In 2021 I posted a list of songs, ranked in order of personal choice, from one hundred to one. I was fascinated by the obsession with ranking things, and tried to demystify the process by making one myself; a kind of contrary similia similibus curantur. Of course, having posted my top hundred I immediately disagreed with many of my own selections, vindicating my scepticism about lists*.
But I had already undertaken the experiment a couple of decades earlier and completely forgotten about it. The older list was a top ten of the 1990s, published on one of my early 2000s nouveau siècle weblogs, of which everyone seemed to have several at the time. It surfaced recently out of the internet like a lost vegetable peeler turning up in the compost. For purely historical interest, here is the initial post followed by the first five songs.
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It’s 2004: time I posted my favourite songs of the 1990s. There's no point rushing it. Time gives you perspective. … In the 1990s, my first marriage had ended, my children grew up and left home (I had started very early with children, my first son arriving when I was … a teenager). I lost my father, I re-married, I moved house several times, I changed jobs almost as frequently, and my son and his girlfriend had a baby girl (he started as early as I had). For me … one thing remained constant through that turbulent decade: my dog—who stayed … loyal, loving, undemanding and uncomplaining. Displaying all the supposedly best characteristics of humans with none of the failings. …. So we got through the nineties, my dog and I, and he taught me a simple but valuable dog lesson: 'stuff happens, then you fall asleep'. He died of old age in December 2000, the day before Christmas.
Where was I? My best songs, no - my most significant songs - of the decade. Of course, everyone does lists like these and it's all so subjective, so take it with a grain of salt. I'll probably change my mind anyway. As you do. Tomorrow, I'll post the first of these.
— posted 21 May 2004
No. 10: ‘Music Arcade’ — Neil Young
Neil Young without Crazy Horse … just an acoustic guitar. From his 1996 album Broken Arrow, a hauntingly beautiful ballad that bears repeated listening. This one slipped right under the radar, appearing on an album that received mixed reviews. It is one of his very best acoustic performances. When it came out, I used to sit back at night and play it a few times in a row.
— posted 22 May 2004
No. 9: ‘Silent Worship’ — Kenneth McKellar
Well, this is a stretch! Prussian-born George Frideric Handel wrote this aria a few hundred years ago for his opera Ptolemy (Tolomeo) , ... one of around fifty Italian operas he wrote. … set in Cyprus in 108BC. …
The Italian lyrics were re-written in English by Sir Arthur Somervell. … So: an Italian song about Cyprus written by a German who became a Briton, translated by an Englishman, sung by a Scot, and accompanied by the London Symphony Orchestra conducted by Sir Adrian Boult. The CD on which this track appears - a compilation - was released in 1996, so I'm counting it as one of my 1990s top ten. It is one of the finest love songs ever recorded. No-one ever to hear this could fail to be moved. Find it and fall in love again.
— posted 23 May 2004
No. 8: ‘Birdman’ — Ride
From Carnival of Light, released in 1993. In fact, the whole album is a complete blast with swirling guitars, a host of superb arrangements creating a wall of sound to rival Phil Spector at his best, and supreme Hammond organ shimmering over the top like a golden shaft of sunlight. Here's what Jim DeRogatis of the Chicago Sun-Times had to say recently about the album.
— posted 25 May 2004
No. 7: ‘Not Dark Yet’ -— Bob Dylan
(Dylan’s) 1997 album Time Out of Mind had the critics raving and the cynics saying that Dylan sounded worse than ever. All right, he sounds like a croaking frog, but man, the production is something else. Daniel Lanois does amazing things. There are Wurlitzers, Hammonds, guitars of various kinds, you name it. Lanois wrenches notes like hard cold crystals out of a frozen sky and scatters them about like glittering diamonds. Oh yeah, Bob Dylan. I was forgetting who this was about. The album has been described as the most depressing ever. I don't agree. Truly depressing albums are devoid of talent and just drone on until you voluntarily overdose or fall asleep, whichever comes first. Nevertheless, the lyrics are sad. But they contain that kind of pathos that instils compassion, not self-absorption. That's what I think, anyway. Others disagree - one reviewer at Amazon said: ‘Just make sure you don't buy it if you want to kill yourself because you probably will after hearing this album.’
'Not Dark Yet' is a triumph by a unique balladeer with an ordinary voice who happens to have been regarded as a superhero rock star for over forty years. If there's a disconnect in this, the problem is with the modern world and how it creates gods out of men, not with Bob Dylan. ... Most of the songs in my top ten send a shiver down my spine when I hear them. I only have to read the lyrics of ‘Not Dark Yet’ for the same effect.
— posted 27 May 2004
No. 6: ‘The Sidewinder Sleeps Tonite’ — R.E.M.
What can I say about this song (from Automatic For the People, 1993)? Don't know. It sends a shiver down my spine every time I hear it. What's it all about? Don't know. Someone tell me! Could have picked any number of (songs by) R.E.M. … one of those 'love them or hate them' bands, but I don't buy into all that … I judge music on its merits and R.E.M.'s music was very, very, very good.
— posted 28 May 2004
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* I’m in good, if dead, company. James Thurber, on making lists of preferred books, wrote in June 1949, ‘no two persons, of course, would pick the same … books to give to anyone, and if I were to compile my list again, I would probably throw several out and put some others in. My system … was simply to sit and remember the … books I’d read, and when one of them struck a bell in my memory, I wrote its title down.'
Hear, hear.
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