Graeme Whitfield
IAM compiling a list – because I am that old and that boring – of my favourite 20 songs ever so that I can burn them on to a disc.
Readers under the age of 35 will no doubt be reading the last few words of that sentence and rolling their eyes while laughing derisively. I will forgive that because rolling our eyes and laughing derisively is very much the perogative of the under35s, and indeed it was what I pretty much did exclusively between the years of 1972 and 2007.
But I want the young folk to know, before they dismiss me as a technological dinosaur, that I have heard of music streaming and indeed, use it frequently. It’s just that I like a CD to listen to in the car and while I’m doing the ironing. Only now I’ve realised that part of the argument for me not being a middle-aged fuddy-duddy is “doing the ironing” and this really isn’t going well. So back to the 20 Best Songs Ever. I won’t bore you with my choice – even I’m not so boring as to think you want to know anything about my taste in music.
For what it’s worth, there’s a couple of songs on there from before I was born and one from the 1970s but a good chunk of the songs are from the late 1980s and early 1990s, proving my long-held theory that pop music only really matters when you are aged somewhere between 15 and 21.
A couple of my favourite artists make an appearance on there but at least one doesn’t, and there’s two songs on the list where I couldn’t tell you a single other thing that those singers have done.
But here’s the problem: I’ve burned a CD with the 20 Best Songs Ever on it and, on reflection, I’ve got them wrong. Some of them, anyway. About 13 or 14 chose themselves and I’m happy with them. But the other six and seven are not quite right and I’m having to go back to the drawing board.
The sensible conclusion to draw from this self-imposed snafu is that it is a fool’s errand to ever try to definitively select your favourite 20 songs. If you like music in any way, that list is likely to change – with your mood, your age and dozens of other factors. The best song ever might be released tomorrow for all I know (and it certainly will be for someone aged between 15 and 21).
Knowing all that, the only logical thing to do is to abandon this whole project and stop wasting my time.
Instead I am currently flicking through my record collection, piles of CDs and even boxes of old cassettes – I am very much a child of the ’80s – to nail down the remaining six songs. This is the work of a halfwit, I realise, but I ain’t stopping now.
■ Graeme Whitfield is editor of The Journal.