The best Smashing Pumpkins song, and it's not close. Polls are closed.
Please appreciate that there are two different choruses after the two verses. The little song is packed with variations and half-call backs, forming a pretty complex, mostly stream-of-consciousness structure in just over three minutes of run time.
The quality of the distorted guitars in this song is the Platonic ideal of overdrive.
Of course, the only hit song by the Zombies came to life after the band was dead. The band released "Time Of the Season" in 1968, then without delay broke up, only for their single to break out in 1969. The Zombies' undead classic continues to stalk the world!
This song employs a trick I love, alternating between the major and minor of the same chord, requiring just a half-step bump of a single note (the third) to become a new chord and noticeably alter the key. The majority of the song is in E-minor, but during that long refrain line ("It's the time of the season for loving"), the resolving chord becomes an E-major, and the shift of the third up a half step to make the major chord is the melodic hook of the song. It's a cheap thrill, but it gets employed over and over in songs throughout generations in new and seductive ways (Paul McCartney used it in "The Fool On the Hill" around the same time). And of course, it was a staple in classical harmony long before - no artist is above a cheap technique that really works.
It's a superb melodic song, employing a cool mode to create a collection of fragments that combine into long phrases. There are arpeggiations that get call-and-response echoes. There are downward scales that find pretty low notes at creative intervals. There are climbing intervals on which the verses peak. The lead up to the refrain has another great set of call-and-response ideas with more of a classic rock n' roll feel.
The radiant harmonies of the refrain are the the reason we listen. By contrast, the background vocal "aah"s are basically subliminal, but they're also imperative additions, setting this thing apart.
The lyrics are pretty standard late-'60s cliches. You can argue that this song is more of a calculated fabrication, something an ad company would come up with to approximate the more impactful "counterculture" statements of bands like the Byrds. You may be right, and the band obviously lacked a strong sense of mission, as its dissolution proved. And what delegitimized the '60s counterculture more than ad companies mimicking the rhetoric to sell cars and antacids?
But it is the perfect zombie song, letting a band rise after its death, a catchy jingle getting more respect as its era cooled in the ground. It was also the banner song in the great film Awakenings, where people immobilized since the '60s are reanimated and walk the Earth again.
Love is always some form of consistency over time. A great song is always some form of consistency over time signature.
The consistently fascinating voice of Cyndi Lauper was born to be wrapped in this song's synthesizers and chorus-effect guitar - and to leap out from them in the urgent refrain, soaring but so intelligently regimented to the tapping beat.
I confidently declare that the 1980s were the greatest era of melody ever in pop music, and "Time After Time" is maybe the top song of them all, consistent with beautiful ideas at all levels, transcendent with a vocalist's magic.
My son Julian has loved the melody of this song for a long time. He came home from school one day singing it endlessly.
He likes the fun of the tune.
He's never told me any incisive opinions about the lyrics, because they’re pretty obvious.
This is, after all, a planet where all things necessary for daily life either grow out of the ground or fall out of the sky. Nobody can debate that.
This planet, where everything is given to whoever needs it, is the conscious benevolence of some great force, speaking to us. Christians might say it is the very Word of God, physically incarnate. Ralph Waldo Emerson was thinking about this in 1836 when he wrote, "What is matter? Matter is a phenomenon, not a substance."
Again, Emerson: "Nature, in its ministry to man, is not only the material, but is also the process and the result. All the parts incessantly work into each other’s hands for the profit of man. The wind sows the seed; the sun evaporates the sea; the wind blows the vapor to the field; the ice, on the other side of the planet, condenses rain on this; the rain feeds the plant; the plant feeds the animal; and thus the endless circulations of the divine charity nourish man."
It's up to you to believe you can intercede in this indiscriminate divine charity, take possession of nature's gifts, and create artificial scarcity for your own benefit.
Woodie Guthrie wrote "This Land Is Your Land" as an alternative to "God Bless America." I'll let you contemplate the differences and similarities.
Since he wrote this song, some have rejected it out of hand because it was written by a communist, while some consider it America's unofficial national anthem. Some love the more radical lyrics that aren’t considered part of the finished version of the song, and consider it a badge of their purity that they tirelessly make everybody aware of them. Views of it in our self-radicalized times are typically over the top.
Kids, regardless, love this song because it is a good song.
Nobody is more or less vindicated. This song is nobody's property. It was made for you and me.
Fun pop-esque song with catchy choruses from Beck's middle period. (It now looks positively indie next to the pop sharpness of his newest album.) There are so many singing harmonies going on, and I can't help but add my own new lines everywhere when I listen.
Beck is always going after some new instrumental sound; every song has a new palette. With "Think I'm In Love," we have the percussion solos after the second chorus.
The middle bridge flips out with an impressive key change, piano and strings filling things out.
The videos he produced and released for every song along with his album The Information are just great. Usually I don't link to music videos, but these are cute little exceptions.