1. A Day in the Life - Everytime I think about this song and all aspects of it, it's hard to describe how essential it is to my musical understanding.
a) It is the final song on an album. Most final songs have sort of an epic sense of closure to them and this song provides a nearly perfect ending.
b) It is the final song of Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band. The sweep of lush styles of this conceptual album must have been pretty amazing to behold when it first emerged on listener's ears. To appreciate this song, you have to understand the album's sequence, that this song began after the "show" of the album had ended, sneaking in after the closing applause. Conceptually, it puts me at a very interesting place.
c) It is by the Beatles. To think the creators of She Loves You and I Want to Hold Your Hand produced this in a short few years is difficult to comprehend. After this song their next career moves could not be close to predicted.
d) It epitomizes boundaries-free musical expression. I'd like to think that if I was lucky enough to make oodles of money and then had the freedom to simply 'create' with no restrictions based on marketability or popularity placed on, what would emerge in any artistic medium would be something this song represents.
e) It aurally represents a irreversible shift in what constitutes popular music. No words can tangibly describe what the massive orchestral crescendo and final drawn out chord mean. You can just imagine Lennon and McCartney taking you with your ears to the ends of the Earth, and through that final note blowing up any musical legacy they held built up to that point and creating everything they do in the future completely on my their own terms.
In other words, not my individual favorite song of all time (that's a more personal choice) but the only song of these four that really truly matters.
2. Gimme Shelter - that being said, this song has been played more on my computer playlist than A Day In the Life. I don't even have the album it's from, but it has been a pervasive soundtrack for dark and creeping menace for multiple generations now, and is the perfect encapsulation of the Stones sound and the key representation of the counterpoint to what their rock godfather rivals the Beatles were doing.
3. Like a Rolling Stone - I am sorry to admit that appreciating lyrics are not my strong point, and can say without a doubt that lyrically A Day in the Life is the absolute worst of this bunch. I can totally understand how this song is the best combination of lyrics and music ever recorded, but I'll let the true Dylan fans express their love for this song.
4. Billie Jean - Because it made it this far, I will definitely give the song more attention, but before its Final 4 status I probably would have skipped over this song on the radio.
In my list of the top songs of all time (last time we did it), I had
A Day in the Life #6
Billie Jean #11
Like a Rolling Stone #51
Gimme Shelter #101
Thus, I'm really happy about the final four. Here, at the beginning of the writing, I'm still sure that Beatles and MJ will take the top positions (in my personal rank that is, I am well aware that "Billie" is #4 in almost every other ballot, which raises the question: how did it get here?). But now to the difficult question: should "groundbreaking pop" go before "perfect pop"? Well, I might admire "A Day in the Life" a little more, but "Billie Jean" is when I HAVE TO go to the stereo and turn up the volume. Well, I decided to go with
1. A Day in the Life
2. Billie Jean
Why? Well, "A Day in the Life" is perfect pop too, although in a very different way than "Billie Jean".
Both "Like a Rolling Stone" and "Gimme Shelter" are for me outstanding song by Stones and Dylan. Still, I had "Like a Rolling Stone" on that all-time list out of respect rather than personal feelings. That's not the case for "Gimme Shelter", so I'm doing the unthinkable here and put Dylan at fourth place.
