My 500 All-Time Favorite Songs: #190-181

The ten songs on this segment of my 500 all-time favorites span many years, from 1966 to 2006, and represent quite a diversity in musical style and lyrical content.  You may know the seven older ones, but I recommend you try out more recent (and grossly underrated) artists like Regina Spektor, Metric and Sufjan Stevens...I absolutely guarantee more from them to come higher up on this list...

190 TURN TO STONE...Electric Light Orchestra
In the winter of 1978 I was overloaded with classes at the University of Florida and a serious flu outbreak was spreading through campus...I became a little paranoid in my crowded dorm and classrooms and overly anxious about my homework and exams.  This was my favorite song of that time, the lessons of which reverberate to this day in my life: don't overcommit yourself and work it out so that you always have a little time and space for yourself.  Turn to Stone was the opening track of ELO's Out of the Blue, one of the best double albums ever produced. By the way, I somehow managed to dodge the flu that year but don't ask me about those classes...

189 WORKING CLASS HERO...John Lennon
Working Class Hero, by John Lennon from his 1970 Plastic Ono Band album, is the antithesis of Max Ehrmann's Desiderata (#195 on my list)...in it Lennon depicts the way people are herded and abused through life by the system and presents one of the most cynical worldviews ever...yet the words ring true: "When they've tortured and scared you for twenty-odd years, then they expect you to pick a career...when you can't really function you're so full of fear"...

188 FUNKY TOWN...Lipps Inc.
This was a great dance song from the summer of 1980...it shouts out fun and happiness.  I was living a frugal but steady existence in southwest Gainesville...I moved to my new apartment in May of that year because at the time it was on the outskirts of town and not so hectic.  Now this area is the most concentrated in town, the traffic jam capital of Gainesville. This was also right in the middle of the Iranian hostage crisis and the 1980 presidential campaign, with incumbent Jimmy Carter holding off a strong challenge from Ted Kennedy...Reagan already had his GOP nomination sewn up early on...

187 20 YEARS OF SNOW...Regina Spektor
Regina Spektor has always liked to experiment around with different sounds and themes on her albums...I didn't hear this deep track from her 2006 Begin to Hope album until four years later after I began to collect all her works to date.  Classically trained on the piano, her skills extend to her singing range in this very, very strange-but-beautiful song...which in places eerily sounds like Led Zeppelin's Stairway to Heaven...

186 BOY IN THE BUBBLE...Paul Simon
I need to assemble a list sometime of my all-time favorite music videos...this one is certain to be at or near the very top.  A collage of some the world's dystopian elements, including terrorism, famine and medical quackery combine with the onrush of science and changing social patterns...an awful lot to cram into a video as Paul makes his presence known in the jungle among elephants, in a newspaper picture and on an oscilloscope screen, among other places.  But the song stands well on its own...naturally I have it on my MP3 rotation.  It's from Simon's celebrated 1986 Graceland album...

185 GONNA MAKE YOU SWEAT...C + C Music Factory
By 1991 I had pretty much given up on Top Forty radio (played in Gainesville on WYKS "Kiss 105".  But then this sharp, energetic (and very funny) dance song exploded on the scene with the unforgettable screamed lyrics "EVERYBODY DANCE NOW!".  I never have cared for rap/hip-hop music on its own, but nevertheless have come to like many songs that mix that spoken word rhyming craft with singing...Gonna Make You Sweat might be the best of this type...

184 LOVE IS A PLACE...Metric
The Canadian alternative rock band bears a similarity to an earlier band, Blondie, with its own charismatic lead singer in Emily Haines, but their music to me has a harder and better edge to it...and the lyrics can be quite biting at times.  But not with this track from their 2003 Old World Underground, Where are You Now? album...it's very short and slow, but with a excruciating electric guitar accompaniment that crescendos to steal the show at the end...

183 TIME WON'T LET ME...the Outsiders
My favorite song of 1966 as I lived through it, for some peculiar reason listening to it brings vivid associations in my mind with the layout of Nova Blanche Forman Elementary School in Davie, Florida, which I attended from 1965 to 1968.  Specifically, the hallway connecting the multi-purpose room (what they called the cafeteria) with the science lab on the Suite D (SW) corner of the building, on the way to the supplies store...go figure why songs sometimes do this sort of thing with your memories.  To this day I think this is a great song...why was it the Outsiders' only hit?

182 FLINT...Sufjan Stevens
Flint, the opening track on Stevens' 2003 Greetings From Michigan may not be to your tastes...but it is about Flint and economic...and ultimately personal...depression.  Sad and forlorn, it still projects a feeling of epic importance and lays the foundation for what is to follow on this stupendous, largely unnoticed album with autobiographical, historical, geographical and spiritual themes.  I loved the horn playing on it...Stevens reportedly played trumpet and other instruments on the same songs...

181 RAMBLE ON...Led Zeppelin
After the release of Led Zeppelin's first box set in late 1990 I listened to my local rock station play the whole thing...and suddenly became a fanatic of their music.  From their 1969 Led Zeppelin II is this, my favorite song of the album...my liking only grew stronger later when I learned that singer/lyricist Robert Plant was an avid reader of J.R.R. Tolkien and inserted his own fantasy lyrical contribution into this song: "'Twas in the darkest depths of Mordor, I met a girl so fair...but Gollum and the evil one crept up and slipped away with her"...

Next week: #180-171...