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Notes -
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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