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!!!!!

Sam's best of 2012:

Anyway-Cee-lo Green

I'm just gonna admit it I fell off the bandwagon in regards to my fandom of this guy after his follow up to the Lady Killer and even that record in retrospect hasn't aged as well as the music it clearly tried to be but god fucking damn it I FUCKING LOVE THIS GOD DAMN SONG.

You ever watch a movie that you know isn't a quality piece of media but you love every fucking second of it because it just makes you feel good in it's lack of quality?

Well that's kind of how I feel about this song disco infused ball of cheese courtesy of a man who's kind of a douche bag, but like I said at the time this song's quality is similar to Discovery-era Daft punk in that it's quality is similar to child like innocence it's good because it makes you feel good you have a tune that has a lot of warm tones, and simple lyrics that are easy to sing along to and just goofy enough to look past the sheer absurdity of them (“for worse or for better, you make me better,”) and I from what I can remember of 2012 as a year I needed an escapist piece of music that wasn't dumb ass angry white boy music and Cee-Lo as a whole opened my eyes up to giving R&B a chance and while I still love me some aggressive rock and roll I don't just listen to that I kind of explore it all and this man is honestly partly why that's a thing for me.

Now if only Cee-Lo would put it ON FUCKING SPOTIFY!

Sam's Top 5 Love Songs: #4 Digital but very lovely...

 #4: Digital Love-Daft Punk

Robots apparently have emotion to people and if you needed proof of that little oddity let me direct you to this Discovery single.

It’s a light song that’s very spacey and maintains that kind of childlike innocence with a very playful approach and like a lot of Daft Punk tracks it’s rather disco tinged track that’s very repetitive lyrically but that doesn’t mask the exclamation in lines like, “You make this dream come true,” and how, “Last night I had this dream about you, in this dream I’m dancing right besides you, and it looked like everyone was having fun the kind of feeling I’ve waited so long,” it’s simplicity at the most romantically child like and innocent  is a good way to help its’ very dreamy vibes. 

It’s continues along at a fairly steady pace before blasting this very late 70’s kind of early 80’s pop guitar solo that’s just this bad ass fret tapping bit of awesome before leading  into the line, “why Don’t You play the game?”which  not only does that serve as kind of a pusher of sorts to motivate the listener to get those little nervous feelings we all have out of the way and go ask that crush out damnit but kind of leads to a resolve to the tune that while it’s over your chances aren’t and in turn you just need to get out and play this crazy little game called love.

When you really think about it that’s a lot to really say for a couple of soulless robots now isn’t it?

5 Years 5 Albums: Day 3

Random Access Memories-Daft Punk (2013)

So I’m not going to lie probably within the last 10 is years or so my love for this band has grown about a quintuplet fold when compared to the joyous memories I remember having when I was a kid and Toonami played that Interstellar movie during some late night rotations and find Alive 2007 to be probably the best piece of electronic music I’ve ever and probably ever will enjoy so whenever they finally got around to releasing their first album in almost 10 years the HYPE WAS FUCKING REAL!  And if you read the review you’ll know this is the only album so far to score the elusive 10 out of 10 and while I’m not one to go back on my word I kind of did whenever it came to that year’s best of list because if you were able to read the wall of text that was this songs entry you’ll know that once I took off the rose colored Glasses I kind of realize this didn’t really feel like a true Daft Punk record and in all honesty it really isn’t even after a year of getting to come to grips with that idea.

BUUUUUT even with that said I refuse to take back my score and even if I’ve kind of found some fault in this album it’s a pretty spectacular effort none-the-less and in all honesty this group really has done something that pretty much no other group can really lay claim to and that’s make a bad album because even if I feel a lack of that feeling of it being a Daft Punk pure record it’s still an amazing piece of work that showcases the continued trend they have of digressing the scene they started back into it’s basics and they’ve managed to make a very surprisingly organic album that’s like the start of it all it’s all the disco, soul, funk, and new wave sounds that inspired the scene they started and it’s quality is comparable to the stuff of their contemporaries and it’s also an album that really was important to me.

Quality Cuts: Instant Crush, Get Lucky, Doin’ it Right

Sam's Top 20 of 2014: #10

10. Michael Jackson-Love Never Felt So Good

OK so this might honestly be the most pop minded tune that’ll appear on this list depending on who you ask and it was also really hard to figure where to place it because I didn’t give this album a listen for a variety of reasons mostly due to my interest in other tunes but when coming up with this list I recalled writing a VERY LENGTHY song of the day on this song and when I listened to it again for the sake of compiling this list something came to mind GOD DAMN he was the fucking king of pop.

SO yeah I’m aware the version of this with Justin Timberlake was the one that managed to make some impact on the radio and was the version I first heard but you know as much as I can respect someone that made the effort to really make something of themselves and exceed all expectations you’re not Michael FUCKING Jackson and yes the version compiled out of his original takes is a more disco tinged off the wall throwback of a track the mother fucker just bleed pop music and this song is just pure proof of that.

It’s not by any means a Billie Jean, hell I wouldn’t really relegate it as something more than a later single to wrap up promotions for Off The Wall but even saying that this is still the most well written, produced, and polished example of how you do a pop song people and even if it’s mediocre when compared to his past works it’s still legitimately better then every other top 40 single I heard on pop radio and deservingly so it just had to be top 10 on my list and while yes it’s only number 10 it’s not for any fault of its own it’s just that my personal interest are elsewhere and I found myself enjoying and listening to these other 9 tunes more…