Friday, November 19, 2004

Rolling Stone's 500 Greatest Songs of All Times

rolling-stone-500.gif

Rolling Stone magazine has selected Bob Dylan's "Like a Rolling Stone" as the Number 1 Greatest Song of All Time. Rolling Stone senior editor David Fricke writes:

“No other pop song has so thoroughly challenged and transformed the commercial laws and artistic conventions of its time, for all time.”


The #2 song is the Rolling Stones' "Satisfaction". Over on Rust, the appropriately handled Barrel of Laughs, found it very amusing that:

"A magazine named "Rolling Stone" declares that a song named "Like A Rolling Stone" is the best song AND a song BY the Rolling Stones is the second best song ever. Can you say 'shameless self cross promotion'!"


So how did our man Neil stack up? Looking at the recent Neil Young's Greatest Hits CD, one would think Neil would have garnered a handful of slots. Actually, it looks like Neil wound up with a total of six slots. Of the six songs, Neil wrote four of the selections and performed only on two of the songs ("Suite:" and "For What It’s Worth"):

#63 "For What It’s Worth" by The Buffalo Springfield
#214 "Rockin' In The Free World"
#297 "Heart of Gold"
#321 "Cortez The Killer"
#385 "Ohio"
#418 "Suite: Judy Blue Eyes" by Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young

There has been some dispute about the credit of Young on "Suite: Judy Blue Eyes" which was on the first CSN album and subsequently appeared on CSNY's 4 Way Street album. Was this the album the Rolling Stone editors were thinking?

And speaking of popularity contests and "shameless self cross promotion", over on Amazon.com, the sales rank of the Greatest Hits has been bouncing around the Top 25 and is now at #26.

Links to this post:

Create a Link

4 Comments:

At 11/20/2004 09:54:00 PM, Anonymous Anonymous said...

You forgot to mention that Rolling Stone placed Rockin' In The Free World at #219, so that's one more I guess.

 
At 11/20/2004 09:55:00 PM, Anonymous Anonymous said...

#214, sorry.

 
At 11/21/2004 07:49:00 PM, Blogger Thrasher said...

OK, thanks for correction! I'll update.

 
At 1/21/2007 11:42:00 AM, Blogger rastronomicals said...

Forgive me for the seriously late post, but someone should note that "Ohio" is seriously underrated here. It's a little surprising, given how stuck in their past Rolling Stone is, but even for those born after the events at Kent State, and even for those whose musical tastes tend towards more recent fare, the guts that it took to write and perform "Ohio" are freaking obvious.

The song is so intimately wrapped around the massacre at Kent State that it is impossible to distinguish between the ramifications of the event and the ramifications of the song.

The song does not just chronicle an important and tragic event in our nation's history, it IS history. It has been woven nto the fabric of our nation, and should easily be in anyone's list of top 25 songs of all time, rock and roll or no.

 

Post a Comment

<< Home