You didn’t think I could let Time Magazine’s 100 Greatest Songs list pass me by, did you? I’m going to do this in two parts, with part one being the songs that I have in their original form. Part Two next week will be the songs for which I have covers. I have sixteen of the former:
1. Nothing Compares 2 U – Sinead O’Connor
2. Borderline – Madonna
3. Thunder Road – Bruce Springsteen
4. Bohemian Rhapsody – Queen
5. One Nation Under A Groove – Funkadelic
6. Rock & Roll – Velvet Underground
7. Crazy – Patsy Cline
8. Be My Baby – The Ronettes
9. I Want To Hold Your Hand – The Beatles
10. The Girl From Ipanema – Astrud Gilberto
11. Where Did Our Love Go? – The Supremes
12. I Heard It Through The Grapevine – Marvin Gaye
13. What’d I Say – Ray Charles
14. This Land Is Your Land – Woodie Guthrie
15. It Don’t Mean A Thing (If It Ain’t Got That Swing) – Duke Ellington
16. Strange Fruit – Billie Holliday
If you put a gun to my head and told me to name Bruce Spingsteen’s greatest song, I might pick “Thunder Road”, which if nothing else is my favorite tune by the Boss. I’m pretty sure I wouldn’t pick “I Want To Hold Your Hand” as the Beatles’ greatest, however. It’s certainly not a bad song, but to put it mildly their compositions got a bit more sophisticated after that one came along. Your mileage may vary, of course.
For a good critique of this list, and of the concept of “greatest song” lists in general, go read Jeff Balke. I’ll be back next week to annoy him further with my cover songs version of this.
Interesting list, Charles — I hadn’t thought about looking up what I owned out of that list. When I counted, I came up with 52 even though I would not have made many of those choices for the artists. On your list, I’m with you on I Want to Hold Your Hand. For Marvin Gaye, clearly What’s Going On makes the most sense or at least Ain’t No Mountain High Enough.
Boy howdy do I agree with Balke. I gave up after paging through three songs. Why no page with a full list? I agree with him on the non-inclusion of some artists, too.