My 500 All-Time Favorite Songs: #180-171

Well, it's Monday again and you know what that means: ten more songs on my ascending list of my 500 all-time favorite songs.  Here they are...

180 MESSAGE OF LOVE...the Pretenders
I came to like this 1983 song via its video.  If memory serves me correctly, it was one shown in regular rotation during WTBS's short-lived weekend all-night video TV show that year.  Singer Chrissie Hynde delivers a compelling performance in this, a very positive-spirited, great old love song...

179 SABOTAGE...the Beastie Boys
I wonder how many people first heard Sabotage, from 1994, from the desert scene at the beginning of the 2009 movie Star Trek where James T. Kirk is a rebellious boy driving a car (not his own) over a cliff...with the Beastie Boys tune playing full blast.  My own encounter with it is closely tied to the amazingly funny video the Boys made with them parodying TV cop shows as they enforce the law...with the customary doughnut break thrown in.  It's screaming hard rock...I wish they'd produced more songs like this...

178 12:51...the Strokes
In 2004 I immersed myself in the current alternative rock hits being played on my local station WHHZ/100.5/"The Buzz"...they kept playing this song without identifying it or its artist.  Later on I discovered that the Strokes did it...they quickly became one of my favorite bands of that era: a very professional, skilled guitar band with a charismatic singer in Julian Casablancas.  Not the last from them on this list...

177 FOLLOW ME...John Denver
In the 1970s during his peak popularity everyone in my family was a John Denver fan, with his albums played a lot at my house.  Follow Me was a track from his 1973 Greatest Hits album and I've always felt a special affection for it...if you listen to it in a certain way there is an added spiritual dimension in the lyrics...

176 IT'S MY LIFE...the Animals
I was a big Animals fan during 1964-65...I'd listen to their ongoing hits on the radio, and every few weeks they'd appear on the Sunday evening Ed Sullivan Show.  Ed Burdon, to me, had the best voice in blues-based rock n' roll and the organ accompaniment added an extra dimension to their sound.  It's My Life is Burdon at his best, singing his defiance at life's challenges...

175 I MIGHT BE WRONG...Radiohead
During the fall of 2010 I collected the then-seven studio albums of this British alternative band and shuffled them on my MP3 player for my long distance training runs.  Consequently I associate various songs with different sections on my course.  Whenever I hear I Might be Wrong, from their 2001 Amnesiac album, I'm transported to the trail heading north along NW 43rd Street past 53rd Avenue, past the electric substation and Talbot Elementary and toward the Cox Communications and WCJB offices.  This song is slow-moving with a wall of electronic sounds, a thumping beat and Thom Yorke's typically wailing style of singing...

174 RAY OF LIGHT...Madonna
In 1998 Madonna surprised me, along with probably a lot of others, with this more esoteric, mystical song...I thought then that yes, the serious artist within her I always knew existed was finally coming out.  Unfortunately, it seemed to be just a phase and her music largely went back to churning out suggestive singles hits and videos.  But that summer at least I had Ray of Light to brighten things up...

173 OLD BROWN SHOE...the Beatles
When Old Brown Shoe came out as the flip side to the Beatles' Ballad of John and Yoko single in 1969, I didn't know of it until a couple of years later after the band had broken up and I had bought their Hey Jude compilation album, with George Harrison's song as one of its tracks.  Both piano and guitar figure heavily in it with an unusual beat and Harrison's cryptic lyrics full of riddles...like this opening line: "I want a love that's right, but right is only half of what's wrong".  This should have been the A-Side of the single...

172 SOUR GIRL...Stone Temple Pilots
From the Pilots' 1999 No. 4 Album, Sour Girl was a moderate hit on rock radio...it's one of those songs that I was okay with from the start but kept growing on me until it became one of my favorites.  It's a different STP song in that they didn't go into the heavy guitar sound on it, nor did they try to create a psychedelic kind of song...instead, it's simple and beautiful.  And when I finally got around to seeing the bizarre accompanying video, a semi-nightmarish vista of monstrous Teletubby-like mutants while Buffy actress Sarah Michelle Geller performs a graceful, passionate dance with front man Scott Weiland, that made it even better...

171 JUMPIN' JACK FLASH...the Rolling Stones
Not one of my favorites when it came out in 1968, Jumpin' Jack Flash was the direction-changing signal to the world of the type of music the Rolling Stones would be focusing on for the rest of their years.  The beat and riffs are mesmerizing and Mick Jagger is up to his trademark cynical, rough-edged and hyperbole-riddled singing: perfect, I never get tired of hearing it these days...

Next week: #170-161...