bloggedy blog: the personal weblog of a music lover and aging punk wannabe

:: Saturday, October 08, 2005 ::

And I would blog 500 songs...*
... And I would blog 500 more...

Scott of Rockcritics Daily is six days and 40 tunes into his ambitious Battle of the 500s project, in which he counts down the top 500 songs from Rolling Stone and Blender magazines and compares the entries.

But why? one might ask. Perhaps Scott's introductory post will provide an answer:
I broke down this morning and bought the Blender "500 Greatest Songs Since You Were Born!" issue, but rather than reading through it, I decided to use it instead as a launch pad for a new little blog sub-feature: a song-by-song showdown/comparison between the Blender Top 500 and the Rolling Stone Top 500 which came out last year (and which the Blender list is obviously a direct response to). I suspect there will be little in the way of overlap between the two lists: Rolling Stone encompasses all the rock 'n' roll decades, and is extremely heavy on the '60s and '70s; the Blender list only contains songs from 1980 onward. Apples and oranges? We'll see.

I'll start at #500 and work my way forward. I don't intend to write about all, or even many, of the songs, but I will mark each entry with my personal grade (on a scale of 1-10) for each mag's selection. And I'll keep a running tally to see which list comes out on top. If I don't know a song well enough to rate it, there will be no score given for either choice (fair's fair). I'm sure there'll be plenty of titles on the Blender list I won't know, and while I'll certainly do a little investigating or re-listening as I go along, my preference is to just rate the stuff I'm already familiar with. Given my own personal biases, I'm going to hazard a guess that Rolling Stone will come out ahead, at least in the individual rankings, but it's hard to say. Truth be told, I think of my own tastes in popular music as being somewhere in between and/or to the left of center of both. I'm assuming, for instance, that RS is stingy with its disco picks and that Blender is stingy with its house picks; a Top 500 list without strong representation from both of those genres presents a problem for me right off the bat. I say all this without having ever read either list in full.

(If all my past blog "projects" are any indication, I'll make it up to about 468 before calling it quits. Otherwise, it'll be business as usual here at the Daily. And if anyone reading wants to send in--via comments or email--their own rankings, you're more than welcome to do so.)
He's up to 480 today, and so far the Rolling Stone list has a slight edge.

He also includes a post about other "500" lists pertaining to music. It includes Michele's impressive, semi-annotated list.

Let's all wish Scott well on this project and hope he makes it all the way.

*Title of this post should be sung to the tune of The Proclaimers' one and only hit, I'm Gonna Be (500 Miles)" (RealAudio file).

music, lists, countdowns, rock and roll, Rolling Stone, Blender

:: Andrew 13:28 + ::
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