100 From 1977-2003

30	THE CLASH “White Man in Hammersmith Palais”

Released in June of 1978, “(White Man) In Hammersmith Palais” marked one of the first times that someone dared to mix two of the most vital musical styles in London at the time: punk and reggae. Blending reggae verses, punctuated by Mick Jones’s lively guitar licks and Paul Simonon’s brilliant, fluid bass line, and a howling punk rock chorus, the Clash proved that they were by far the most musically gifted of any punk band from its era. If that weren’t enough, the song also boasts some of the most powerful and pointed lyrics that Joe Strummer would ever write. Beginning as a story of his disappointment at a reggae concert, where instead of revolution, he got little more than “Four Tops all night”, Strummer’s mind starts to wander, as he ponders the state of punk in 1978 (“They’re all too busy fighting / For a good place under the lighting”), taking shots at bands like the Jam (“They got Burton suits . . . you think it’s funny / Turning rebellion into money”), and his shame at his country’s embracing of ultra-right wing politics (“If Adolf Hitler flew in today / They’d send a limousine anyway”). After his diatribe, Strummer returns to the morning after the concert, and takes a humorous jab at himself, saying, “I’m the white man in the Palais / Only looking for fun”. Angry, witty, and lighthearted, this is one punk song that still bursts with life today.
      — Adrien Begrand

29

U2 “One”

“One” is not a song that you analyze. Nuts and bolts-wise, it’s pretty simple. The melody is carried by a handful of chords and the lyrics are Bono’s usual grab bag of spiritual and elliptical imagery. U2 is on record saying that it was written in 20 minutes. Somehow, this all adds to up to one of the most moving and powerful songs about redemption and moving on ever. It’s one of two songs that I can recall hearing for the first time. (“Smells Like Teen Spirit” is the other.) And out of all the songs I’ve listened to in the last 10 years, “One” probably has gotten the most spins. Why does this song hit me so deeply? I don’t know. I can’t wax intellectual about “One” because it doesn’t speak to my head. It goes, quite shamelessly, straight for my heart and touches on feelings that can’t be articulated or relinquished. It’s a song that I always like to hear and sometimes need to hear, when a part of my life ends and I have to believe that what’s coming next will be better. “One life, but we’re not the same”. Bono never waved a white flag to that line, but it was truest thing he ever said.
      — Steve Hyden

28	N.W.A. “Fuck Tha Police”

N.W.A.’s most memorable contribution to music culture may not be the same thing to all people. Once the most powerful rap — some would argue rock — song made at the time it was released, it has now fallen beneath the shadow of Eazy-E’s ironic AIDS-related death, Ice Cube’s burgeoning acceptance into mainstream American entertainment, and Dr. Dre’s Godzilla-like impact on today’s hip-hop landscape. But there is no denying that N.W.A.’s influence on gangsta rap — which is now, love it or leave it, mainstream rap — is incontrovertible. After all, Straight Outta Compton went platinum without any radio play, videos or promotion, and it launched Dre and Cube into the stratosphere. But they couldn’t have done it without “Fuck Tha Police”, the album’s most visceral song. Structured around the trial of a white cop accused of fucking too hard with the street-smart thugs of South Central, the track was a giant middle finger to the racist power structure (“they have the authority to kill a minority”, Cube bellowed) of Daryl Gates’s LAPD, one of the most crooked police regimes in American history. Its in-your-face violence scared the living shit out of everyone, from the trigger-itchy FBI (who issued the group an ominous letter telling them to watch their asses) to a white youth culture tired of squeaky clean losers. As ugly as it might have seemed at the time, ghetto America identified all too readily with Dre, Cube, E, and Ren’s devil-may-care whupping of the boys in blue, having lived under their thumb for longer than they wanted to. And for all the outcry and protest, N.W.A.’s abrasive masterpiece proved prescient when the blue crew opened up their own can of whup-ass on Rodney King, an act that set the streets of South Central, literally, on fire. Today, like Public Enemy’s “Fight the Power”, “Fuck Tha Police” is a frequently used fight song, and that alone proves its relevance. But sonically, it set the table for a future hip-hop generation, and made Dr. Dre a bonafide production legend. After “Fuck Tha Police”, everyone wanted to hear what Cube had to say (“I’m the wrong nigga to fuck wit”, he claimed on Death Certificate) and what Dre wanted to make (The Chronic was up to that task). But before “Fuck Tha Police”, no one had ever heard of either one of them. Enough said.
      — Scott Thill

27	RADIOHEAD “Fake Plastic Trees”

It was memorably dubbed “complaint rock” by Alicia Silverstone’s character in Clueless, and it’s the “rock” part that’s key. In 1995, Radiohead’s first step towards musical domination was conquering the kingdom of sad rock songs. “Fake Plastic Trees” is one of their best, a song so expansively, rockingly depressingly it makes wallowing in sorrow seem almost epic. Allegedly about mass consumption, the song, with its references to a “fake plastic love”, resonates with the melancholy of severe emotional distance. The final, repeated strains of “If I could be . . . who you wanted . . .” were trying to break your heart (and succeeding) long before Wilco.
      — Jesse Hassenger

26	R.E.M. “Losing My Religion”

When R.E.M. released the single “Losing My Religion” in 1991 from that year’s Out of Time, it marked the point where a whole generation of American college students finally realized that 1988’s Green hadn’t been a slightly unsettling dream, and that their “alternative rock” idols were indeed a crafty pop band after all. Not that this was a bad thing. Pop as sublime and enigmatic as this will always be welcome, even if hipsters at the time were in full pout mode. With chiming mandolin, feathery strings, and a melodic thread plucked straight from an angel’s wings, not to mention an ambiguous title that actually bore no relation to a crisis of faith (the phrase is a Southern one, meaning roughly “being at the end of one’s tether”), “Losing My Religion” was justifiably huge –- even if it was a fairly conscious (and misunderstood) attempt by Michael Stipe to recreate such obsessive, sinister love songs as “Every Breath You Take”. While R.E.M. were dragging so-called underground rock into the mainstream (if not kicking and screaming at least scowling and squinting in the harsh glare), a scant six months later Nevermind would hit the record stores, proving 1991 to be almost as pivotal a year in America as 1977 had been, um, pretty much everywhere on earth.
      — David Antrobus

25	MADONNA “Like a Virgin”

Face it, when it comes to female pop stars in the ’80s and ’90s, Madonna was the queen. While her career may have gotten its start with minor club hits and some pop charts notice in “Holiday”, “Borderline”, and “Lucky Star”, it was the breakout title track to her second album, Like a Virgin, that really propelled her to the top. Moreover, it was the song and album that saw her grabbing hold of the public consciousness, with the strength of her media personality and image. While “Material Girl” solidified things, “Like a Virgin” was there first, and the true launching point of a career that affixed itself in the imaginations of a vast public, ranging from the teenage girls who copied her look, to the small cadre of academics who would eventually coin the label “Madonna studies”.
      — Patrick Schabe

24	PRINCE “When Doves Cry”

Me and Sam, a week from high school graduation, cruising to go meet some girls from Lake Oswego in his orange pickup (three on the tree, manhole-sized speakers), about to finally start our Real Lives — and suddenly the DJ says “This is the new single from Prince” and plays the strangest and most beautiful pop single of all time. I mean, come on, it’s heavy metal (that squall at the beginning, the gothic portent) and it’s funk (even though the damned thing has no bass at all, just a fat drum whomp so big no bass is needed; apparently he programmed the drums IN ONE SESSION) and it’s techno (what’s with that growling synth voice anyway, where did that come from, can you just see the look on his face when he came up with that) and it’s prog (in the album version my man is all like Rick Wakeman on the keys) and it’s emo (“how can you just leave me standing alone in a world so cold”) and it’s pop too. Me and Sam, the chief rockers of all time, just started yelling. They played that song six more times that day. The girls brought beer.
      — Matt Cibula

23	ELVIS COSTELLO “Radio Radio”

1977: Elvis Costello and the Attractions stop part way into a live performance of “Less Than Zero” on Saturday Night Live to vault into the insubordinate single “Radio Radio.” That move got Costello banned on the show until 1989, but also perfectly encapsulated the furious, irreverent, and 100% punk spark that the song set out to incite. Hardly a year into his musical career, Costello was already sick: of the cookie cutter nature of the music business, of the bedfellows relations between the labels and the stations, of the docile audience — all this, decades before the Clear Channel behemoth made the song’s bleak pronouncements more of a reality than Costello could have ever fathomed then. But this song remains a classic not because of this incident, but thanks to its sheer velocity: pissed off, spitting declarations (“the radio is in the hands of such a lot of fools / Trying to anesthetize the way that you feel”), lashing guitars, stealthy drums, and maybe the most insistent keyboard lines ever written. If you want to know why they called Mr. Costello an “angry young man,” take a listen.
      — Devon Powers

22	THE STONE ROSES “Fool’s Gold”

“Gold’s just around the corner/ Breakdown’s coming up round the bend”. We weren’t to know at the time how prescient those lyrics would be. In 1989 the Stone Roses had the music world at their feet, but rather than the beginning of something truly massive, “Fool’s Gold” turned out to be the bright shining moment of a meteoric flight. No single record traversed the boundaries between rock and dance music better than this one. In doing so, it epitomized the story of popular music in Britain throughout the last couple of decades. Shortly after its release, when Run-D.M.C. sampled John Squire’s exquisite and impossibly funky guitar line, the song also reached into the defining movement of recent American music: hip-hop. Ian Brown said he knew then that the band had created something special, lasting. The Stone Roses were a brief, incandescent love affair. The Mancunian candidates released one classic album (1989’s The Stone Roses), and one under-rated, if flawed, full-length (1994’s Second Coming). That it all ended up messy, as love affairs are apt to do, is beside the point; along the way they gave us plenty, including this, at nine minutes and 53 seconds, a flawless crystalline gem.
      — John Davidson

21	THE RAMONES “I Wanna Be Sedated”

While British punk bands like the Sex Pistols and the Clash went on to take the genre into a totally new direction in 1976, the Ramones stayed the course, putting out four outstanding albums between 1976 and 1978. Their finest moment as a band may have been 1977’s Rocket to Russia, but their greatest, most enduring song didn’t appear until a year later, on the Road to Ruin album. Despite their thuggish, leather-clad exterior, the quartet from Queens were old-fashioned rock ‘n’ rollers at heart (so much so, that Phil Spector wound up producing their fifth album), as the sound of those first four albums mined various sounds from the Sixties, from surf music, to doo wop, to Nuggets-era garage rock, to The Beatles. “I Wanna Be Sedated” combines an insanely simple chord structure and melody with the band’s hilariously dark sense of humor (“Put me in a wheelchair, get me to the show / Hurry, hurry, hurry, before I go loco”), some good old, reliable handclaps, a fun “bap-bap-bapbap” singalong, and guitarist Johnny Ramone’s most brilliant moment: a 16-bar, one-note solo. It’s two and a half minutes of pure rock ‘n’ roll fun, which every single kiddie punk band today tries to imitate, with mediocre results every time. You can’t beat the original.
      — Adrien Begrand