Okay, I'll be the first to admit that last week's list may not have accurately captured the five greatest songs of all time. While a bit esoteric, they were all songs that I like and I was sincere with my selections, but in retrospect, well, let's just agree that while good and certainly interesting. they weren't the absolute best songs ever recorded.
I've re-thought it, and here are the five songs that are so perfect there's nothing that could be done to improve them, not even a little. If one were to change as much as one binary bit in the audio stream, the songs would be that one bit worse.
So here we go, starting with Acknowledgement from John Coltrane's master's thesis of an album, A Love Supreme, to Miss Nina Simone's smokey masterpiece I Put A Spell On You, to Patti Smith's ground-breaking and visionary punk manifesto Horses which still sounds urgent and hallucinatory 40 years later, to Hank Williams Jr.'s bawling and caterwauling at his best and booziest in Whiskey Bent and Hell Bound, and Parquet Courts' Stoned and Starving, an indie-rock anthem so off-handed and casual that they can pull off rhyming "Swedish fish" with "licorice" and not sound self-conscious about it - one couldn't achieve that level of effortless slack even if one tried (the harder you try to sound effortless, the more forced you appear).
Yeah, that's it - the five greatest songs of all time. Case closed. Sorry if your favorite band didn't make the cut.
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