Charles Petzold

Imagine for a moment that a magazine such as the Atlantic or New Yorker published a list entitled “The 500 Greatest Novels of All Time.” Cool, you think, I wonder how many I’ve read. But as you study the list, you discover some peculiarities.

For example, this imaginary list of “Greatest Novels of All Time” seems to be oddly restricted to novels written in English. It has no French novels so no Camus or Colette. No German novels so no Thomas Mann or Heinrich Böll or Günter Grass. No Japanese novels so no Murakami or Kobo Abe. No Italian novels so no Umberto Eco or Elena Ferrante. Nothing from South America so no Gabriel Garcia Marquez or Isabel Allende. No Russian novels so no Solzhenitsyn. No Czech novels so no Milan Kundera. Et cetera.

On further examination, you discover that this list contains virtually nothing published before 1950! No Hemingway or F. Scott Fitzgerald or Virginia Woolf, no James Joyce or Faulkner. And where is the mass of great literature of the 19th century? The list has no sign of that! No Melville, no Hawthorne, no Twain, no Austen, no George Eliot, no Thomas Hardy, no Henry James, no Flaubert, no Tolstoy, no Victor Hugo, no Émile Zola.

Something is wrong here. You go back and look at the title: Yes, the title is really “The 500 Greatest Novels of All Time,” and you’re pretty sure that “All Time” is as unambiguous as it gets.

Of course, such an article is fantasy. If you ever came across such a travesty in the pages of the Atlantic or New Yorker, you would doubt the sanity of the magazine’s editors.

In fact, nobody who has the slightest bit of perspective would ever publish a list of the “500 Greatest Anything of All Time” that’s limited to the post-WWII anglophone world.

Then there’s Rolling Stone, whose update of The 500 Greatest Songs of All Time is as insular, myopic, and xenophobic as my imaginary non-list of greatest novels. Yet it’s presented as a reasonable exercise without a trace of irony. (For those without the patience to page through the Rolling Stone website, the list has been consolidated on one searchable page.)

The first thing to notice is that the list is based on performers of songs rather than composers. One of the characteristics of pop music is a disparagement of the composer in favor of the performer (who is oftern referred to as the “artist").

But even within the bounds of post-WWII pop, the list has some glaring omissions. Frank Sinatra is not on the list, for example. (Sinatra isn’t my thing, and he might not be your thing either, but shouldn’t one of his songs make the top 500?) Similarly, there’s no Barbra Streisand, no Edith Piaf, no Carpenters, no Elvis except Costello, no Joan Baez, no Lesley Gore. (No Lesley Gore! Are you kidding me?)

Looking over the list, it soon becomes obvious that Rolling Stones has not compiled “The 500 Greatest Songs of All Time” but instead “The Cool Kids’ List of 500 Songs that Demonstrate Their Perpetual Coolness.” Because we all know that cool kids don’t listen to Barbra Steisand.

The list includes a Robert Johnson song and Billie Holliday singing “Strange Fruit,” but where is Bessie Smith or Ma Rainey or Ida Cox or Mamie Smith or Elizabeth Cotten or any of the great blues singers who flourished in the 1920s and 1930s? Where the hell is Alberta Hunter? And where is Ella Fitzgerald?

What else is the list missing? I don’t know if Rolling Stone has a strict definition of what constitutes a “song,” but there is an extraordinary rich repertoire of songs from the American Musical Theater that the list entirely ignores. No George Gershwin, or Cole Porter, or Jerome Kern or Rodgers & Hart, or Rodgers & Hammerstein, or Stephen Sondheim. The list has not one song from West Side Story! How can this be?

If we restrict our focus to songs composed independently of larger works, how can anyone deny Franz Schubert’s intense song of sexual obsession “Gretchen am Spinnrade” ("Gretchen at the Spinning Wheel") a spot on the greatest 500 songs of all time?

This is not an obscure song. ArkivMusic.com lists 93 recordings of it.

Schubert was instrumental in kicking off a wonderful tradition of German song that includes Beethoven, Schumann, Brahms, Hugo Wolf, Mahler, and Alban Berg. A similar tradition exists in French song, featuring Berlioz, Gounod, Fauré, Debussy, Ravel, and Reynaldo Hahn.

German, French, it doesn’t matter to Rolling Stone, which considers none of these composers worthy of attention.

If we stretch the definition of “song” to include opera arias, another avalanche comes. Then we must allow Mozart, Puccini, and Verdi to compete. And if we start pulling out arias from Bach and Handel and Purcell, where will it end?

And what about folk songs and spirituals? Is Rolling Stone really claiming that “Swing Low, Sweet Chariot” or “Motherless Child” or “Amazing Grace” are not among the 500 greatest songs of all time? And have they also surveyed songs outside the Western musical tradition? People sing in cultures all over the world.

I can’t believe that the people who assembled the Rolling Stone list of “The 500 Greatest Songs of All Time” are as oblivious to music prior to 1950 as the list indicates. But if these people are familiar with songs that don’t include guitars and drum kits, that actually makes the list worse. That means that the goal of the list is to flatter the readers. The Rolling Stone readers who recognize many or most of these songs can rest assured that they know pretty much everything there is to know about music. Their knowledge is complete. In this way, Rolling Stone is contributing to musical Duning-Kruger syndrome.

Rolling Stone is not educating its readers, or broadening their musical experiences. It is keeping them in a state of ignorance.

The use of the word “song” in Rolling Stone’s description of the list raises another issue: A “song” is "a musical composition intended to be performed by the human voice". Probably 99.9% of all pop and rock satisfies this definition, so people who listen exclusively to pop and rock have come to regard all music be a “song” (which it is in their world). MP3 and Spotify confirm and amplify this bias by also using the word “song” for all music.

But most music is not songs. A composer such as Beethoven certainly wrote songs — that is, music for voice and accompaniment — but he also wrote much more music for solo piano; for various chamber ensembles including violin and piano, cello and piano, string trios, piano trios, string quartets, quintets, sextets, and octets; and for orchestras; and for orchestras and soloists; and for choruses. These are not songs, despite how MP3 and Spotify label them.

I guess we should be thankful that Rolling Stone called their list “The 500 Greatest Songs of All Time” rather than “The 500 Greatest Musical Compositions of All Time.” At least they recognize one limitation of this ridiculous list.