The Perfect Beat

Photograph by Guy Le Querrec  Magnum
Photograph by Guy Le Querrec / Magnum

We make ourselves lists in order to know if we think what we think.

I’ve wondered for years—while feeling uncomfortable with the wondering—whether there are any “perfect recordings.” Obviously, there aren’t. But there are records that had a significant impact on me, as both a musician and a listener, and it seemed like something would come out of arraying them as a list. Maybe. “Perfect” is an appealing word when compared to “best”: it’s patently ridiculous, but it also hints at the mystical belief that there are no mistakes. If something—a fern, a frog that looks like a bat, a four-hour song cycle about Lincoln—exists, it exists for a reason. It won’t be your reason, but it could be mine. To test this notion, I posted the titles of three songs to Twitter last year, along with their years of release and the hashtag #PerfectRecordings. Those songs were Laurie Anderson’s “O Superman,” Pet Shop Boys’ cover of Willie Nelson’s “Always on My Mind,” and “Pay to Cum” by Bad Brains. Months later, I assigned myself the task of making five volumes, of forty songs each, largely to see what, if anything, my brain would do.

My internal, fuzzy rules: I had to have been around when the song came out. (No, I wasn’t around when Patsy Cline’s “Crazy” came out. I warned you: fuzz.) The song had to have had an acute and lasting effect on the community of musicians, at the time of its release or later. And the second word in the hashtag was the more important of the two: #PerfectSongs would have felt like an unmanageably long and boring exercise; #PerfectRecordings was about lumps of sound that do things to us. This test wasn’t a metric for songs as written things, because pop music is a recorded form more than a written one. Many great pop moments, maybe most of them, happen first in a recording environment, and are captured in a way that enables us to repeat them in places far from the site of the original event. That means that a drummer doesn’t necessarily write out his part before going into the studio: he sits down and plays it. The recording of that performance changes how we think of drumming, not any idea the drummer might have had before entering the recording studio. I excluded jazz, because the form is built—with obvious exceptions, including a chunk of Miles Davis’s best-known work—on improvisations that are often unedited and mixed with the goal of fidelity to the sound of the original instrument in mind. Pop is filled with extravagantly, savagely filtered, chopped, and layered sound objects. Comparing the two feels like a categorical mistake that impoverishes the best aspects of both approaches.

There were odd gaps in my list—songs that are spectacular but somehow off in their mechanically reproduced form, like Sinead O’Connor’s version of Prince’s “Nothing Compares 2 U.” I loved that song when it came out, and it was woven into the ridiculously long lifespan of my first major breakup. It’s a cri de coeur—someone has left the singer, and it is never, ever going to get better. O’Connor’s keening vocal—the sound of an unwelcome operation being performed without anesthesia—cannot be improved. But, as a recording, something bugs me about this one—one of the synthetic sounds, the reverb, I can’t be sure what. When I hear “Nothing Compares 2 U,” I do not become unmoored, enter the supervoid, and feel my dendrites and enzymes going flapdoodle. I think, It’s 1989, and I’m really sad.

A #PerfectRecording is a song that exceeds our most acute memory of it. Often, our brain stores imperfect moments and then generously blurs the edges, giving vibrancy to a three-hour reading of the “Odyssey,” or adding layers of hilarious serendipity to a grueling five-hour car ride. Perfect recordings, though, are shot through with some spiritual cement that never loses its adhesive power. Our brain doesn’t need to be generous; these recordings are overloaded, at the level of significance. Our memories can’t hold the entirety of these moments, but they hold a persistent feeling that we need to go back, again and again, to recapture as much as we can of what was first captured as a recording.

The #PerfectRecording project is also a reflection on our healthy but preposterous need to make lists. People who make and read lists are not stupid: they do not necessarily believe their own ordinal conclusions. There is no finality in a list, just a promise that we will argue about everything listed, adjust our thoughts, and watch our feelings change over time. (For many years, Mojo seemed to be compiling every possible list about every aspect of rock music, against reason, and yet without surcease.) Why? We want to see the list written down, so that we can know what the list means. No sane person really believes there is a “number one album” of any kind. In this way, lists are more like sexual role-playing than like statistics: you don’t necessarily need any particular ranking to be accurate; you want to know what it feels like to believe that one thing is more important than another, for at least a moment.

So here are the five volumes of lists, as Twitter timelines and Spotify playlists; they are also available to stream as a single Rdio playlist featuring all two hundred songs. Because of catalogue holes and a few cursor mistakes, all three lists are slightly different. No single answer, then, which feels right. For legal reasons, some songs are absent, though they should be included: Aaliyah’s “Are You That Somebody?,” Big Black’s “Kerosene,” The Beatles’ “Tomorrow Never Knows,” and anything performed by Bill Callahan. James Brown’s “Give It Up or Turn It Loose” and Sugababes’ “Overload” are on the Rdio playlist, but not on the Spotify ones. Prince gets to have “I Could Never Take the Place of Your Man” and “Hot Thing” on Spotify, partly to caulk the spot of a missing song, and partly because it’s mind-flattening to think that Prince released a single with both of these songs on it—and it was the fourth single from the corresponding album, “Sign o’ the Times.”

A week or so after I started posting the lists in earnest, I spoke about them to Lilah Raptopoulos of the Guardian. My answers to her questions are concrete, with a bias toward the profane. My own reporting on the not-very-reliable, self-selecting sample of people who follow my feed told me that the following seven songs are the most popular. Television’s “Marquee Moon” (sixty favorites), Nick Drake’s “Pink Moon” (sixty), Dolly Parton’s “Jolene” (sixty-six), Sky Ferreira’s “Everything Is Embarrassing” (seventy), XTC’s “Making Plans for Nigel” (seventy-seven), Amerie’s “1 Thing” (seventy-seven), and Tom Tom Club’s “Genius of Love,” which, with eighty-nine favs, was a solid winner. I won’t pretend that this is some kind of civil-rights victory, or even that it is statistically meaningful, but it’s a pleasingly diverse list, and an unpredictable one. Surprises are another pleasure native to the strange habit of list making.

None of this is accurate, and all of it is true.