The Top Pop Song Of All Time

This is a post that explains the methodology I use in compiling my top 75 pop songs of all time. For my philosophical defense of pop music, see here:

Words like “greatest” and “best” imply the use of an objective standard. In reality, when it comes to judging music, it’s not possible to eliminate subjective considerations. This is especially true when one defines pop music as I have: an auditory artform intent on producing the most pleasurable sound possible.

Sometimes definitions are uninteresting. This one is really important. I take pop music to fundamentally be a striving toward pleasure, and a particular kind of pleasure at that. Epicurus’ hedonism famously endorsed a serene, longer-lasting kind of happiness. Pop music, by contrast, is built to immediately please; built for enjoyment in the now — what happens later be damned.

In my philosophy of pop music piece, I expound on the above in more detail.

Here’s an important question for me to resolve: Are the songs I’ve chosen in the end just my “favorites”? Or does this list actually pretend to carve out what the greatest songs are? When it comes to pop music, I’m not sure that distinction is a meaningful one.

Although pop is amorphous, on this list I’ve tried to chase a certain sound. As spectacular as “Gimme Shelter” and “Atlantic City” are, they were excluded. I won’t spell out the conditions for eligibility, since my criterion for pop excellence is fundamentally a feeling and not an easily-specifiable characteristic, but hopefully it’s enough to say I’m allowing songs whose overriding goal seems to be to produce the most pleasurable sound possible.

There is a musical sweetness I’m looking for. This is methodologically imprecise, of course, but we’ll be all right.

One last example that I think helps explain my approach. Sam Cooke’s “A Change Is Gonna Come” is musically beautiful, but the longing it captures is subversive to the targeting of pleasure; the optimism built into the song is tempered by the social realities Cooke is lamenting. Had Cooke sought to eliminate this wistfulness and approach the song along the lines of the pop standard I gave above, it would betray the artistic vision of the song. This isn’t a failure of the song but an illustration that pop doesn’t just mean anything that has a chorus and is musically beautiful.

I’ve chosen to cap the number of entries at two per artist. We could populate the entire list with just Beatles and Beach Boys songs, and it would solidly represent some of the best pop music ever produced. Yet where’s the fun in that?

Ready for the list? To see it, go here.