121. "Heart Shaped Box" by Nirvana

Drum creativity is song creativity. And look, it's another Dave Grohl drumming performance.

We must also thank bassist Krist Novoselic, because he really comes through with a dark, moving line here. In the chorus especially, it lays the basis for and really sells Kurt Cobain's whining guitar stabs.

I think my favorite moment, other than the wonderful verse harmonies, is the ringing, ragged final note of the too-short guitar solo. 

This song was supposed to imitate the form of "Smells Like Teen Spirit," which it kind of does. But for a song that's supposed to be a knock-off, I can't think of anything else that sounds like this thing.

120. "Heart In a Cage" by The Strokes

A buzzing little 6/8 head swinger, one of the best heavy experiments of Julian Casablancas. The guitars, mostly playing single strings, layer into sweet cumulative chord combinations. They have gain on them but barely. I love heavy songs where the guitar isn't a god damned buzz saw, achieving power with note selection rather than brute wattage. The drums are the core of the song's excellence, morphing from a cool, contained hi-hat 6-beat to a big smashing release, to a cycle of tom drums, to a minimal bridge beat with a duplet poly-rhythm.

The vocal is dark, controlled but also hitting aggressive one-syllable blasts. I love the voice of Julian Casablancas, the laconic attitude with fierce brown eyes, the baritone timbre, the vibrato delivery, the always strange phrasing. His melodies are never, ever conventional. They are always his.

119. "Head Over Heels" by Tears For Fears

Falling head over heels for someone will define your entire miraculous, once-only stay on this planet. So make sure you're falling head over heels with the absolute best possible song in your head. Good luck.

118. "Head Down" by Soundgarden

Sometimes the moment calls for simplicity. Sometimes it calls for the theory of relativity.

"Head Down" is not a fairy tale, a cartoonish parable, or pithy aphorism. It's not even nice.

"Head Down" is a tour de force, to me the single greatest song Soundgarden ever produced, the crown jewel of an entire album that will stand for complex greatness for as long as there are people who care to remember the past. 

This has to be the heaviest song ever that prominently features an acoustic guitar. It layers well with with a gang of electric guitars, all in an arcane tuning. The modality and rhythm of the central guitar theme is a nod to lead guitarist Kim Thayil's Indian heritage and the influence of Indian classical music, known for its melodic and rhythmic complexity.

The drumming is one of Matt Cameron's definitive performances, a showpiece of rudimentary skill that is simultaneously tabla and jazz-informed heavy rock. His cymbal in the verses crashes with ideal tone and sustain.

I also have to praise the bass playing of Ben Shepard who plays key, mobile parts in the instrumental sections.

Like many songs I'm fascinated by, this one has no choruses. There are scintillating instrumental sections led by the guitar theme; there are looming verses; there is a savage middle development that rings out into a kind of shared lead and rhythm guitar solo; there is a psychedelic outtro fading into the foundational soil of those drums, which only quit of their own volition.

117. "Hard to Explain" by The Strokes

Lo-fi drums holding a simple beat. Down-strummed (excellently fuzzy) guitars. A low-complexity guitar lead. There are many things in this song that are rudimentary, as there should be with many things. Many people in charge of too much fetishize maximum supposed productivity. We forget that punk is a philosophy that can apply not only to music but to all fields, where only the barren careerists, résumé stackers, and people with a palpable lack of experience with the eruptive, accepting chaos of resourcefulness stand and regard our making-do with their fear-frozen arms crossed. McGuyver worked in duct tape.

Within the simple, there is the sublime.

Those down-strummed guitars form intelligent chord patterns of bold irregularity, changing in completely voluntary decisions rather than in rote four-beat components. The effect of the abstract, decentralized changes could possibly be alienating except the chord choices are a series of warm major chords. The song is invitingly bright in chord scheme.

The vocal is so casual but so agile. The verse melody stretches from a quick-climbing scale up to screamed high notes, down to a mid-range major phrase that hints at simple, dopey happiness. "Everything's just great!" Only the pre-chorus, neat gaps in its phrases and strange timing of changes, has a darker edge. The chorus overrules it with a yippee-type melody doubled identically by the lead guitar. This is a song about things that are hard to explain. The lyrics present hard-to-explain scenarios in short lines. The music video is filled with brief images that are hard to explain. Sometimes you attack things that are hard to explain with simple phrases.