“Best of” Lists: The Good, the Bad and the Ugly
The New York Times must have anticipated the shitstorm that “The 30 Greatest Living American Songwriters” article would provoke. Writers like lists because they start conversations, but fans usually just want to see their preferences validated.
The list didn’t give readers the usual suspects, venturing away from the heroes of Rolling Stone to include such less likely talents as The-Dream, Nile Rodgers, and Romeo Santos. On the podcast Cannonball, New York Times culture critic Wesley Morris argued that a list like this is a time capsule for a moment when ideas about authorship and even what counts as a song are in flux. As accurate as that is, what readers wanted to know is where Randy Newman, Billy Joel, and Beyoncé were.
My sympathies lie with the Times because I think about lists the same way. They’re not definitive statements because “Best” and “Greatest” are empty words. Lists like this one invite people to think about what they mean in context. While at OffBeat, I wanted to ask people around the country for their Louisiana Top 10 to see if records we considered canonical really had the authority we attributed to them. Was it possible in 2009 or 2010 that Britney or Lil Wayne meant more to people than “Mother-in-Law?”
The project never happened because the publishers wanted to be able to adjust the list to reflect what they considered the right answers. Since being the authority on Louisiana music was the magazine’s brand, I understood where they were coming from, and many readers clearly approached the Times list the same way. Judging by the responses to it, a lot of people felt that the omissions and unwarranted inclusions invalidated the whole project and went online to share their irritation.
The backlash was disappointingly predictable. I gather from Cannonball that many people asked about Kanye West and Beyoncé, but my social media overindexed Dylan & Sons. Musician/content creator Rick Beato spent a video naming such overlooked Social Security-eligible songwriters as Randy Newman, Steely Dan, and John Fogerty, and in 12 minutes managed to name only two people of color who he thought might be omitted—songwriters Theron Thomas and Pharrell Williams—though Beato presented them more as a “Why not them?” than as an actual slight.
He typified many lists I saw, casually throwing elbows at women and people of color—if they thought of them at all. He only noticed one woman missing—Amy Allen—and when he thought of songwriter Desmond Child, he talked about him as someone who could take the spot on the list occupied by Diane Warren. When he identified Rock & Roll Hall of Famers that he considered wronged, he sarcastically talked about them not being as good as Young Thug and Bad Bunny, both of whom made the list.
To be fair, The New York Times created some problems with their methodology. Many people in the industry were asked for lists, but their results weren’t simply tallied and presented. Those results went to Morris, critics Jody Rosen and Danyel Smith, and Times music critics and journalists Jon Caramanica, Joe Coscarelli, and Lindsay Zoladz. They used those results as a starting place from which they developed the final 30. Manipulating the results, whether to conservative or counterintuitive ends, invites readers to doubt a list’s integrity. I don’t, but Coscarelli admits in the podcast that he approached the project with an agenda. He looked for opportunities to advocate for artists that added nuance to the question of what constituted a great songwriter.
The list succeeded in that way by making a case for a broader vision of pop songcraft, as it leaned on Motown and writers whose songs found their truest expression in singles on the radio and, more recently, streamed playlists. Writers whose validation came not from albums or critics but people who sang along.
There came a point in the process when the panel effectively sorted songwriters into smaller groups, and the question became who from that group were they going to pick. One such debate was between Young Thug, Lil Wayne, and Future, who they felt represented a certain kind of contemporary hip-hop writer, and that process shows in the final list, which many detractors on social media read as driven by box-checking. Latin writer? Check. Contemporary country writer? Check. Contemporary R&B writer? Check.
The New York Times also posted the nomination lists from famous musicians, and they make me wonder what the list would have looked like if the nominations were simply tallied and cut off at 30. Jimmy Webb gets a lot of love, but you also see votes for Ted Leo, Jay Electronica, Neko Case, Adrianne Lenker, Phoebe Bridgers, Teddy Riley, and Eric B. & Rakim, just to name a few. The final list would have been similarly interesting and probably would have told a similar story, but one that didn’t highlight the writers behind contemporary hits.
Their list doesn’t give us the 30 best living American songwriters, but it does give us 30 of the best living American songwriters. Maybe that’s the best you can hope for when there’s more than 60 years of musical history with living representatives to choose from. Start with the canonical singer-songwriters and add the great pop songwriters, indie songwriters, country songwriters, hip-hop and R&B songwriters, and you have so many greats that a list twice or three times as long would still have glaring omissions.
But rather than rethink the list, maybe it’s more productive to rethink the way we receive it. It’s tempting to slag it, but the controversy it created constitutes a success. A bloody, bruising success, but a success nonetheless. At a time when the mainstream media’s relevance has been questioned, it prompted almost 6,000 comments on the website, pages on Reddit, two videos from Beato, at least four Substack posts that I know of, and countless posts across social media. The Times and the critics took a beating, but their journalistic endeavor left the page and entered the culture.
For more Alex Rawls musings, check out myspiltmilk.com and @myspiltmilk on socials.
