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Songs That Time Forgot (Established 12/31/03. Updated 6/24/04: Added "Soily," "Stupid Cupid," and "Nothing As It Seems.") I'd like to think that everybody knows at least one. One song; one precious gem of musical craftsmanship; one perfect recording; one unmatched, stick-in-your-head sonic thirst-quencher....that nobody else seems to know about. Let's face it, a lot of great songs fall through the cracks. It's not surprising: most every album that comes out probably has at least a dozen songs on it, and how many albums come out in, say, a given month? Too many for you or I to even keep track of the hit songs, let alone the unpublicized masterworks hiding on the inward grooves of records both popular and obscure. This site can by no means even begin to overcome that gap of knowledge; all I hope to do is share a few of the discoveries I've made over the years. I really do love music, and I feel a compulsion to resist the hipster ethos of keeping good discoveries to oneself to protect them from the love of the public. So here they are: songs that I refuse to forget, no matter what time does to them. I urge you to seek them out if my descriptions intrigue you - mostly I've stuck with relatively accessible songs by semi-prominent artists, so it shouldn't be too hard to track them down by whatever means you prefer. Every so often I'll probably end up reviewing lower-profile Songs That Time Forgot; you'll have to bear with me through my bursts of indie-rock semi-elitism. The songs are in three groups which I think are pretty self-explanatory. [There is a Paul McCartney Collection because one impetus for creating this page was the need for a tribute to a man who has, in between his colossal worldwide hits, penned and performed more worthwhile Songs That Time Forgot than any other artist of his generation. I strongly recommend Maccafan.net, where a few of these songs can be found with some searching. I also ganked several pictures and some information from there.] For each song, you get the name of the song (naturally), plus the artist and the album on which the song can be most easily found in an appropriate context. There's also a sample lyric, which serves to suggest both an idea of the song's character and an idea of the general inanity of most pop music. Then, you get an ampersand rating ("&" to "&&&&&"), a few paragraphs of my bumbling attempts to get across the song's greatness or badness (and any interesting history, trivia, and dicta), and maybe a footnote or two. I've chosen the ampersand for ratings instead of the customary asterisk because my project here is to bring these songs into the established lexicon of songs - my ratings are a measure of how important it is that this music be ampersanded into the historical record. A few of the songs are truly terrible and deserve their obscurity, but a great many are true underappreciated classics. In any case: read! Enjoy! Listen! And share back if you care to - I'm always interested in learning about new forgotten songs via email. |
