Charles Petzold

It’s well known that MSN shovels a lot of crap onto the homepage of Microsoft Edge, but sometimes it reeks so bad that I want to scream. The latest offense was this (seemingly innocuous) headline:

I’ve obscured the source and the author because there’s no reason for them to be publicized.

This headline might not seem ridiculous unless you know what a “song” is and unless you know what “of all time” means. (The headline does seem to be using the word “instrumental” correctly.)

Both Google and Bing define a “song” as “a short poem or other set of words set to music or meant to be sung” and Wikipedia defines a “song” as “a musical composition intended to be performed by the human voice.” Every other dictionary and reference source that I know of defines “song” similarly.

Which means, of course, that an “instrumental song” is an oxymoron.

I know why people sometimes make this mistake. Pop music is maybe 99.99% songs, so that for people whose musical knowledge is restricted to pop music, the word “song” has become synonymous with “music.” Even something that is not a song is labeled a “song.” Even a symphony or a string quartet or a piano sonata is a “song.”

And what are these “20 best instrumental songs of all time”? Chronologically, they range from “Tequila” (1958) to “Electric Worm” (2007), which means that if all “instrumentals” really qualify as “songs,” then these 20 songs are better than anything composed by Bach, Mozart, Beethoven, and so forth. Within that narrow time frame, it’s being claimed that these “songs” are better than anything composed by Pierre Boulez or Philip Glass or Steve Reich or John Adams or Kaija Saariaho or Salina Fisher, or any jazz composition by John Coltrane or Ornette Coleman.

I don’t mind if people write articles like this, but please give it a proper headline. “The 20 Best Pop Instrumentals of the Past 65 Years” is much more accurate and avoids sounding like something put together by a lazy moron or some brain-dead chatbot.