It's been pretty gloomy around here recently, so in the spirit of the holiday season, here's a little bit about a four-month quest to determine the best rock song of all time, and how you can participate.
From 1994 to 2002, I held monthly single elimination "music tournaments" to determine my favorite song. I took great pleasure in pitting some of the all-time greats, most of whom I was just discovering at the time, against each other to see which song rang most true no matter what mood I was in. Songs like "Thunder Road", "Rock the Casbah" and "Bad"(U2) were among the repeat champions.
In the years since I've resurrected the concept more sporadically, most notably in Biloxi after Hurricane Katrina, where 100 Hands on Gulf Coast volunteers participated in a mass music tournament that lasted over a month and ended with "Superstition" taking home the crown.
Rolling Stone magazine has been shedding credibility for years, but this summer’s Top 500 Songs of All-Time list put me over the edge. First of all, they had the audacity to name "Like a Rollin’ Stone" the #1 song of all-time. It’s a fine song, but for Rolling Stone magazine to coincidentally claim it as the benchmark of all rock music is just embarrassingly transparent. More importantly, the magazine’s list panders far too much to the early decades of rock and roll, with very few choices released after the mid-1970s. As with sports, comparing across generations is a tricky business, but no one who grew up on Nirvana and Radiohead could possibly stomach the idea that there were more great rock songs in the 1950s than 1990s (the list had many other flaws as well, like no Grateful Dead).
Once I got down to picking songs, done in collaboration with some fellow music fanatics, it seemed like about 430 songs definitely belonged in the tournament. Rather than make arbitrary picks on the other 82 songs, we decided to have 164 songs do an extra "play-in" round, featuring numerous picks suggested by participants at LivingtheDream.org. After two weeks, a number of folks have helped whittle the field down to 512, and that round started yesterday. That means we are only nine rounds, or about 511 match-ups, from picking a winner!
This is a democratic process- and you are all invited. You can judge five match-ups daily simply by listening to both songs in a match-up back to back. When you are done, note on a ten point scale which song you like better (ie, Thunder Road 9, Changes 7). You have 48 hours to vote on each match-up, after which I’ll post the next set. Finally, these songs are all the greater ‘rock and roll’ tradition- which leaves room for some hip-hop, country, folk and soul.
The Living the Dream website is updated daily, and new songs are all streamed at Grooveshark for your convenience.
There's no direct link to all 512 contenders, but 430 are listed here, and you can kind of scroll around to see the rest.
I've written my share of downers about the war in Afghanistan, campaign finance reform, protesting and all that other good stuff, and figured this might be a more fun activity from the eclectic peeps that make up the Kossack world. I'm sure I'll be accused of making glaring omissions and choosing some horrible songs, but in music appreciation, as in politics, you need to have a thick skin about what you believe in.