The 200 Best Songs of the 1960s, part 1 of 10

(Part two, three)

My basic attitude towards the ’60s is more or less like my basic attitude to the early years of Modernism: It’s mostly bad and dumb, but it must have been exciting to be young then. But then there’s the music…

Not Modernist music; I mean the music of the 1960s. When has music ever been as exciting at the 1960s? When has music been as consistently good across such a wide spectrum of genres? When has music changed so much in such a short time? Maybe you could pitch the 1920s as an answer for two of those questions, but not all three. Everyone knows Sturgeon’s Law is “ninety percent of everything is crap”; but in the ’60s about 75% of music was at least pretty good.1 It’s not quite an inverse Sturgeon’s Law, but it’s close.

So of course I thought I’d ruin everything by quantifying it. I mean by pretending to quantify it. I have ranked the 200 best songs of the 1960s, and I will stand by my rankings with religious fervor, but I have scarcely assigned them scores in different categories and then run them through some database compiling…engine? I don’t know words for things, and I have certainly misused every musical term I bring up in the following piece, including easy ones like “country and western” or “drums.” Anyway, I just put the songs in the order of how much I liked them.

I decided to limit spots to one song per artist after I saw how many Jan & Dean tracks were on the list. “No one is going to respect me if they see all this Jan & Dean,” I said silently to myself. So there’s only one Jan & Dean pick. I tried to be accommodating with people who were in more than one band, or who fielded solo careers, largely because I didn’t want to have to pay attention to who was in The Drifters when. If you see someone pop up more than once, don’t shoot me. It'll happen, and don’t shoot me.

In general, you should not be angry that I have snubbed your favorites. First of all, I hate most music, so statistically speaking I probably hate whatever you like, even in an inverse-Sturgeon era like the 1960s. Second of all, I’m an idiot. Third of all, there are plenty ...