My Top 100, No. 85: "L.S.F." by Mark Ronson ft. Kasabian

I have two Mark Ronson hot takes. The first is that Mark Ronson is the coolest person in pop culture, if not the entire English-speaking world. Ordinarily I'd say something like "I wish Mark Ronson was my best friend" because he's so cool, but Mark Ronson is so cool, I worry about how uncool I'd look in comparison if we were ever in the same room. He's so cool he goes completely around the cool/uncool spectrum to the point where, despite coming off as a perfectly decent and nice man, he terrifies me and if I ever met him I'd probably melt into a stammering puddle of goo and die of embarrassment.

The second hot take is that nobody actually likes Amy Winehouse, and people who think they like Amy Winehouse actually like Mark Ronson.

You know how I know this? Because Amy Winehouse's first album, which was not produced by Mark Ronson, did nothing to separate her from what was a very crowded field of mid-2000s jazz-influenced British chanteuses. Enter Mark Ronson, and Back to Black turned into a generational critical and commercial success. This is because, around 2006, Ronson realized that the solution to most of the problems in pop music is to add more bari sax.

It was a remarkably simple solution, but the difference between Amy Winehouse and, say, Duffy, was the bari sax. And once everyone figured that out, the difference between Amy Winehouse and, say, Clairy Browne and the Bangin' Rackettes, was branding. And Mark Ronson.

And we know this because Ronson continued his Operation Bagration-by-Saxophone with a 2007 album of covers called Version, which is nearly uniformly magnificent. The big hit off this record was a cover of The Zutons' "Valerie," mostly because it featured Amy Winehouse. Or rather, the song featured Amy Winehouse. The video for that song involved Ronson and his band pulling random women out of the crowd, Courteney Cox-in-"Dancing in the Dark"-style, and having them sing Amy Winehouse's part, which is for all intents and purposes the visual representation of my second Mark Ronson hot take: Replace Amy Winehouse with any better-than-replacement-level rando and Back to Black does pretty much the same business.

I'd call that conclusive proof, except I never got the impression that Mark Ronson was petty or snarky enough to do that on purpose. Because he's the coolest person in the world.

Anyway, "L.S.F." isn't strictly a cover, because Kasabian wrote and performed the original, which is also really, really good. But it lacks Mark Ronson and his army of saxophones, which turn a really good pop-rock song into the grooviest, coolest part of one of the grooviest, coolest albums of the past decade. 

Because Mark Ronson is the coolest person in pop culture, and the bari sax is the solution to most of pop music's problems.