What's the best track ever written, or what is the best album of all time? Rolling Stone, Bestsongsever.com and the Everyhit List have all tried to answer this question.
Magazines, television shows and, increasingly, websites publish regular lists of 'the best of', not least because they fill space relatively cheaply and are loved by their readers. Within this genre, there have been many attempts to produce the definitive list of the best ever music, songs, tracks or albums.
So, what is the best piece of popular music ever produced? This question has exercised peoples' minds ever since music was invented during the earliest stages of human development. Thwe question has also been at the root of many of the arguments that have bedeviled the generation gap in the period since the invention of the teenager and the birth of pop music. Here are just a few of those lists of the best music ever.
The Rolling Stone Best Albums of All Time
Rolling Stone is one of the most respected music papers of the last 50 years and ran a poll of its readers to try to determine what was the best album of all time. The results produced some surprises but included some really great music including five albums by The Beatles.
Here is the top 20 of the Rolling Stone top 500 albums of all time.
1.Sgt Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, The Beatles
2.Pet Sounds, The Beach Boys
3.Revolver, The Beatles
4.Highway 61 Revisited, Bob Dylan
5.Rubber Soul, The Beatles
6.What’s Going On, Marvin Gaye
7.Exile on Main Street, The Rolling Stones
8.London Calling, The Clash
9.Blonde on Blonde, Bob Dylan
10.The White Album, The Beatles
11.The Sun Sessions, Elvis Presley
12.Kind of Blue, Miles Davis
13.The Velvet Underground and Nico, The Velvet Underground
14.Abbey Road, The Beatles
15.Are You Experienced?, The Jimi Hendrix Experience
16.Blood on the Tracks, Bob Dylan
17.Nevermind, Nirvana
18.Born to Run, Bruce Springsteen
19.Astral Weeks, Van Morrison
20.Thriller, Michael Jackson.
What can be clearly seen here is the audience demographic for the Rolling Stone readership. Established in 1967 but coming to national and international prominence in the early 1970s with its political coverage of US elections by, amongst others, Hunter S Thompson, the magazine's readers have clearly stayed with it over the years. Over half of the tracks belong to the 60s generation, with two representing the music that preceded and influenced it. Only two albums are post-1978.
The Bestsongsever.com Website
The development of the internet has allowed easier collection of information about people’s favourite music. One such site, www.besteversongs.com has come up with a list of the best ever songs and here’s the top 20.
1.Bohemian Rhapsody, Queen
2.Stairway to Heaven, Led Zeppelin
3.Wish You Were Here, Pink Floyd
4.Imagine, John Lennon
5.Hotel California, The Eagles
6.Comfortably Numb, Pink Floyd
7.Hey Jude, The Beatles
8.Like a Rolling Stone, Bob Dylan
9.All Along the Watchtower, The Jimi Hendrix Experience
10.A Day in the Life, The Beatles
11.Sweet Child O’ Mine, Guns N’ Roses
12.Sultans of Swing, Dire Straits
13.Learning to Fly, Pink Floyd
14.Nothing Else Matters, Metallica
15.Born to Run, Bruce Springsteen
16.Light My Fire, The Doors
17.Smells Like Teen Spirit, Nirvana
18.(I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction, The Rolling Stones
19.Let it Be, The Beatles
20.November Rain, Guns N’ Roses
The besteversongs.com list also demonstrates a nostalgic tendency with a combination of 1960s classics tempered by a smattering of the later rock which flowed from the psychedelic era without ever being part of it. It shows that despite the potential for a wider spread of audience for general internet-based polls rather than those associated with a specific publication, this is not a necessary consequence.
The Everyhit List
One other way of trying to decide what is the best ever song is to use surveys undertaken by other people and the website everyhit.com has done just that, scouring the lists of best ever music to compile a best of best of lists of songs. As might be expected, this list comprises a wider selection of music and artists, but the selection is still only slightly wider, remaining focused around the classic pop music of the 1960s.
Their compilation list has the following top 20.
1.Bohemian Rhapsody, Queen
2.Imagine, John Lennon
3.Angels, Robbie Williams
4.Hey Jude, The Beatles
5.Smells Like Teen Spirit, Nirvana
6.Live Forever, Oasis
7.Wonderwall, Oasis
8.One, U2
9.Bitter Suite Symphony, Verve
10.With or Without You, U2
11.Penny Lane/Strawberry Fields Forever, The Beatles
12.Good Vibrations, The Beachboys
13.Losing My Religion, REM
14.Like a Rolling Stone, Bob Dylan
15.God Only Knows, The Beach Boys
16.Everybody Hurts, REM
17.Waterloo Sunset, The Kinks
18.Don’t Look Back in Anger, Oasis
19.A White Shade of Pale, Procol Harum
20.Stairway to Heaven, Led Zeppelin.
So, What is the Best Ever Music of All Time?
There are almost as many lists of best ever music out there as there are songs and the listener can select the one they want to validate their own taste in music as being the best. To paraphrase the concluding words from the cult TV series The Naked City, there are a million lists of the best ever music out there. This has been one of them.
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