100 More Songs, No. 3: "Paparazzi" by Lady Gaga

The hardest thing about picking a finite list from a virtually unbounded universe of choices is making sure you didn't miss anything obvious. Well, when I wrote about my 100 favorite songs ever, I fucked up. I forgot Lady Gaga. 

I don't know how--I went over every playlist I'd ever created and could find, I asked friends, I looked at my Spotify history, and I just never thought about Lady Gaga. 

This is not a minor omission. I can't run for political office, ever, because when I was in grad school I went to live band karaoke at Paddy Whack's on South Street in Philadelphia and requested "Bad Romance." When the guitarist called my name and told me where I could find the lyrics, I told him that wouldn't be necessary and sang the whole song, in her register, from memory. And there is, somewhere out there in the universe, a video of this incident.

If I'd remembered Lady Gaga, at least one of her songs, probably this one, would've made the top 30, if not higher. This was not a minor omission.

100 More Songs, No. 2: "Mirrors" by Justin Timberlake

I once claimed that "Reptilia" by The Strokes is the greatest Western musical composition of my lifetime. This one's close.

"Mirrors" is a song that I liked well enough and then for some reason binge-listened to it for months, starting immediately after I finalized the Top 100 list, so it didn't make the cut, and that I regret, because there are two kinds of pop (I guess this isn't really pop, but that's not really the point and I don't really have a precision understanding of musical taxonomy anyway) songs that I especially like: slow dance songs and fuckin' bangers. And of all the popular songs I'm aware of, this is the only one that manages, by some miracle, to fit both of those seemingly opposed categories. It is all things to all people.

100 More Songs, Introduction and Table of Contents

After Grantland shut down last October, I found myself not only without a creative outlet, but without a writing job, and I filled the space and time before my next song by writing about each of my favorite 100 songs of all time. All told I wrote around 20,000 words in eight weeks and I think it was at least a moderate success.
But after completing that list, I realized immediately that I had more to say. More songs, that I either omitted or forgot, or had misgivings about, or parts of music that I wanted to touch. So I'm going to do another list, this one not in any particular order, about 100 more songs that I particularly love that didn't make the cut the first time. Because I'm juggling several jobs, this set of 100 will probably take much longer to complete--more on the order of a year, instead of two months, but that's just a guess--but I aim to get something out of it, and I hope you do too.

1. "Teenagers" by My Chemical Romance
2. "Mirrors" by Justin Timberlake
3. "Paparazzi" by Lady Gaga

100 More Songs, No. 1: "Teenagers" by My Chemical Romance

Dear My Chemical Romance,

I'm sorry I was such an obnoxious rockist when I was a kid.

My Top 100, No. 1: "Hard Way Home" by Brandi Carlile

Somehow Brandi Carlile was a thing for about six years before I found out about her. Nobody told me, and I'm still holding a grudge against everyone I know because of it.

I came across "The Story" about two years ago, and having enjoyed that, I turned on what was then her latest album, Bear Creek, and at this point in my music-consuming life, Bear Creek inhabits almost precisely the point in space where I want to be.

My Top 100, No. 2: "Neighborhood #1 (Tunnels)" by Arcade Fire

I didn't like Arcade Fire that much when Funeral first came out. This was high school contrarianism talking--my friends who were, like, really into Arcade Fire tended to like whatever Pitchfork (it might not have literally been Pitchfork, but it was probably literally Pitchfork) told them to and I felt like pushing back against an externally imposed orthodoxy. 

After 10 years, four albums, a Grammy, a backlash, and a backlash to the backlash, it's hard to remember Arcade Fire representing anything new, particularly when it feels like a lot of the reasons not to like Arcade Fire have less to do with the band itself and more to do with people who like the band, or with other bands that were inspired or enabled by Arcade Fire's success. But we were all young once.

My Top 100, No. 3: "Reptilia" by The Strokes

All along I've been making the distinction between my liking a song subjectively and thinking the song is great objectively. And because I have, I can say this, even though I'm only ranking "Reptilia" third.

 

"Reptilia" is the best rock-and-roll song written and released in my lifetime, probably the best in any genre of popular music, and possibly the greatest piece of music released in any Western genre in that time. Its only fault is that because time itself is linear the song does not extend forever.