100 From 1977-2003

20	PAVEMENT “Summer Babe”

Why “Summer Babe”? Because in 1992 it was the best damn song released. Too silly for Nirvana, but somehow more earnest, Pavement were proof that you didn’t have to wear flannel or sport track marks to write a great song. Instead of looking for inner demons to expose, Stephen Malkmus, Scott Kannberg, Gary Young, Mark Ibold, and Bob Nastanovich were busy burying gorgeous melodies beneath 10 tons of feedback. Beneath all those gorgeous melodies and feedback was the voice of one Stephen Malkmus, who seemed to sound the way every person in their late teens or early 20s was feeling. “Summer Babe” became the song you listen to when the weather is warm and everything is OK in your world.
      — Adam Dlugacz

19	PULP “Common People”

Working kid takes a spoiled-rich dame to the supermarket: she wants to “live like common people”. Thus begins Jarvis Cocker’s slit-eyed cynical view of her, and the class warfare erupts. The song starts out sorta whispery and seductive, then gets glammy, and ends up sounding like a ravenous singalong mob busting down doors and pissing on trust-funders: “You’ll never fail like common people / You’ll never watch your life slide out of view / And then dance and drink and screw / Because there’s nothing left to do”. This was a huge hit in Britain, and some critics blabbered about how America has no class consciousness, therefore the American indie-hipster kids would only wax theoretical about the “bourgeousie” when digging this song. Maybe so, but it did irritate one of my well-traveled scion-of-academia housemates back in 1996 (“He’s just neurotic about status”, she said, revealingly). Sadistic anger about wealth and privilege has been an insistent musical theme since at least the 1920s. From Woody Guthrie to Eminem, I think that the myth of a class-free America is now pretty well trampled. We don’t talk about it, but we know it on all the deepest levels. In recent years, I’ve heard a potent handful of class-warfare singalongs in Midwestern bars, from “Play With Fire” by the Stones to “Slide off of Your Satin Sheets” by Johnny Paycheck and “The Ballad of Jerry Curlan” by Angry Samoans (and let’s not forget my favorite recent band, the Dropkick Murphys). They’re all great, but they don’t quite achieve the epic tone of “Common People”, which takes all the spacious echoes and shouts of classic Britpop and shamelessly amplifies them. The soundbites are classic: “Like a dog lying in the corner, they will bite you”, “Everybody hates a tourist”, “If you called your daddy he could stop it all”. This is not so much a “song” as an immense threatening crowd condensed into six minutes of escalating rage. I get a warm feeling inside when I hear it, and bear in mind the power in my apartment’s about to be disconnected.
      — Mark Desrosiers

18	DAVID BOWIE “Heroes”

In the fall of ’77, David Bowie unleashed his dramatic “Heroes” with extraordinary style and the song soared aloft, propelled as much by his delivery as by the lyrics and melody. Six minutes and eight seconds of richly textured and powerful beauty, the song’s story celebrated humanity and validated the true power of love. On the most important level, “Heroes” is a passionate response to a modern world that was accelerating only towards the cold and mechanical, where any one could be ground from existence or all could be instantly blasted into the atomic void by those figures with their fingers on the power buttons in that same loveless, cruelly indifferent world. Yet the song celebrates belief in other possibilities, the possibility of finding love in dire circumstances as well as the belief that all things really precious to humans can survive intact. This complex song continues to haunt the imagination. Drawing musically from new German electronic influences, this was an early precursor to and so influence itself upon the decades of electro-pop and synthesized music following. The political and cultural lessons of “Heroes” uncannily resonated with the zeitgeist of the 20th century. While the atmosphere of the song was predicated on the oftimes unspoken consciousness of living through the Cold War (and the nuclear standoff) and the continued division between East and West (symbolized by the partition of Berlin itself), Bowie also used the song to outline a burgeoning New European consciousness. “Heroes” came in English, French, and German versions. In his own way, Bowie was striving to predict a unification, not merely the eventual and near inevitable re-unification of an old European capital city but the coalescence of a New and different Europe. If you’d bought into the surrounding mythos that the song’s allusion was only to the Berlin Wall, the lyrics could now seem “dated” as physically the Wall is no more. For those interpreting the song literally and relying for that on its placement in time, the very act of singing the song now would be somehow different. Which may in the end only strengthen the song’s real beating heart, as “Heroes” is likely to remain one of the greatest love songs ever written.
      — Barbara Flaska

17	THE SEX PISTOLS “God Save the Queen”

Released on 27 May 1977, just days before the Queen’s Silver Jubilee celebrations, the Pistols’ second single epitomised pure punk controversy. From problems with the pressing-plant staff to tabloid outrage at Jamie Reid’s sleeve depiction of HM with eyes and mouth ripped out, from the thunderous opening bars to the final despairing cry of “No future for you”, “God Save the Queen” rocks, assailing the senses with Chris Thomas’s production of Jones’ massively over-dubbed guitars, Matlock and Cook’s crunching rhythm and Rotten’s howling, sneered, vocals. Radio networks and mainstream record stores, queasy as seasick travellers caught in a storm beyond their comprehension, banned it; it shot to No. 2 in the charts, gerrymandered out of the top slot by frantic media officials, and became a rock’n’roll legend, symbolising a three-minutes-20-seconds moment when English establishment fragility was there for all to see. Twenty-five years on, it stands as one of youth culture’s great convulsive moments, beautiful and true, barely contained by the familiarising forces of popular music history.
      — John Sears

16	GUNS N’ ROSES “Welcome to the Jungle”

At a point in time in which most metal music was sagging under the weight of sappy ballads and happy-go-lucky party songs, “Welcome to the Jungle” came out of nowhere and put a little of the nasty back into rock ‘n’ roll. True, the video did feature Axl Rose in tight spandex and over-teased hair, but musically the song was a sharp shock to metal on the pop charts. Slash’s furious guitar playing, Axl’s seedy, sinister singing and primal screaming, the pounding rhythms — all served to bring the bluesy, dirty rock ‘n’ roll edge back to the charts and make metal less about hair and make-up and more about the raw rage and dark sexiness of rock’s past. There were lots of harder, heavier bands competing against GNR at the time, they may have been playing dead set in the middle of a strong musical legacy, and Axl may have become something of a joke, but in 1987, Guns N’ Roses revisited a tense and vicious sense of the dangerous side of rock ‘n’ roll, and “Welcome to the Jungle” was its anthem.
      — Patrick Schabe

15	TALKING HEADS “Once In a Lifetime”

Talking Heads were always really two bands —- the art band seeking to communicate minimalist aesthetics via songs, and the slightly skewed pop band. When the two bands collided, the results could be scary, weird, or sublime. “Once In a Lifetime” definitely falls on the sublime side, encompassing minimalism, wry commentary on modern society, and spirituality. Coupled with the video and the band’s presentation of the song on the concert stage, the song could essentially say whatever you wanted it to say. But there was no denying the power of the hook, featuring what alternately sounded like an African call and response or a recitation by a Greek chorus, concluding with David Byrne’s mantra — “Same as it ever was / Same as it ever was” — all propped up by some fierce dance grooving from Chris Frantz and Tina Weymouth plus Brian Eno’s static, treated keyboards. These elements combined to make the song a huge radio hit, leaving middle America to wonder just what the rest of it all meant.
      — Marshall Bowden

14	SONIC YOUTH “Teen Age Riot”

It’s no secret by now that Sonic Youth saved the electric guitar from certain doom in the hands of hair metal wankers, but “Teen Age Riot” is the definitive moment in that struggle for liberation. As Kim Gordon’s breathy playground chant explodes into coming-of-age ritual, Thurston Moore and Lee Ranaldo’s guitar work literally soars miles beyond any recorded medium that tries to contain it. Simultaneously dissonant and melodic and refreshingly distortion-free, those guitars drew the blueprint for an entire decade’s worth of indie rock — just try to imagine Pavement without the precedent set by “Teen Age Riot” and Daydream Nation as a whole. But more importantly, the song captures the teenage impulse to rebel with a lack of glorification that was another complete antithesis to what rock had traditionally been all about. Instead of exalting the tried-and-true “teenage leather and booze”, it’s a paean to a much simpler, less venerated method of rebellion with Thurston and a chorus of untraditionally tuned guitars leading the way — I listened, and an army’s worth of others did too.
      — Scott Hreha

13	RADIOHEAD “Paranoid Android”

Undoubtedly the best song off of O.K. Computer, one of the greatest albums of the past 25 years. After the Seattle grunge fall-out of the early ’90s, mainstream radio stagnated into a morass of thrift-store flannel imitators and retro big-band, dry-martini schlock. Radiohead’s “Creep”, off of Pablo Honey, received significant airplay in 1993, but the album as a whole was inconsistent and not very noteworthy. The 1994 release of The Bends revealed much more sophisticated musical structures that fused punk, rock, and avant-garde into engaging songs. But O.K. Computer actualized in every track the musical potential suggested on prior albums by combining highly charged rhythms with digital manipulation and Thom Yorke’s ethereal voice. “Paranoid Android” is best representative of this complex style. Beginning with a deceptively simple acoustic guitar and Yorke’s plaintive melody within esoteric lyrics, the song almost seems it could slip into power ballad. But guitar quickly shifts into a toe-tapping funky riff with collage lyrics like, “kicking screaming gucci little piggy”. The song briefly chills into a requiem beat and agonized melody before slipping back into frenzied guitar tension transmuting into digital snakes and a sudden halt as tape machine melts down into silence.
      — Chris Robe

12	RUN-DMC & AEROSMITH “Walk This Way”

By 1986, Run-D.M.C. had already established themselves as an influential force in the world of rap with modest hits like “King of Rock” and an integral role in the hip-hop film Krush Groove, but nothing could have prepared them for the success of their third album, Raising Hell, and its classic hit single “Walk This Way”. A cover of Aerosmith’s 1975 hit produced by Rick Rubin and featuring Aerosmith’s Steven Tyler and Joe Perry, “Walk This Way” brought rap to a new audience by putting it into a context white America could understand: classic guitar rock. The collaboration rocked enough to seduce kids who wouldn’t normally listen to “Black music”, and was fresh enough to encourage a second look at Aerosmith’s then-flagging career. Riding high on the single’s success, Run-D.M.C. broke many barriers, becoming the first rap act to receive MTV airplay, have a No. 1 R&B hit, hit the Top 10 pop chart, and achieve platinum sales, setting the stage for the prominence of hip-hop for the next two decades.
      — Charlotte Robinson

11	GRANDMASTER FLASH AND THE FURIOUS FIVE “The Message”

Best protest song ever, because it’s just so incredibly DOPE. It’s electro, it’s funk, it’s dub: it’s the beat of New York City, urgent and angry and smart. But it’s all strangely patient, too, which matches up nicely with the seen-it-all-ness of the narrators (session musician Ed Fletcher a.k.a. Duke Bootee, along with Melle Mel). The crucial part of this song is not either one of the repeated choruses — “It’s like a jungle sometimes it makes me wonder how I keep from goin’ under” and “Don’t push me ’cause I’m close to the edge / I’m trying not to lose my head” — but the cynical laugh that comes after them, ah-huh-huh-huh-huh. But this intense flow and bitter wordplay are not the ravings of a streetcorner madman. The vicious cycles of ghetto life in Reagan-era Harlem are visited upon the regular guy, his family, his son, his community, his city, his world, which is OUR world, OUR lives. When, at the end, the first-person turns second-person, the You ends up hung dead in a cell. Our bodies swing back and forth. The cycle continues. All to a dope-ass funky beat.
      — Matt Cibula