Friday, January 25, 2019

THE GREATEST SONG EVER.

Of all the questions I can recall hardly ever being asked it's been on my mind for some time to talk about something I think every critic at some point in time needs to cover and since I'm near the end of this thing I figured WHY THE FUCK NOT RIGHT?!?!?!

So since 2011 I've done this series of articles where I try to discuss the greatest song of all time in theory and I guess that's a topic that's more difficult for me to do since I've only done it 4 times with the last one being posted on April Fools Day 2015 and being about Prince and my unironic but comical love of Purple Rain which in retrospect is awkward because he passed on just a little over a year after I'd posted that article and the rest of the world realized I was right.

In preparing for this article like everything I'm doing on here I've been going over some of the older post and looking at what I said back then and comparing it to what my thoughts are now on top of trying to come up with an accurate way to say what is the greatest song ever and before I get into what is the greatest song ever and what made me think this I feel there has to be some precedence laid because with a statement like that as much as every dick head armchair critic is going to take every chance to inform me of how wrong I am there's still a means of taking that away from them by laying some form of groundwork to make it less of an opinion piece and to lend some more weight to my thoughts that's immediately dashed away by my vocabulary but fuck em it's better than nothing.

Alright so if you're going to say that a song in question is the greatest song ever I'd say it has to follow some criteria of being both a critical and commercially successful piece of media because while sales aren't shit in retrospect for critics it's a lot harder for your average Joe listening to music as nothing more than background music to argue these things with you  when you can show them some numbers and figures to help prove a point that the track at the very least has some clout in terms of being worth considering with critics polls serving as one more nail in their uninformed coffin of invalid opinions.

Now with that in mind and looking back at the songs I've covered on top of a cursory Google search to see what comes up when you type in the greatest song ever I came to a realization that the first song I ever covered under this umbrella is in fact still without reservation the greatest song of all time and what song is that?

Billie Jean-Michael Jackson 

#1 for 7 weeks, winner of 2 of the 8 Grammy Awards he won that night, an American Music award, half a billion views on Youtube, certified over 5x platinum as a single, and apart of one of the most watched and talked about television events of the millennium it's safe to say the second single from the top selling album of all time has a pretty good claim in terms of charting success to have the title of the greatest song of all time no doubt about that.

Yeah back in 2011 when I first wrote one of these I said that this was the best song of all time because it was this oddly dark and ominous tune that stepped out of Michael's territory of well crafted light radio friendly dance ready pop tunes and instead went about showcasing his ability to be more that meets the eye while also proving that you can be different and people will still buy it so in some case he opened the floodgates for a host of musically inclined people being able to maintain artistic integrity while also having commercial viability and that's a thing that's really important in the grander scheme of things because we can only have so much sugar coated garbage being shoved down our throats.

Jackson was a genius of sorts because he was a cold and calculated businessman that knew the vast majority of his decisions well in advance and released what was the most meticulously crafted things he could that would leave people talking for a long time and it worked more often than not even at his most over bloated he still did stuff that was of a level of quality that his contemporaries maybe minus Prince could really match and the thing that's always made this song stand out in comparison to everything else was the somewhat simplistic and straightforward nature of it because it's not a happy and upbeat tune it's a very somber and depressive tune that mixes just the right amount of disco production with a kind of funk groove and showcases a more held back side of Jackson he never really chose to do that often and it's this kind of strange direction that leads me to go back to it time and time again and really find myself thinking that it really is the best pop song to ever be made bar none.

It's after repeated listens still maybe one of the most fantastic songs I've ever heard and after all these years of asking myself what is the greatest song ever I think I've come to a point where if you were to ask me I'd probably have to say this song bar none.

Also it was in GTA Vice City which had the best soundtrack ever fight me fuckers!!!!!


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