When I was first coming up with the idea for this site and how it was going to look and what songs it would include, I went back and forth a lot internally as to whether or not to write a proper introduction before I wrote about any songs. Ultimately, I decided not to as “Jailhouse Rock” by Elvis Presley is the first post on this site. I figured that the overall idea—creating a fictional Pantheon in which only the best songs will be included—combined with the disclaimer along the right-hand column of the page, the tag “Songs That Transcend Classic Status” and the About page rendered an introduction moot.
Also, I figured that I would wind up writing introductions later on down the line anyway. Thus, this post and why it is called #1.
I’ll start off first by clarifying what this site is. This is a site that tries to deal with the conundrum of Best Songs Of All-Time lists. What is the conundrum of Best Songs list? For me, it is the writing and the format. Almost every list out there either just simply lists all of the songs in ranked order without any summary of why the song has been placed in that spot, or if they do include a summary it is usually too concise or too unbalanced (like when Rolling Stone released its Top 500 Songs list—it had summaries but after a certain point they became 50-100 word segments offering a half-assed explanation of why it was on the list, or cookie-cutter information about the song or band). I wanted to cut through this conundrum in four ways:
1) Do Not Assign A Number To The Site — This site might ultimately have 101 song entries. Or maybe 150. Or maybe 127, or 178. It’ll end when it ends.
2) Only One Song From A Band Can Be Selected — This wrinkle not only further opens up a debate between myself and the reader (“He picked ‘A Day in the Life’ for The Beatles? I would’ve picked… because of…”) but it also adds another—and, if I may add, welcomed—dimension to the argument of what are the best songs ever. You and I could write up a list of the 100 greatest songs ever made and probably include anywhere from 3-10 songs by The Beatles. But if you could only choose one, what would it be, and why? Would you go with the song that skews more personally and/or emotionally to you, or would you go with the song that is the most significant with regards to rock history?
3) Establish a 550-word minimum for each post — My thinking: If I think a song is great enough to go into my fictional Pantheon, I need to be able to cover as many bases as possible to convey to you why it’s there.
4) No Ranking — Trying to come up with a list of the best songs of all-time is hard enough, and trying to rank them is even harder because subjective biases will always discount one or two genres (typically, the old school blues and country songs that were the progenitors of rock are left off of most lists). Why not try to include as many of them as possible? Not having a ranked list makes that proposition much easier to execute.
Does this all make for a perfect list, or site, here? No, not at all. And my aim here is/was not perfection. Just adding something a little different and separating myself from the rest of the pack is all I want to do here. (And hopefully you will/do agree.)
Finally, I have another reason for posting this first Underture:[1] to inform of you what the next series of posts will focus on, and to inform you of what the previous 51 posts focused on.
You may or may not realize that every month there are always 3 songs written about on this site. And you may or not have realized that each month had a very definite theme tying in the groups of songs that have been written about over the last 17 months. To see what those themes were go here. (I will readily admit that some of them would’ve taken a while to figure out but they were all selected ahead of time based on these themes. For instance, you may be wondering why the years 1964 and 1997 were seemingly arbitrarily selected as themes; it seems very random. But those years are used as themes as a way of referencing the years on my Top 80 Albums site.)
In the meantime, here’s what you can expect from this site in the upcoming 12-15 months (I still haven’t decided on the timeframe yet but it will definitely lie in between 12 and 15 months): songs that either time forgot about completely, songs that you may have never heard before, songs that you have heard before but probably didn’t realize who sang them, and finally, a couple of songs from very well-known bands that might cause some debates because they may not be a lot of people’s first choice to include on a site like this, with the restrictions that are in play. Which means that over the next year there will be posts featuring songs by (in no particular order) Sinead O’Connor, The Byrds, The Stone Roses, Desmond Dekker, The Orb, MGMT, The Kinks, Ministry, The Replacements, The Nitty Gritty Dirt Band, Van Morrison, David Bowie, Jimi Hendrix, Phish, Faith No More, and others. And then when this run is through there will be a second Underture written that will explain the next group of song posts, and so on and so on.
I hope you have enjoyed the first 51 song posts, and I hope you enjoy all of the upcoming and future posts too. Thank you for reading and visiting this site, and please note that this post will be the only one for this month. There will be no song posts for the month of March. Pantheon Songs is taking a break and will continue in April.
[1] In case you do not already know, an underture is not a real musical term. It is the name of a song on Tommy by The Who (eight tracks sit in between “Underture” and “Overture”) and my use of it here is a shout-out to that track’s title.
