a Classic Hits mix that started as a playlist for a birthday party and now has 590 songs on it, good enough for a 41-hour party. And many more. 

I have by now accepted that my list-making has a limited audience. A couple of my cousins and a few friends actually like and listen to my annual playlist (thank you). A few other musically obsessed friends appreciate the enormous effort I put into them and actually listen and give feedback: "We have pretty different tastes." "Interesting to see how our musical tastes have diverged so much since high school" and my favorite, "Great photo!" Most others never open the list. I realize that's par for the course in the attention economy; most creative work gets no attention, something the long tail and recommendation algorithms were supposed to fix, but the reality of the power law is that the vast majority of us get single-digit views. And that's despite the fact that my playlists are actually really good. 

There are YouTube creators who thrive from making list-videos: "Things you have to buy at Costco in February." "100 most amazing places to visit in the world." "Every song on Spotify with more than 2 billion streams." "Top 10 dogs of the week." "The 100 greatest sad songs of all time." "Every French #1 from the 1970s." I usually fall for these. I don't know if it's just me, but YouTube recommends lots of these to me. The music-related ones rarely match my actual current tastes or bring interesting new music to my attention, but somehow I get hooked anyway. 

So inspired by one of those, I set out on an impossible quest (as quests tend to be). I started it on a random night at 10:30pm, knowing full well this would cut into sleep, and knowing there was no correct answer and that the search would likely mess up my recommendations and raise my Spotify age (not altogether a bad thing, given that last year it was 16 which I am most definitely not). The challenge was: What do I think of as the top songs everyone has to hear at least once?

This, of course, is an under-constrained problem, a poorly defined request. I struggled with the list. This was illustrated by all my AI tools giving me trite or stupid answers (I have been advised to be nice to and about AIs, just in case...). I was given a bunch of songs that were famous, or culturally significant, or representative of a genre or population, or enduring hits. I disagreed with some very common recommendations like Satisfaction, Back in Black, Sweet Child O' Mine, Billie Jean, and Born to Run because my immediate inclination was to hit the skip button because je ne sais quoi. I'm on the fence about Bohemian Rhapsody (thank you, Wayne's World, you have been forgotten but your impact on the song's legacy remains). I eliminated personal anytime-happy-makers like SOS or Sweet Caroline for the same reason that even though I love Twix bars, I would not put them on my list of top food everyone has to taste at least once.

I did a bunch of queries like "what is the most iconic and emotionally impactful song by X". I tried lots of prompts with terms like important and instantly likable. I kept getting songs that were good, popular, solid, important, quality, significant, but not quite... you know. I went over my 590 classic hits and personal favorites and realized that list scratched a different itch but didn't quite hit the spot. I ended up getting pointed to solid lists like the NME's 500 Greatest Songs of All Time, the Business Insider 100 life-changing songs, BBC Radio 1 Greatest Hits, Rolling Stone's 250 Greatest Songs of the 21st Century So Far, and so on. All of them had great songs on them, but also a bunch of less remarkable contributions and even annoying and very skippable ones.

So what are my real criteria? Not sure. I suppose I want:

  • Unskippable
  • Iconic, in the same league as songs like Imagine or Stairway or Let It Be
  • Goose bumps, "please play this at my funeral," emotionally impactful
  • Quality (whatever that means)
  • Stood the test of time
  • Relatively universal
  • Select (Not too many songs -- remember, attention economy)
I suppose I should have listened to my original question: What do I think of as the top songs everyone has to hear at least once? That does not mean it's stuff I expect anyone but the most die-hard classic rock fans to listen to regularly. Once may be enough. That once may have come and gone for you; you may be over it. But when someone else hears any of these for the first time, I want at least a nod -- like, OK, I understand why you put this on the list. That's a great song.

I ended up with a list that was not diverse, not recent, and not adventurous, very different from all my normal annual playlists... a lot of songs more than 30 years old by English-speaking white guys. I suppose there are good reasons for that. The power of nostalgia and adolescent imprinting. Historical dominance of the Anglosphere in the music industry, the British Invasion, and music as a social movement. Real instrumentation rather than digital loops during the golden age of production. Sheer volume. A more unified listening experience through radio, rather than today's micro-segmented on-demand tastes. But even though I tried to avoid the Twix-effect, this lack of diversity felt weirdly dissatisfying, even though every song on the list feels legit and is an artistic accomplishment and gut punch. When push comes to shove, even though I was looking for something universal, did the implicit bias in me create a list that was, well, biased, not universal at all? I shudder to think... did I make a boomer list? (disclaimer: I am proudly not a boomer)

My playlist description ended up being Maybe an impossible list, regardless of how many you pick. Only sure about the first few, but every one of these is likely to hit you hard if you’ve never heard it. Not about the artist (“deserve to be on the list” “represents X” “changed X”). My “test”: is it in the same class as Let It Be? 

What's on your list?

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