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Representation and Stupid Lists
Over the weekend, Fivehour posted a brief missive that included his disappointment regarding the paucity of black songwriters at the top of the NYT recent list of the 100 greatest living American songwriters. It should be noted that there were actually two lists. The first was an unranked list of the top 30 that was compiled by critics. After that list generated the expected amount of controversy, the Times solicited list submissions from readers, which were then compiled into a ranked top 100. On the original list, 13 or 14 of the top 30 were black, depending on whether you count Mariah Carey. One thing I noticed about the critic's list is that it suffers from another kind of representation problem, the opposite of what Fivehour was talking about. In an apparent effort to avoid offending any constituency, the critics who made the selections cast as wide a net as possible. You can say what you want about the wisdom of the crowd and the biases of the NYT older, white, urban readership, but the reader list acts as somewhat of a correction. First, I'd like to go through each artist on the critic's list and evaluate their worthiness for inclusion.
The Original 30
Nile Rodgers: He was the guitarist and principle songwriter for the disco group Chic, and since disco's critical rehabilitation, he has enjoyed an elevated status. Part of this is because his own contributions to disco—Chic's music and the songs he wrote for other artists, including Sister Sledge and Diana Ross—are among the finest examples of the genre, a world away from stuff by The Village People, KC & the Sunshine Band, and Lipps, Inc. that contributed to disco's demise. A bigger part is that after disbanding Chic he spent the next several decades working with artists as diverse as David Bowie, Madonna, INXS, Beyonce, and Daft Punk, which maintained his profile in the industry at a time when most former disco musicians were in the "Where are they now?" file. While his musical bona fides are unquestioned, most of them are due to his work as a producer, not as a songwriter. Chic only had a few pop hits, not many more R&B hits, and theirs is not a catalog where critics are pointing to a lot of hidden gems. He didn't write a ton of hit songs for other artists, either. His career as a hit songwriter was pretty much over by 1983, and he seemed disinclined to contribute material for records he was producing. The notable exception is "Get Lucky", for which he received a songwriting credit, along with everyone else who was in the studio that day. His inclusion on this list is suspicious and ultimately not okay.
Lucinda Williams: If you've spent any amount of time listening to your local public Adult Album Alternative radio station, you've heard Lucinda Williams. She's a critical darling and avatar for the urban hipster's idea of what "Americana" should be: Country-ish songs about gravel roads. As a cult artist, she isn't going to be judged based on how many hits she wrote, only the overall quality of her output, which is high. I have no problem with this inclusion, though I admit that I'm a member of her target demographic.
Stevie Wonder: If you want to nitpick, you can argue that he had a lot of help before Motown gave him full control in the early 1970s, and that the quality of his work fell off a cliff after the mid-80s, but let's be real here—he was a teenager in his early years and his peak lasted about as long as one can reasonably expect. And what a peak it was. Wonder's greatest strength was that he wasn't afraid to stretch the boundaries of what was harmonically possible in R&B. Like the Beatles, though, he was able go off the reservation and still remain massively popular. This one is a no-brainer.
Jay-Z: No rapper I would pick will ever end up on one of these lists, but if you have to choose someone mainstream, Jay-Z is about as good as you're going to get.
Paul Simon: With Simon & Garfunkel, he was able to take what should have been massive epics and shoehorn them into three minute pop songs. Solo, he was able to branch out stylistically, eventually landing a hit album based in South African pop music at a time when most artists of his generation were vainly attempting to conform with 80s trends. Another no-brainer.
Taylor Swift: You would think that someone as famous as Swift who has been around as long as she has would have tons of songs that would be familiar to the general public whether they liked it or not. I will admit that I can identify a song as being by Taylor Swift upon hearing it, whether I've heard it before or not. Aside from Love Story and Shake It Off, though, I wouldn't be able to tell you the title, or even tell you whether I had heard it before. Her music is so bland that it simply goes in one ear and out the other without the brain taking note of anything. Internet music guru Rick Beato pointed out to Lex Fridman a few months ago that for an artist as popular as she is, she has never once been at the forefront of any musical development. Her modus operandi, instead, is to put her finger in the wind and capitalize on the sounds that others have already popularized. Her actual songwriting skills are rather limited, as they involve basic melodies and paint-by-numbers chord progressions. Beato also noted that only two academic books have been published on the topic of Swift, one about her lyrics and one about her marketing sense. There is nothing to date analyzing her actual musical contribution. One cannot imagine the same being true of Stevie Wonder. She should not be within a mile of this list, though by excluding her the critics would have caused a riot. After all, any reviewer giving one of her albums less than five stars or pointing out any flaws whatsoever risks their own personal safety, so I'll give the NYT a pass on this one.
Brian and Eddie Holland: 2/3 of the famed Holland/Dozier/Holland songwriting team, who were responsible for more Motown hits than you can shake a stick out, including most of the hits by The Supremes and Temptations. You can claim that they shouldn't be included due to the passing of Lamont Dozier, but his being dead doesn't diminish them as songwriters. They shaped the sound of a generation made an indelible mark on the music of generations to come. Easy inclusion.
Missy Elliott: I'm going to put this in the Jay-Z category where I admit that I don't know enough to make a decision on this, though if I were compelled to include a female R&B songwriter from that generation Alicia Keys would be my first thought.
Lionel Richie: This is an interesting one. From 1974 to 1981 he was the mastermind behind the Commodores, and his contributions thereto would be enough to include him on my personal list. From 1982 to 1987 he was a popular solo musician whose material hasn't aged well and was, for many years, the but of jokes. Beginning in the mid-2000s he reinvented himself as a generalized music celebrity who people know had a career at one point but which career nobody seems interested in revisiting. Critics almost certainly included him solely on his Commodores material, using his unrelated contemporary popularity as a defense against people saying "Who?" The result is that his inclusion is both deserved and undeserved at the same time.
Dolly Parton: I was in Gatlinburg on vacation a few years ago and a friend of mine, who was taking his kids to Dollywood the following day, said at cocktail hour that he couldn't understand her popularity because the only songs of hers he could think of were "Jolene", "I Will Always Love You", and "Islands in the Stream", which she only gets half credit for. I added "9 to 5" to the list, and can personally name several more songs, but not ones he, or anyone else, would be familiar with. That being said, her work is critically acclaimed, and she probably has a ton of country hits that my friend wouldn't know about, but so does Conway Twitty. This is a Lionel Richie situation on steroids, and since I'm only inclined to include one such performer on the list and I like him better, I'm dumping her from mine.
Young Thug: Evidence of the critics' compulsion to include modern artists, including ones whose contributions are actively detrimental to the genre. Hard pass.
Diane Warren: Another interesting selection. Warren is the kind of hook-for-hire songwriter who you call when you need a readymade hit for a famous artist who is incapable of writing their own material. While she may have written some of the biggest hits of the 80s and 90s, they were clearly designed to move units, and nobody would call them their favorite songs. I get that the critics wanted to include a behind-the-scenes songwriter who didn't perform, but I doubt anyone things that the proliferation of generic power ballads was a good thing. Pass.
Josh Osborne, Brandy Clark, Shane McAnally: Simultaneously the most and least baffling conclusion. Least baffling because the critics clearly felt compelled to include someone writing contemporary country music. Most baffling because this isn't an actuall songwriting team but three people who occasionally collaborate with each other and always collaborate with someone. Another example of ham-fisted representation for a popular genre that sucks. Dump all of them from the list.
Fiona Apple: She gained prominence in the late-90s for being better artistically than one would expect a teenage girl to be, and has been mildly overrated ever since. It's clearly a critical darling inclusion, but I'm not going to complain about it too much, since her songs are at least tolerable, if not quite as good as advertised.
Babyface: Apart from the question of whether we need representation for 90s R&B, at least this is the most obvious pick. Then again, as many hits as this guy wrote, few people remember them today. Bland R&B balladry tends to disappear down the toilet of history pretty quickly. Pass.
Stephen Merritt: Another critical darling. I have listened to all 69 of the love songs he is known for, and maybe a half dozen merit a second listen. He hasn't done anything since, and his work from before ranges from mediocre to awful, and everything he does is excessively twee. I'll never understand the critical appeal. Hard pass.
Romeo Santos: Latin music exists almost wholly apart from the mainstream, and the critics accordingly had to select a big name that nobody had ever heard of. I have no idea how deserving this guy is, but Reuben Blades more or less invented salsa music and isn't on the list. Now, Mr. Blades was born in Panama, but since he spent the bulk of his career as a New York musician I won't hold that against him.
Carole King: As a younger woman, she stayed behind the scenes and wrote a healthy number of 60s pop hits along with her lyricist then-husband, Gerry Goffin. As a somewhat older woman she had solo success in the burgeoning singer-songwriter movement of the 1970s. Easy inclusion.
Outkast: An odd choice but not one worth complaining about.
Mariah Carey: Her music was the soundtrack of my childhood. Particularly the shitty parts of my childhood, like standing in a store for three hours while my mother looked at clothes, or sitting in the back of a hot 1986 Pontiac between two car seats with no way to change the radio. She, too, would be relegated to "Where are they now?" file if a Christmas song that she wrote hadn't become popular 20 years after its original release. Like everything else Carey wrote that was even remotely good, it was ruined by being played to death. Hard pass.
Willie Nelson: Another multi-stage musician. In the 60s he wrote hits for other artists like Patsy Cline while his own career foundered. In the 70s he came into his own as a progenitor of outlaw country and made a name for himself with a series of critically acclaimed hit albums. In the 80s he capitalized on his success with a bunch of pop hits that were halfway decent if not great. In between all of this he expanded his boundaries by releasing albums that explored genres he had no business exploring. Easy inclusion.
Kendrick Lamar: For years, the top-rated album on online review site RateYourMusic was Radiohead's OK Computer, which made sense because it appealed to music snobs but was mainstream enough that the general public would have heard of it. It was such a perfect selection for #1 that it was surprising when To Pimp a Butterfly overtook it a few years back. I'm not the biggest fan of Lamar, but he's a much better selection for this list than Young Thug, and I'll voice my approval just to show I'm not entirely out of touch.
*Valerie Simpson: Another Motown songwriter, best known for her work with her late husband Nick Ashford. But aside from Ain't No Mountain High Enough and the other songs they wrote for the Marvin Gaye/Tami Terrell collaboration, their work is pretty thin. Does a single iconic song make up for an otherwise underwhelming career? Maybe.
Bob Dylan: I'm not even going to address this.
Lana Del Ray: She started off as a pop musician but came into her own as a legitimate singer-songwriter. If you want to include someone with pop credentials who can actually write music, she's a much better option than Taylor Swift. No problem with this selection.
The-Dream: The 2000s equivalent of Babyface, and a stand-in for Beyonce. The merit of his inclusion is likewise dependent on whether you think his material is any good. I don't, so I'll pass on this guy.
Jimmy Jam and Terry Lewis: They came to prominence in the mid-80s as Janet Jackson's producers and the architects of the sound that defined the era. Like Nile Rodgers, their primary contribution is more through production than songwriting. Besides Jackson and boy band New Edition, their credits are pretty thin. The sound also aged poorly and, unlike disco, hasn't had a contemporary revival. The 80s aesthetic that is popular nowadays relies more on synth-pop than what they were doing. Pass on these guys.
Bad Bunny: Maybe he merits inclusion due to his mainstreaming of Latin music. Maybe in ten years he'll be remembered as well as Marc Anthony. A little to early to start putting him on these kinds of lists, but if you need to include a contemporary Latin artist, I don't know who else you'd pick. Pass for me.
Bruce Springsteen: I always felt that Bruce was overrated and I find his working man schtick tiring. Even as a musician, the guy never worked a day in his life; his first album was a hit and in a few years he was the hottest thing going. If they wanted to include a heartland rocker, Bob Seger has him beat in the authenticity department, as he struggled for years before he finally broke through outside of Michigan, and his songwriting catalog can go toe to toe with Springsteen's. I'm in the minority with this, though, so I can't complain.
Smokey Robinson: Another architect of the Motown sound and an obvious choice.
In all, I can endorse about half of these selections. Now let's look at the people who made the top 30 of the reader's poll who weren't on the original list:
**5. Billy Joel: He's had more hits than you can shake a stick at, and has been continuously popular despite not releasing anything new since 1993. In the age of punk, though, his music was seen as lightweight, and he had a similar popular perception until relatively recently, when younger people started to admit that he was actually pretty good. The stigma was slow to disappear among rock critics, and it seems nobody wants to give him too many accolades. His exclusion from the list was criminal.
9. James Taylor; 11. Jackson Browne; 14. Randy Newman: In the 1970s, there was an entire singer-songwriter movement where musicians who would in a previous era would have stayed in the shadows and written material for more obvious pop stars were encouraged perform and record albums. The result is that there's an overabundance of these types, and any list that seeks to be representative has to include a few representative examples. Carole King and Paul Simon were the lucky ones here, as their careers predated the movement and were thus the most qualified on paper. Is Jackson Browne a better songwriter than Diane Warren? Would you rather listen to The Pretender or Aerosmith's 90s material? I don't even think this is a legitimate question. Especially with regards to Newman, who also wrote a lot of songs that are better known through cover versions.
12. Tom Waits: It says something that a guy who is effectively a cult musician and a critical darling made it this high on a reader's poll. That doesn't happen unless there's something transcendent about the quality of the work.
15. David Byrne: For as much as the list tried to be representative, the critics seem to have forgotten about the punk/new wave era entirely, possibly because it was largely a British phenomenon. But it's still odd, because these guys, and Talking Heads in particular, are usually critical darlings. I'd definitely include him.
16. Stevie Nicks: The compilers of the reader's poll admitted that this was a hard one to score, as some people just wrote "Fleetwood Mac", which had three principle songwriters, Nicks, Chritine McVie, and Lindsey Buckingham. Complicating matters further is the fact that McVie is British and thus ineligible. Buckingham was the more prominent songwriter (and never went through an addict phase), but isn't as famous. I have no problem including Nicks, but I understand why the critics would avoid this hornet's nest.
19. Jason Isbell, 20. Jeff Tweedy, 21. Brandi Carlisle: See Lucinda Williams and the NPR crowd's obsession with Americana musicians. If this is purely a question of songwriting quality without regard to popularity, then you can make the case for either of them, but since we already have Williams as the Americana stand-in, there was no reason to include them. If I'm only naming 30 people I'm not putting any on my list.
22. Donald Fagen: Steely Dan is one of my favorite bands, so I obviously would put him on the list. His songs are also unlike anything else in music, so you don't have the subgenre overrepresentation issue. The problem is that everyone thinks of Steely Dan and not of him as a songwriter.
23. Neil Diamond: See Billy Joel. Massively famous, massively talented, and massively uncool. The youngs might belt Sweet Caroline in bars to the point where it becomes irritating, but there's no contemporary appreciation for I Am, I Said, or Play Me. As an unapologetic Neil Diamond fan, I would include him on this list, but I'm sympathetic to the arguments against, namely that much of his material is crap, to a greater degree than Billy Joel.
24. John Fogerty: It seems like the critics must have just forgot that people in bands can also write songs. This guy was Americana before Americana even existed, and even if you want the list to be representative, he's more deserving than Lucinda Williams.
25. REM: Almost certainly this high in the reader poll because of their cult material from the 80s and not their hits from the 90s. Six months ago I would have passed on these guys, but I saw Paul Shannon perform their non-hits back in March and the concert was so good that I'm no longer sure. Then again, I'd place them ahead of anyone I crossed off the critic's list, with the possible exception of Nile Rodgers.
26. Patti Smith: She was both punk and singer-songwriter. She was also a poet. She's also massively overrated, with most of her "songs" consisting of her rambling on stage while people like Bob Quine wail on guitars in the background. And the song she's best known for (Because the Night) was written by Bruce Springsteen. Pass.
27. Don Henley: One line in one movie made an entire generation hate these guys, not that there was much to love about them before. That being said, see my above comments about people being in bands not getting nearly enough respect as songwriters. I don't know if he makes my top 30, though.
30. Jimmy Webb: See Valerie Simpson. The NYT must have the smartest, most astute readership in the world for him to rate so high. Webb wrote a few hits in the late 60s—MacArthur Park, Galveston, By the Time I Get to Phoenix, Up, Up and Away—before trying to make it as a singer-songwriter and not having much success. He might have done better had he continued to write for other people, though the market for outside songwriters in the 70s wasn't good, and wouldn't pick up until schlockmasters like Warren came to prominence in the 80s. I make the comparison to Simpson because although he didn't write that many hits, he also wrote Wichita Linemen, which, like Ain't No Mountain High Enough, is in contention for the greatest song ever written.
So let's tie it all together by looking at who got booted from the critic's top 30:
From the original critic's list, readers chose to boot 8 of 13 (or 9 of 14 if you include Carey) black musicians out of the top 30, and 4 of them out of the top 100 entirely. While crowd-sourced lists are usually suspect, this list was compiled in response to comments about the original list, and thus the responders read the original article, were familiar with the justifications, and ultimately disagreed. It's easy to look at Swift's high ranking and label the readership as ignorant, but they also elevated Jimmy Webb to #30, despite him not being mentioned on the original list, and he should certainly be in the conversation despite not being a household name and not representing the Americana that the NYT readership has a hard-on for.
The point I'm trying to make here is that we can take a group of experts and have them put together a list that's supposed to be representative, and end up with a list that everyone agrees is terrible. It's not even clear that they succeeded in the first sense, since there aren't any country songwriters who were primarily active between circa 1990 and 2010 (unless you count Taylor Swift at the tail end of this period). It would be one thing if there simply weren't anyone prominent enough to merit inclusion, but that ignores the existence of Dwight Yoakam, who was both popular and the kind of guy whom critics slobber over. The list also ignores R&B from between Motown and disco. Why not include Kenny Gamble and Leon Huff, who proctically invented the Philly Soul sound in the 70s and wrote for groups like The Intruders, The O'Jays, and the Stylistics? Is Fiona Apple really the best representative of alternative rock songwriting? Why is the list so thin on rock songwriters in general?
The reason is that you can't please anybody, and, despite my disagreements, the critics' list is as good as anything. Because attempts at being representative, as misguided as they often are, can be better than the alternative. What if the list were just a bunch of country songwriters, or a bunch of R&B songwriters, or pro songwriters that nobody had heard of? People would complain that the compilers were too myopic and were unqualified to compile such a list by virtue of their ignorance. In this sense, the NYT's format was sneakily good—release an unranked list of critics' selections, then invite the public to chime in. The got additional mileage when they evaluated the suggestions that the readers liked but that the critics had ignored. I honestly think that this format is better than putting out a critic's list that is overly curated to avoid controversy (like what VH1 used to do) or simply putting it out to the vote (which ends in Rolling Stone's best albums of the millennium list having Limp Bizkit at #2). The emphasis is less on the list itself than on the discussion, which is the way it should be, and I'm glad that this is the way they chose to do it now that it's technologically possible to have such a discussion.
My instant CTRL-F: Max Martin. Neither list has him. Honestly, as such, I consider at least the 100 list to be objectively wrong, but I also consider the critic list to also be wrong. I'm not surprised exactly since readers really don't pay attention to songwriting credits, just the actual singers, but it's still pretty impressive when the wisdom of the crowds fails so badly. But you'd think expert critics wouldn't have that issue and would be more aware?
Okay, I'll admit that I'm a bit more of a fan of pop music than some out there - a lot of people don't seem to want to acknowledge that something poppy and high-charting is therefore "good", even though that's kind of the obvious suggestion. However, this man literally has the record!! And it's not just one era, this man has a 30 year career.
If you expand it just a bit to top 20 songs and allow co-production only? "Since 1995, Martin has written, co-written, or co-produced 121 Billboard Hot 100 top 20 hits." One hundred and twenty one!! You may recognize a few of these, and I'll bold unique artists so it's clear that although he leans on a few, he's been all over the pop scene:
1998 – "...Baby One More Time" by Britney Spears
2000 – "It's Gonna Be Me" by NSYNC
2008 – "I Kissed a Girl" by Katy Perry
2008 – "So What" by Pink
2009 – "My Life Would Suck Without You" by Kelly Clarkson
2009 – "3" by Britney Spears
2010 – "California Gurls" by Katy Perry featuring Snoop Dogg
2010 – "Teenage Dream" by Katy Perry
2010 – "Raise Your Glass" by Pink
2011 – "Hold It Against Me" by Britney Spears
2011 – "E.T." by Katy Perry featuring Kanye West
2011 – "Last Friday Night (T.G.I.F.)" by Katy Perry
2012 – "Part of Me" by Katy Perry
2012 – "One More Night" by Maroon 5
2012 – "We Are Never Ever Getting Back Together" by Taylor Swift
2013 – "Roar" by Katy Perry
2013 – "Dark Horse" by Katy Perry featuring Juicy J
2014 – "Shake It Off" by Taylor Swift
2014 – "Blank Space" by Taylor Swift
2015 – "Bad Blood" by Taylor Swift featuring Kendrick Lamar
2015 – "Can't Feel My Face" by The Weeknd
2016 – "Can't Stop the Feeling!" by Justin Timberlake
2019 – "Blinding Lights" by The Weeknd
2021 – "Save Your Tears" by The Weeknd and Ariana Grande
2021 – "My Universe" by Coldplay and BTS
2024 – "Yes, And?" by Ariana Grande
2024 – "We Can't Be Friends (Wait for Your Love)" by Ariana Grande
2025 – "The Fate of Ophelia" by Taylor Swift
2026 – "Opalite" by Taylor Swift
2026 - "Hate That I Made You Love Me" by Ariana Grande
It's like not including Warren Buffett in your list of greatest living investors, or Spielberg from your list of greatest living directors, or Agatha Christie from greatest authors, you know? The man literally holds the record, judged by commercial success, for being the greatest songwriter of all time, let alone the "living" restriction. I honestly cannot wrap my mind around it.
But no, these songs are too... what? Too catchy? Too popular? Lmao. I know "greatness" and "popularity" are not really quite synonymous, but surely quantity has a quality of its own. How can he not even make the top 100? It's frankly bizarre. It's not like he's one of those parasites attaching his name to a ton of things either, by all accounts he's actually responsible for some of the most famous hooks himself.
The issue with Martin is that it's well known in the industry that he makes songwriting credits a condition of his production contract whether he actually writes the songs or not, so there's some question of how much of those songs he actually contributed to.
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It’s a list of American songwriters. Max Martin (real name Karl Martin Sandberg) is Swedish. The closest American equivalent would arguably be Dr. Luke.
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You have to add two spaces at the end of a line in order to create a line break.
Thanks, I thought it was only the double return, that's helpful. Though I went back and forth if I wanted it listicled or not.
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I really can't stand Bob Dylan. He is the most Harrison Bergeron attendance award mealy mouthed nonsense I've ever heard in my life and boomers should be humiliated that they share a generation with him
Is Sufjan Stevens not on either of these lists? Devendra? (Both lists are paywalled for me so I can't check.) Why has the indie hipster folk movement of 2006 to 2013 been so thoroughly memory holed?
Sufjan Stevens was #35 on the reader list. Devendra wasn't on either list, an while I like his material, it's a pretty obvious imitation of Marc Bolan's Tyrannosaurus Rex. And while I understand how one could find Dylan's voice or overall media personality grating, I don't understand how someone praising Devendra Banhart and Sufjan Stevens could take issue with his merits as a songwriter, especially considering that the careers of those two don't exist without Dylan.
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I'll have you know I hated the Eagles long before The Big Lebowski. Henley especially; while I normally advocate separating art from the artist, a) his output sucks, and b) writing a diatribe against tabloid culture because KTLA though it was odd David Geffen made that whole thing about 16 year old hookers ODing with a shit-ton of coke and quaaludes that were totally brought in by her and her friend, your honor, I swear!
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But he walked through Bedford Stuy alone!
Nobody mentioned Burt Bacharach and Hal David? And was Phil Spector disqualified because he killed someone?
Bacharach and Spector were disqualified on account of being dead. And while Spector had a few hits, he didn't write a whole lot, mostly outsourcing that job to professional songwriters like Carole King.
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All of these lists are missing probably the greatest living American songwriter (we'll leave aside my typical possessiveness over that term): Alan Menken.
This man has more hits, earworms, and famous songs than pretty much any other person on this list.
Let me show you. Let me know how many of these songs you can sing a line or two.
Starting with Little Shop of Horrors, he just kept writing hit after hit after hit. He single-handedly launched the Disney Renaissance with The Little Mermaid, and continued it with Beauty and the Beast, Aladdin, Hunchback of Notre Dame, Pocahontas, and Hercules.
His later songs aren't as popular as these, but that's 7 songs that I expect most people to be able to recognize and hum or sing along to.
From Hunchback:
From Hercules:
And we haven't even gotten to Galavant.
Surprised to learn that Alan Menken is straight and has kids, apropos of nothing. I vaguely knew the Disney Renaissance story and that Howard Ashman died of AIDs but didn't realize Menken was hetero.
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The readers' list's inclusion of Lin Manuel Miranda made me realize that the critics may have had a blind spot when it came to people who wrote primarily for the theater. As for Menken, right off the bat I can't count the incidental music he wrote because scoring is not songwriting, and if we include composition in general we have to figure out where people like Phillip Glass, Steve Reich, and Terry Riley fit into the list, and I don't think anyone intended to disturb that hornet's nest. Looking at the part of his career he is best known for, we have Little Shop of Horrors plus a half dozen Disney scores. Each of the Disney scores only includes 6 to 8 actual songs (compared with 12 to 18 for a full-fledged musical). One or two will be rerecorded as pop versions so they can be released to radio (at least after The Little Mermaid), one or two will be well-known for novelty value but won't get anywhere near the pop charts.
At this point his catalog is looking a little thin, but nothing is disqualifying yet. The problem comes when you look at who recorded those hits: Peabo Bryson, Celine Dion, Regina Belle, Vanessa Williams, Michael Bolton. All of those hit songs were Adult Contemporary pap that, had they not had any association with Disney movies, would have disappeared from the public consciousness as quickly as the rest of those artists' respective catalogs. This isn't to say he's a bad songwriter, but I wouldn't put him anywhere near the top 30, let alone call him the greatest living American songwriter.
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Kendrick is an interesting cultural figure to me, in the he's a black man who self-consciously makes music for and about black people, but I associate him primarily with white fans who love his (in their view) sophisticated view of black culture. There's a weird tension there, as Immortal Technique put it:
Kendrick's also in a funny spot where the initial launch to prominence was a full court press from the establishment inclusive of a Lonely Island feature, a song where Arenas is rhymed with 'suck ma penis' and then zig-zagging wildly in terms of his 'auteur credentials' when he's well past his best work. I enjoy TPAB and GKMC, but I've also made a lot of fun of my friends who were holding him up as a unique genius and I don't think he's produced anything particularly good in years.
Also he might have effectively killed rap commercially via winning the Drake beef, credit to him for that.
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I think Missy Elliot is there for the 90s hip hop and R&B sound of Are You That Somebody, Sexyback, Pony, etc. She is definitely cooler than Timbaland and had a few genre-shattering songs as an individual artist, but Timbaland is the one who should have made the list since he is the one who made Aaliyah's genre peaks.
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... because he so obviously should be included, or shouldn't?
Considering that I went to great lengths to explain why relatively minor figures like Young Thug and Bad Bunny should be excluded, there's no way that I'd imply that he who was #1 on the reader list and is widely considered to be one of the greatest songwriters of all time merits dismissal without explanation. Of course he should be included. I'll add that of the 25,000 reader ballots that the Times received, in which readers could select up to ten songwriters, fully 1/3 of them contained Dylan, who finished in first place by nearly 2,000 votes.
It’s amazing how many popular songs were actually written by Dylan. Dude has no competition.
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I feel like music and movies share the same feature in that as soon as you give anyone involved an ounce of reverence or respect a part of your soul dies.
The list should all be Taylor Swift. She writes the best songs in her niche of 'all white women' and it's not even close. Except #3 which should be Fred Durst, for managing to take the essence of angsty rock rap and properly commercialize it without pretending to be a gay communist. #1 and 2 should be shared between Henry Wayne Casey and Eminem for showing the world that white people do black people better.
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There's a place for surveys of the field like that. Unfortunately, "The 30 greatest living American songwriters" is punchier than "A selection of 30 great living American songwriters, which is representative of the field as a whole", so misrepresenting it is easy.
Any fair individual ranking system would (most likely) be heavily concentrated in whatever subcategory matched the rating criteria. The same goes for greatest athletes, greatest politicians, or anything else.
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I think this can be a bit like the midwit meme.
Stupid bad list: Everyone hates it
Playing it safe mediocre list: Everyone kinda nods their head in agreement
Great list: Everyone hates it
The reason why people would hate the great lists is because well, everyone has their own personal preferences whether it be genre or artist. If you're finding yourself liking everything on it, then it's probably too agreeable and overly mainstream and doesn't truly capture the essence of what (some) members of the niche fanbases actually prefer.
An example for say video games would be how I don't normally play base management tactical combat strategy games but do like XCOM. Putting Xcom on a list of top games would fit me. And it would kinda fit a lot of the base management tactical combat strategy nerds enough that they'll go along with it. But is it really what a lot of those guys like the best? I doubt it.
Of course as I keep making a point to note, fanbases and niches have tons of disagreement within them and one superfan's magnum opus of the genre can be another's cliched slop and vice versa. (As an example that I am a superfan of, I love soulslikes but actually am quite mid on Elden Ring due to hating open worlds). But still, most likely many of the superfan choices in genres I'm not into will be disagreeable to me whichever way.
I think the most important part of the rankings is to provide solid criteria for selection. I am not that good with songwriting, but I can use Mike Duncan's criteria for greatest Roman emperors until official fall of the Western Empire. He named three criteria: what cards were they dealt with - a self-made man like Caesar or Augustus and specifically Aurelian are ranked higher than emperors who had great starting point - like let's say Titus or Antonius Pius. Second criteria was his impact on the empire, which is combination of longevity and reforms done. Augustus is absolute beast in this criterion, Aurelian is a sprinter as he did amazing stuff during his short reign. And last criterion was how they handled the succession. This absolutely tanks Marcus Aurelius as 1/10 in this category as despite his supposed stoic rationality, he allowed his retarded degenerate son Commodus on the throne, who then promptly destroyed the empire.
The same here with music. For instance the OP has disdain for rap, which is fair given the structural difference between rap and other music. Rap lyrics are built into the loop, rock and other genres use chord progression and melodies meant to be sung. On the other hand rap lyrics have denser linguistics space, rappers like Aesop Rock or GZA have famously large vocabularies densely packed across their songs, especially compared to linguistically more simple pop songs. Of course then there is also a tension that OP recognizes - are we going for artistic merit or are we going for popularity, maybe one criterion or even a requirement can be how many songs written by a specific songwriter hit top 10 charts or some such. Are we valuing mastery over one genre or are we going for versatility of working with many different artists? Are we discounting writing for famous artists who are guaranteed to be successful over actually making unknown talent break through with a hit written by that songwriter? Are we valuing just pure success at the time in terms of awards, copies sold at the time vs cultural longevity, impact and universality of the lyrics for songs that maybe started as obscure or hated, and which are now universally famous? Just think "We Are the World" vs "Hallelujah" or something like that, with the former being song of the year and 8th best selling song in history, the latter never receiving any award and selling less copies - although spread over years.
In a sense true value of these discussions is not necessarily the actual list, but the surrounding discussion of what criteria to use, how to analyze success and if there are some outliers. You may have almost infinite lists depending on what criteria you use, which is the fun part of the game playing with the topic.
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Mmm hmm. Outta my fucking cab!
This is one of the rare instances where the edited version for television actually improves on the uncensored original. "Get out of my peaceful cab!" is infinitely funnier.
Preach! Do you know what happens when you find a stranger in the Alps, Larry? Do you?!?
I've had it with these monkey-fighting snakes on this Monday through Friday plane!
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