 This video is brought to you by Incogny. Go to the link in the description to get 60% off an annual plan. There's been a question lingering in the back of my head for the past few months. It's not exactly a novel question. In fact, it's one that I've asked myself on and off for years. It's one that a lot of music fans have asked and a lot of the music press have asked. That question is, what is the greatest song ever made? In my decades listening to and writing about music, my answer to this has fluctuated as much as my tastes. At various times in my life, I have boldly proclaimed like a Rolling Stone, Scarborough Fair Canticle, Under Pressure, and a half dozen other songs as the definitive greatest song ever made. These days my answer tends to gravitate toward Curtis Mayfield's Move On Up, but ask me again in a few years and I'm sure that will change. The question of what the greatest song is is a moving target. Every year thousands of new songs are released and every year thousands of old songs find new life in an ever-changing culture. So rather than try to answer this question outright, I've decided to come at it from another angle. Over the past few weeks, I roped in my trusty assistant Matt and sent him digging through every music publication we could find that has asked what the greatest song is. The result is a collection of 27 different songs declared the single greatest by 32 different organizations or blogs. By looking at this data, I'm hoping that we can come to a better understanding of what we as a culture value in a song, and just maybe we'll be able to add a bit of clarity to that eternal, unanswerable question. Let's take a closer look. Before we get our hands dirty with this dataset, I want to note a couple of things. The easiest way to find this data was through the internet. This potentially cut off older publications if they hadn't been scanned and almost certainly leaves dozens of lists behind. The oldest list we pulled was NME's 1976 list, Top Singles of All Time, while the newest are a number of lists released this very year and a few content aggregate sites that are sort of always updating. Also, we are a pair of English speakers in Canada with nearly passable French, so most of the sources we had access to were English language and all of them were either European or North American. That alone puts a huge bias on this dataset, but that Western bias is also a reflection of broader trends within the history of popular music. And finally, not all these lists are explicitly labeled as the greatest song. Some are most iconic or top single, but for our purposes, I think we can all just agree that they're pretty much saying the same thing. So with these caveats in mind, let's do a little tour of the list. Three songs topped on at least three different lists. Bohemian Rhapsody and Lyco Rolling Stone each appeared three times, while Smells Like Teen Spirit topped them all with four different appearances. So if you go by the numbers, the answer to what the greatest song is might be Smells Like Teen Spirit. None of these songs seemed particularly surprising to me. While they're all quite different aesthetically, each of them is an enormous cultural touchstone. Both Lyco Rolling Stone and Smells Like Teen Spirit were landmark recordings in their day, drawing attention and controversy, and leading to drastic shifts in the music industry. Both were also written and performed by artists who would be dubbed the voice of their generation. Bohemian Rhapsody, on the other hand, is a bit of an otter case. It was celebrated in its day and cracked the Billboard Top 10, but it really blew up when the cult classic Wayne's World used it for the iconic headbanging sequence. Since then, the song's cultural impact has continued to grow as new generations take it on. And the slow burn influence of Bohemian Rhapsody is reflected in the publications that have called it the greatest song. All three of the lists that had Bo-Rap at the top have come out in the last two years. I don't think many people would historically argue that Bohemian Rhapsody wasn't a good or important song, but the place it holds in the collective consciousness right now is a lot more of a modern phenomenon. That's probably due to things like the Bohemian Rhapsody biopic and a reflection that happens as songs age through the filter of time. As a lot of these older artists have reached the twilight of their career, or in the case of Freddie Mercury, passed tragically, we as a culture have taken closer looks at some of their works. It's also a reflection of a changing political culture. As LGBT plus rights have advanced, Freddie Mercury has become a modern queer icon, so audiences have viewed his work in a new light. By the same measure, Aretha Franklin's feminist anthem Respect has been resurfacing in the discourse following the Me Too and Black Lives Matter movements. In the 2021 edition of Rolling Stones' 500 Greatest Songs of All Time, Respect took the number one spot, booting like a Rolling Stone down to number four. Respect is one of a number of protest songs proclaimed the greatest. It's joined by tunes ranging from the melancholic utopia of Imagine to the raging storm of Anarchy in the UK. And I think that this speaks to something that we all want to see in music. We really do want to believe art can change the world, and that affects the way that we evaluate songs. One protest song that did truly contribute to world change topped multiple lists. Billie Holiday's Strange Fruit, a song that sometimes gets credit for kicking off the civil rights movement, was declared number one by Time Magazine in 1999 and by Time Out in 2015. Strange Fruit, getting the nod from a prestigious organization like Time, is a sign of an organization that puts more weight on the historical impact of songs. But plenty of lists also choose songs that have musical influence or virtuosic playing. One song to top two lists, perhaps unsurprisingly, was Led Zeppelin's Stairway to Heaven. What might be a bit more surprising about that is that both of these list tops are far more recent. Stairway currently sits at the top of the fan ranking site, Ranker, which might reflect the power of Zeppelin's enduring fan base. And the other topper was from what I think is a French song ranking blog. Both of these show that even as the world is reckoning with Zeppelin's complicated legacy, the band's rock god persona persists. The last song to have multiple list tops was Joy Division's Love Will Tear Us Apart, which saw one of the widest spreads between its tops, copying a 2002 NME list and a 2014 Music Express list. That song hits on one of the most common topics found throughout the lists, love, and especially heartbreak. Far and away, the largest proportion of the songs that topped lists are About Love. We've got everything from Elvis's Suspicious Minds, to heard it through the grapevine, all the way to the weekend's Blinding Lights. It's no secret that humans love talking about love, and the abstract emotionality of music as a form lends itself so well to love songs. There's such a rich history of artists pouring their heartbreak into song, and that simple universal human experience can clearly spawn greatness. Even to this day, so many hit songs are about love and heartbreak, so don't be surprised if you see a Taylor Swift song top one of these lists in a few years. The remaining songs in the lists run the gamut in lyrical content, from the abstraction of David Bowie's Life on Mars, to feel-good dance songs like Johnny B. Good and the Twist, to the surreal paranoia of Michael Jackson's Billie Jean. The oldest songs that sat on the top of lists were Strange Fruit, and Judy Garland's 1939 Over the Rainbow. Over the Rainbow also holds the distinction of being performed by the youngest artist. Garland was just 17 years old when she recorded Over the Rainbow, a full two years younger than our next youngest in Chubby Checker. On the whole, nearly every song represented in this dataset was sung by somebody who was young. In the entire list, only five were recorded by people older than 30, and the only song performed by an artist over 35 was Leonard Cohen's Hallelujah. This skewed age is a reflection of the popular music industry of the 20th and 21st century. Pop music has always been a young person's game, with labels eager to sign talent that will appeal to teen markets, and the grueling schedule of touring making it harder to keep up as artists age. This is also just a reflection of a culture that puts undue value on youth, and chews out most artists as soon as their backs start to ache. This youthful skew ties in with another huge bias present in these lists. More than half of all these songs are rock. The next most represented in the list are Soul and Pop, with a handful of other genres getting spotlight. There's a number of genres not present at all, including dance music, classical, country, and even rap is barely mentioned. Despite the fact that hip-hop is half-century old, and has been the dominant music for over 20 years, only one song appearing on the list could be considered hip-hop, Beyoncé's Crazy in Love. These biases are a reflection of a music press that was birthed out of the 60s rock era. There definitely were publications writing about music before, but this sort of culture is born out of music magazines like Rolling Stone and Cream, and those magazines have a long legacy of rock bias. These biases are slowly changing, but it takes time for things to catch up. Most songs need to gestate and accrue a certain level of prestige before they're topped on these lists. Almost all the songs in our set were written and recorded decades before the list publication, but there are a few notable exceptions. Mr. Brightside topped an XFM listener poll just six years after its release, and Unfinished Sympathy topped a similar poll by BBC seven years after its release. It's notable that both of these songs are from listener polls that pulled from a wider audience. This could suggest that broad listeners are less biased toward the old stuff and quicker to recognize greatness than an established music press, but it could also just be recency bias. Really, with a sample size this small, it can be hard to draw meaningful conclusions. But there are a few objective data points that we can pull from these songs. Nearly all of them are in 4-4 time, most of them are in a major scale, most range between 3-5 minutes, with the shortest being yesterday at a hair over 2 minutes, and the longest being Stairway to Heaven's 8 minutes. But there's not really much meaning to be found in these numbers. There are some trends that do tell us important information, though. Nearly every one of the songs on this list was a commercial success. Most of the artists named have sold millions of records worldwide, with four of the five best-selling artists in music history making appearances. The Beatles, who have been certified for nearly 300 million sales worldwide, are one of the only artists to appear on the list with two different songs. They're joined in that by Aretha Franklin, who has two votes for respect, and one for, I say, a little prayer. And this reality brings up a certain chicken or egg situation. Are these artists great because they have sold? Or do these artists sell because they're great? In my mind, I think it's a bit of both. I do truly believe that great art taps into something universal in the human spirit that people latch onto. So it's not surprising to me that a lot of great art is popular. But I also think that our perceptions of greatness are deeply, deeply impacted by the media we consume, by the stories we read, by the documentation of these artists' lives. Just knowing more about these artists, I think, makes a lot of people feel closer to them and feel like their work is greater. And that closeness is reflected in national identity, too. Almost all of the artists named here are either from the UK or the US, with two notable exceptions. Both The Weeknd and Leonard Cohen share my home in the strange cold lands of Canada. I'm sure if you looked at more lists from other countries, more local artists would top with great songs. Because music is fundamentally subjective at its core, and that means what is considered great music will always be a reflection of the culture of whoever is making that declaration. There is no such thing as an objectively great song. Honestly, having dug through all this data, I don't feel any closer to a definitive answer as to what makes a song great or what the greatest song is. But at the same time, just looking through this has been a delightful experience that has let me find weird connections between songs that I love and has encouraged me to see songs that I might not have valued as highly through a new light. And really, I think that's the reason why these lists exist. They're not there to give you definitive truths. They're there to give you a fun and interesting way to interact with the art that you love. The entire point of these declarations is to have you disagree with them, to have you argue them out with your friends and come to your own conclusions. By getting into discussions about the art that we love, we learn more about ourselves and we learn more about the society that we live in. And really, that's the whole point of art. So I don't think there's an easy answer to what makes a song great. And I think the question of what is the greatest song is completely unanswerable. But I hope that this has at least piqued your interest and inspired you to start questioning what your criterion for a great song would be. And if you want to get heated in the comments and talk about the art that we love, I'd love to hear what your list looks like. I don't know about you, but with each passing year, it feels like my inbox has filled with more and more spam. 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