My favourite songs?

Your three best songs?

The ones you have to ration yourself from playing too often in case they might ever spoil?

A man on some crackling radio station was asking that question this morning - just while I tried to park before talking to Australian Broadcasting Co's  Bookshow, just as I was preparing to say more about that  Princeton conference on the decline of book reviewing.

If the wonderful Ramona Koval had asked me about top songs instead of about the TLS, I would have said:

1) The Needle and the Damage Done: Neil Young: 1971: with a preference, not shared by many, for the 1993 live version on Unplugged.

2) My Funny Valentine: Rodgers and Hart: 1937: forgetting, since songs mean words, the Miles Davis/ Bill Evans version from 1958, I'd choose Rickie Lee Jones  from Girl at her Volcano, an EP (remember those?) 1983.

3) Lady Stardust:  David Bowie: 1972: again with a preference for the acoustic version added to the resissue of Ziggy Stardust: 1990.

Now, back to the production of this week's TLS.

Comments

[Jantar]

This one is my favourite Valentine:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jvXywhJpOKs

[Andrew]

I could easily enough fill it up the 3 favoured songs with Beatles tracks but probably ultimately in a fight between Tomorrow Never Knows & A Day in the Life, the first would win out.
Golden Hair by Syd Barrett off the Madcap Laughs album, possibly the second version added on re-issue.
And Looking Glass by The La's would happily be one of my three. Doesn't really get any better than that Lee Mavers song, or if it does, not by much.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wjo9CwDKRls

[Bertrand Russell]

1) 'Smack My Bitch Up' by The Prodigy. Debatable I know if this dirty techno tune really is a song, but it does have words, such as those in the title repeated at strategic moments designed to release ever greater doses of adrenaline.

2) 'Nuclear Superstar Midget' by Bono and the boys off the 'Platform Boots Americana' album.

3) 'Don't Call Me Nigger Whitey' by Sly & the Family Stone. Not alot of people realise this was an early working title for the Principia Mathematica but Alfred North Whitehead for whatever reason would get uptight at the suggestion.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fwmrd_T53E0

[Dion Per Sona]

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xQycQ8DABvc&feature=related

[ricardo]

yes, Sir Peter, Chet Baker is far superior...

[Jantar]

Sorry to go on about Chet Baker but you really should listen to this version:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UOEIQKczRPY

[Truthlord]

On nearly the last of Lord Rees Moggs blogs I mentioned that soon the Lord Chancellor on Desert Island Discs will be proudly talking of his collection of Stephen King novels and U2 CDs...
Well,times changebut the changes that represent the collapse of traditional high culture represent something terrifyingly new.There is now a total disconnect between intelligence and its driven pleasures.The intelligent mind has traditionally looked upwards,to inspirational concepts of beauty or anything that can lift our gaze out of the human morass,yet this seems to have been factored out or deeply repressed in the post 60s generation
Of course as I and my friends sat on the floor playing those early Tchaikovsky LPs we knew there were other pleasures from music...Dancing close to Glen Miller or later jiving in trad jazz clubs.Yet our minds were not chained to our music as present generations are.It is remarkable how the more narrow peoples musical tastes are the more fanatically they defend their musical territory(continued)

[Truthlord]

This music business is directly related the drug business. Because if people cannot get the emotional highfrom music-or from those corny yet emotionally satisfying films of the forties and fifties then the human desire to get out of and beyond our physical world will cause a desperate turn to narcotics.
There is also a built in human desire probably caused by the tribal hierarchical nature of the human tribe, to live lives constrained by some kind of tribal laws.
Since the normal laws imposed externally by the church or state have now collapsed the individual is forced to create his own law or moral prison-the prison of need -of addiction.This need gives meaning and pupose to life.
It is interesting that the addict is actually creating his own complete universe with the ecstacy of heaven and the pain of a Boschlike hell
The cage of his selfmade prison and its metal bars so splendidly replicated by the twang and clang of the steel strings of the steel guitar.

[Andrew]

Have to say the good Lord's rather bringdown words bring to mind Russian author Victor Pelevin - sizeable extraction coming:

"One of the terms that came into modern English from the Russian in the wake of "gulag" and "pogrom" was "samizdat." It is usually defined as a system of clandestine publication of anti-Soviet texts in the countries of the former Eastern bloc. This definition somewhat implies that "samizdat" meant Solzhenitsyn. In fact, "samizdat" meant Castaneda. The explanation is simple: When you live in a gulag from the day of your birth, reading a book about gulag in your free time feels a bit too patriotic. You want something different.

The first Bulgakov book I read was The Master and Margarita. As for the lessons I drew, I’m afraid there were none, though it overturned all ideas I had about books before...However, the effect of this book was really fantastic. There’s an expression “out of this world.” This book was totally out of the Soviet world. The evil magic of any totalitarian regime is based on its presumed capability to embrace and explain all the phenomena, their entire totality, because explanation is control. Hence the term totalitarian. So if there’s a book that takes you out of this totality of things explained and understood, it liberates you because it breaks the continuity of explanation and thus dispels the charms. It allows you to look in a different direction for a moment, but this moment is enough to understand that everything you saw before was a hallucination (though what you see in this different direction might well be another hallucination). The Master and Margarita was exactly this kind of book and it is very hard to explain its subtle effect to anybody who didn’t live in the USSR. Solzhenitsyn’s books were very anti-Soviet, but they didn’t liberate you, they only made you more enslaved as they explained to which degree you were a slave. The Master and Margarita didn’t even bother to be anti-Soviet yet reading this book would make you free instantly. It didn’t liberate you from some particular old ideas, but rather from the hypnotism of the entire order of things."

If any reader is still with me...similarly acts like the best work of the Beatles, Hendrix and the like, didn't generally bother to be anti-whatever it was or is not worth being for - in terms of now Pop Idol or whatever inane shite - but their liberating effect was all the stronger for it. Their art was on their own terms, & so a direct oputpouring of life, & not a lifeless determined reaction to shite that would only enslave if one were obsessed with it.

[Dion Per Sona]

Il me semble, Monsieur K., que non seulement avez-vous dit juste, mais que c'est pour cela que les hommes mentent.

[James Bent]

1 > Mason Jennings / Nothing
2 > Pachelbel / Canon
3 > Mazzy Star / Fade Into You

Three is a short list, but I guess if I had to go for those three on repeat, then so be it.