Forgotten Songs

There's a lot of lousy music lists out there... you know, the 100 best guitarists of all time, or the 500 best songs from the 1990s. (Really? Were there 500 good songs in the 1990s?) But I recently read a pretty creative list in a magazine published by the folks who bring us NME and Uncut of the 500 Lost Songs You Need To Hear Now.

Rather than counting down 500 songs in some contrived way, the lengthy list is broken down into sub-categories, for example "Soul" and "Punk" and "Krautrock" and so forth. But there's also subcategories encompassing specific artists -- like #191 to #182, all reserved for Blur. ("Young and Lovely" tops the Blur sub-list, and I can't disagree. You can really hear the band take a huge creative step forward with the songcraft of that tune.)

Other notables: At #340, it's Wire's "Outdoor Miner" from 1979, a song that was pretty much on the soundtrack to my live circa 1995. And somewhere between 252 and 281, The Clash make the list for "This is England", which is a phenomenal song despite being on the universally panned Cut the Crap LP.