canonical

I'm planning an entry which will be a list of songs that I really like. I'm going to need it later when I discuss why I'm not impressed with a lot of today's indie-rock. Rock'n'roll is a genre of music where there's a chance that any bunch of musicians barely conversant with their instrument can bash out something catchy, compelling, and meaningful. But it's a challenge to say that one creation of a bunch of musical illiterates is better than another (Of course, Times New Viking is the greatest bunch of musical illiterates ever, having filled four albums with catchy sublimely naive songs that sound like the first ones they've written (which of course means that they're not in the same category as the Shaggs)). So, I find the San Francisco band, Girls cloying and slickly half-assed, aspiring to be nothing more than a hipster prom band for kids who only went to prom ironically, and probably inferior to the Brazilian Girls and the Theoretical Girls and the Parenthetical Girls and every other band of mostly guys who call themselves girls, but as I write this, "Lust for Life" is stuck in my head. So I'd like to point to "Love you more" by the Buzzcocks as a song that I like more, think is a better song, and is just as catchy. So I've got the beginnings of such a list. But as soon as I started, I was tempted to name certain songs canonical, but I could find no grounds for the inclusion of such songs except that I haven't gotten sick of them as my tastes have changed and that people whose tastes I trust also like them.

Here, you try. "Hallelujah" definitely belongs on the list. So does "Blitzkrieg Bop." And "Billie Jean." What about "Living on a Prayer." What about your favorite song from the great early '90's pop-punk band, Pierre and the Quixotes*, who were every bit as infectious and energetic as the Ramones, but wrote better songs and captured exactly what being your age at the time felt like for you.

Hard isn't it? I'll try again tomorrow.

*Pierre and the Quixotes do not exist.