15. "All You Need Is Love" by the Beatles

Have you ever submitted a drawing or a photograph or something you wrote to a contest? Usually there's a theme you have to match, and it's all very rushed and forced, and in the end the arbiters of the contest just accept submissions that serve their preconceived narrative rather than celebrate challenging quality. I have succeeded seldom and been rejected most times in this business. The Beatles wrote "All You Need Is Love" under those kinds of circumstances (except their acceptance was guaranteed, which I'm sure did nothing to make it less unnerving) and just happened to produce a song of significance in world history.

They were commissioned to write and perform a new song for the world's first satellite broadcast - "Our World," which was kind of the Olympics and a TV variety show combined, with countries contributing segments to represent themselves. The Beatles were Great Britain at the time. With less than three weeks before the event, John Lennon began to write in earnest. He was still putting finishing touches on the song the day of the broadcast - to 25 countries and over 400 million people. They had just released Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band a few weeks before and could've been forgiven if they were a bit creatively spent.

Instead, John Lennon did something that became kind of a template for anyone creating content for worldwide consumption, keeping it extremely simple. He focused on one forceful idea, and he conveyed it in five words. Our international blockbuster movies do the same thing now (using about five words and 500 explosions).

Those are the iconic choruses of "All You Need Is Love."

The verses were much more complex, and I'm sure John took it as his right to say more in the verses if people were going to focus on the choruses anyway. ("Don't bore us, get to the chorus" mentality)

First of all, the verses are in a 7 beat, an anomaly then and really still today in popular music. The beat is slow enough that non music people probably do not notice. 

The lyrics are a real work of art, full of both plain meaning and maybe not such plain meaning. His lines are sly repeating variations of the same grammatical format:

"There's nothing you can do that can't be done.
Nothing you can sing that can't be sung."

I have assumed Lennon omitted the word "otherwise" at the end of each line. As in, don't sacrifice love to spend your life doing things that can just be done by others. Careerists and perfectionists, relax, and realize that the more you strive, the more you are shutting out love.

But consider if there isn't an implied "otherwise" ending these lines. 

It's most telling in the second verse: 

"There's nothing you can know that isn't known.
Nothing you can see that isn't shown."

It's not just that some other person probably knows all the things you know. It's hinting at the idea that knowledge itself resides in completeness elsewhere, beyond human minds. Not only that, but the daily act of seeing the world is not as me-centered as you think it: You are not seeing it - you are being shown it. Suddenly there are bigger spiritual implications.

He's not flashing Bible verses; He is hitting on a reality that many people suppress, religious and atheist: The world is being given to us, shown to us; it is being made available to our senses and reason to be discovered. Everything in front of our eyes is a message.

You can get the same ideas in-depth by reading Thomas Paine's "The Age of Reason." John Lennon decided to hide glimpses of it in the 7-beat verses of his pop song on the world's first international broadcast. It's a hella-catchy song too.

14. "All My Loving" by the Beatles

I like so many Beatles songs, but only a small group could make it on the list. This is, however already my third Beatles song in 14 entries. At least this is the first Paul song. 

This song is only 2 minutes, 4 seconds long. It is perfect Paul, who relentlessly packed so many ideas and changes into lots of little, upbeat ditties.

13. "All Apologies" by Nirvana

Simple, sad, loud.

12. "Afterlife" by Arcade Fire

I am not an Arcade Fire superfan. There are plenty of songs, particularly on the older albums, that grate on me. But their greatest songs are some of most impressive songs I have ever heard. So I am a selective Arcade Fire superfan, because at their best, I cannot do without them.

Enter "Afterlife." I will see it against any Beatles bet you want to make. The brilliance is blinding on level after level.

If I am ever asked by Arcade Fire to drum this song as an emergency replacement, I will glide through that fantastic, compact opening drum fill and set the damn beat down.

Arcade Fire are led by a husband-wife duo, two of the strangest, most interesting people in music. Win Butler is the primary singer, a Texan Mormon by upbringing who moved to Montreal at age 20 to major in religious studies. There he met Régine Chassagne, a Montreal native and jazz singer whose parents emigrated from Haiti. They were married not long after and embarked on a music career together. Régine is a secondary lead vocalist and multi-instrumental contributor. Their co-vocals are a key component of the Arcade Fire sound. Her "ooh-oohs" in this song are a purely iconic touch. This is band of touches.

For their Reflektor album, they wanted to include the sounds of the percussive Haitian music Régine grew up with in her family home. The backbone of "Afterlife" is the Caribbean percussion section. As the many, many nicely orchestrated instruments add and subtract from the song, the percussion holds steady, and it really pays off in the quietest moments, as those shakers and hand drums come through clean, just far enough back in the mix to be a ghostly presence. It is, ironically, a life force.

The instrumentation is elite, layering tremoloed electric guitars, bouncy bass, strings, synthesizers, saxophones, more, and whatever that instrument is chiming out in the quiet third verse. Plenty of bands write songs for many instruments. The choices of instrumentation and their perfect orchestration are what you buy an Arcade Fire album to hear. You can hear everything to the back of the mix, counterpointing, complimenting, compounding. It takes leadership to get all these pieces to fit right.

But with all these musical ideas flaring out left and right, the real fire is in the words and the singer singing them. The first lines give us a rush of the sensations of life: "After all the breath and the dirt and the fires that burn." Besides being great, sober word choices, he is using a technique called synecdoche, using these parts of life to summarize the whole. The voice is Win Butler's warble, one of my favorite singing voices.

There are two ways I can see this song's message. One, it is a plea from Win Butler to Régine Chassagne over some apparently major problem in their marriage. He is trying to see their relationship, their stupid decisions and banal daily challenges, from the vantage point of the afterlife, trying to see if any challenge in life sizes up to the perspective of death and the greater, spiritual meaning of their love and marriage. I wouldn't be surprised if something like this was covertly inspiring the song.

Two, I think it is about experiencing the death of a loved one, a spouse or anyone else. Butler is literally asking "When love is gone, where does it go?" He means this on a metaphysical level: Where does the energy of love GO after the transcendent event of death? If there is an afterlife, does love remain on the other side; will the lost loved one be waiting there with the same love that bound them in the experiences of life?

It definitely seems like there has been an emergency. The "ambulances" have gone. There are "hangers-on" who seem to watch the ambulance lights recede out of sight, then hang on to the "dead lights of the afterglow." Those of us who have experienced death know of this afterglow of the lost that we will continually hang onto for the rest of our lives.

These are not "burrito fixings" lyrics. These are high-level, stand-alone lyrics with designed ambiguity, not simplistic vaguery. You can slip down a rabbit hole with them. In this case, they are themselves slipping down their own rabbit hole. And those very thoughts are about slipping down an unknown rabbit hole and what awaits. They do this duty while also being sonically great to sing.

Music videos are weird. Some are only promotional tools. Some are interesting exercises where the music is incidental. Some are Kanye videos. And some fuse themselves almost integrally to the song. There is only one freaking music video that has made me cry. It is the video for "Afterlife." The humanity of the situation in this video is making me type the rest of this sentence through tears. That's why I'm attaching it to this post.

Be well.

11. "Aeroplane" by The Red Hot Chili Peppers

This may be controversial - but I think the Chili Peppers' Dave Navarro era is super underrated. He made the One Hot Minute album much heavier but also gave them deeper range, contributing interesting, moody interludes webbed with strains of echoing, ambient guitar. "Aeroplane" is a perfect demonstration.

Even with a rock guitarist in their band, I defy you to find another song in the Chili Peppers repertoire as funky and fun as this. Flea works out the entire song - slapping through the verses, sliding up and down the choruses, and hitting a nice upper register in the moody bridge. They finally just hand him a full bass solo to close it out.

But then what? Halfway through Flea's rad solo, Navarro whines in with a co-solo of his own, and the two freeform perfectly together to the finish line. I think it was a really cool, if brief, partnership in rock music history.

Lyrics in most rock/pop songs are like fixings in a fast-food burrito: you would never enjoy them on their own, but in a mix with other ingredients they are fine. Some lyrics rise above this standard, and I'll point it out when I think they do. For instance, when I actually know and remember lyrics without effort, something is being done right. 

The Chili Peppers are not in this class. "Music is my aeroplane" is a cool refrain though. Little else in the lyrics make sense, but what a sweet moment of music love that is.