The 100 Greatest Songs of the 1970s, Part XII.

045. Dolly Parton “Jolene”
(Dolly Parton)
Jolene, 1974

I’ll cop: it wasn’t till the White Stripes covered it that I even heard of this song. (The only Parton classics I knew were “Coat of Many Colors” and “I Will Always Love You.” Um, yeah.) But whatever you think of Jack White’s music, the man’s got impeccable taste. This is a lean, spare, hungry song, steeped in the Appalachian tradition that delivered songs like “Pretty Polly” and “The Banks of the Ohio,” given Parton’s trademark femme-centric twist (a trick she might have picked up from her time in the commercial wilderness of girl-group pop in the late 60s). Its unsmiling bluegrass backbone goes against just about everything Nashville believed in at the time, and would have been commercial suicide if anyone who heard the song could ever get its haunting atmosphere out of their skulls again. The lyric is more or less country-standard, if unusual in that the singer’s addressing a potential rival instead of the cheatin’ man himself, but it’s the melody, the rising tension in that repeated “Jolene, Jolene,” and the desperate urgency in Parton’s aching soprano, that give the song its unescapable wild-roots force. If she’d never cut another song, she would deserve a spot in the American-music pantheon; as it is, the music will endure long after Dollywood, 9 to 5, and the most-beloved bazongas in country music are forgotten.



044. The Ramones “Blitzkrieg Bop”
(The Ramones)
The Ramones, 1976

The Ramones are difficult to write about because they require no explanation: just turn them on, turn them up, and they’re a two-minute world unto themselves. And the Ramones are really easy to write about, becuase they are so important and great and fun and necessary. And contradictory. On the one hand, they perfected punk’s noise + speed × simplicity formula, fusing a suburban-lowbrow aesthetic with an urban-hipster cachet, and were the first consciously punk-rock band. On the other hand, punk’s self-righteous anti-pop, anti-commercial, anti-mainstream attitude (as made famous by Maximum Rock’N’Roll) was the furthest thing from the Ramones’ ideals; or at least from Joey’s, and frankly who cares about the other jerks? Because the Ramones were a pop group, one of the greatest pop groups ever — and, like many great pop acts, it was because every song sounded the same, not despite — and they chased the commercial brass ring, though fairly unsuccessfully, and have by now become mainstream enough that this song is being played in a cellphone commercial. They were the first punk-pop band, too, and better than anyone since at it. The song can be read as death throes of glam (“blitzkrieg bop” is such a Bolanesque phrase), an “At the Hop” for teenage lunkheads with no prospects, a joyous call to arms for a new generation of pop radicals, and as a timeless pop chestnut every bit as thrilling as anything Brian Wilson or Phil Spector ever did. Your choice.



043. Kraftwerk “Neon Lights”
(Karl Bartos/Ralf Hütter/Florian Schneider)
The Man-Machine, 1978

Today, with the 12” aesthetic firmly in hindsight, this song can perhaps be appreciated better than in the days when a nine-minute song required extended solos, multi-suite compositions, or at least more than one verse to flesh it out. But with these guys it’s all about the texture, the subtle layering, the slow rise and fall of their warm electronic patterning. And one of their best, most evocative, and (yes) most minimalist lyrics. “Neon lights/Shimmering neon lights/And at the fall of night/This city’s made of light.” That’s it. But you should be able to hear a lovely soprano synth solo float up afterwards in your head, and if you can’t you need to listen to this song more often. People think of them as the godfathers of techno, but they were never club bangers, and if post-1985 electronic music must be referenced, then let it be trance (which was always more my style anyway). Without the insistent beat of the dancefloor, this has a meditative, running-water rhythm, and makes me think of nighttime driving on an urban freeway, perhaps on an off-ramp that arcs up over the city so you see it spread out before you, twinkling and flashing, beguiling and mysterious in a way daylight never is — or better yet, riding, so that even the minimal effort of steering and accelerating are taken away, and you may as well be floating.



042. T. Rex “20th Century Boy”
(Marc Bolan)
single, 1973

That opening feedback-laced blast is as heavy as pop ever got until 1991 and “Smells Like Teen Spirit” (and if you don’t think that’s a pop song, you haven’t been paying attention), and the rest of the song finds Bolan edging perilously close to pop-metal. Which, since pop-metal wouldn’t become the scourge of the planet until the 1980s, is okay; plus, the emphasis here is on pop, with gloriously indeterminate lyrics like “Friends say it’s fine/Friends say it’s good/Everyone says it’s just like rock & roll” (or is it Robin Hood?) and his wife Gloria Jones’ “Tainted Love” wail backing him up on the chorus. Glam never swaggered like it did under Bolan’s attentive hand; only he could pull off such macho posturing and have it seem fey and slightly ridiculous. Part of that, of course, is his lamb’s-bleat voice, part of it is the giddy nonsense of his lyrics, and part of it is that even with all the crunch and stomp, his music never plodded; it was always light on its feet, always ready to dance but never insisting on it, always with an eye on the screaming-teenager demographic that launched his inital early-70s success, but never pandering to it. He was perhaps the definitive UK pop star, with only one (noveltyish) Stateside hit, but a devoted and surprisingly wide fanbase; everyone from Bowie to John Lydon to Morrissey to Damon Albarn to Robbie Williams to Pete Doherty has taken cues from the original Electric Warrior.



041. Jackson Browne “Rock Me on the Water”
(Jackson Browne)
Saturate Before Using, 1972

Sensitive singer-songwriters don’t get much more sensitive, or singer-songwriterly, than Jackson Browne. The only voice of his generation that was never acclaimed as the voice of his generation (which is why he’s still tolerable), he produced some of the most deeply-felt, literate, complex lyrics ever set to basic West-Coast soft rock; and while his initial (artistic) success was with writing songs for others to sing (and no one who worked with Nico can ever be entirely uncool), he had one of the finer mellow/nice-guy voices of the decade. This song, which ironically was a hit for one L. Ronstadt, comes off better in this underproduced, piano-led version, which addresses social change, personal responsibility, religious tradition, and an inexplicable sense of hope in image-heavy, understated lyrics that don’t mind if you don’t pay attention to them and would rather just groove to the music. It’s that humility, I think, that I find so pleasant about Browne; unlike other singer-songwriters (cough cough James Taylor Cat Stevens Janis Ian cough cough), he never preaches or prescribes, and you can enjoy the music simply as music. This would be reaffirmed in a few years when he’d drag Frankie Valli out of retirement to give him a classic-pop edge, but it was never out of evidence for those with ears.


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