352. "You Can Call Me Al" by Paul Simon

You don't see many musicians or artists of any kind doing their best work in their 40s, but I think "You Can Call Me Al" is the best Paul Simon song I've ever heard, one of the standards of modern musical canon.

The bass guitar playing is gigantic, the core of this song's virtuoso artistry. The quick-sung melodies are funny and outstanding. The brass parts still hold up as immaculate where a lot of that 1980s auxiliary instrumentation sounds extremely dated now.

We all love this song. There are few epic songs with this kind of brightness, lightness, and certitude.

The lyrics encapsulate a bit of Paul Simon's experience visiting South Africa back in a time where the Apartheid and the enervating vestiges of colonialism still made this a radical adventure. The song's rhythms evoke the complex music of those Sub-Saharan African cultures. It was a brave, relaxed attempt to reprogram 1980s Americans’ automatic responses to the idea of the "Third World." Africa, it turned out, was a place with people and music and normalcy that welcomed visitors. This was a perception shift that began decades earlier with real adventure types like the Beat writers, wild, undeterred people who found their way into countries that most traveling class Americans considered too "dark" and chaotic for their modest tastes. Mexico and Morocco were locales the Beats particularly relished in their work. I'm actually a little surprised thinking now about how much the scope of world travel has changed in my lifetime.

These days, when a little white folk singer suddenly adopts African beats and vocal styles into his music, you could denounce it as appropriation. But don't you need ambassadors on both sides? I don't think we should blame the teachers of literacy for the lack of literacy.

351. "Wondaland" by Janelle Monáe

Janelle Monáe is a great one, who can traverse a breathtaking range of musical palates in a single album, but of course my favorite song of hers is her most pure pop production, "Wondaland." (But seriously, go check out the entirety of her brilliant 2010 album The ArchAndroid.)

"Wondaland" is cybernetic baroque.

It's theatrical as well as song. In other pieces, she wails and screams. But here, it's her android alter-ego in a crazy little meep voice, singing complex classical-based melodies.

The production is so full, a mix of sci-fi futurism and timeless "hallelujah" chorales. The bass guitar playing is elite, melodic but modest enough to hold the song together. My favorite touch has to be the syncopated, percussive chimes pinging softly in the supporting soundscape during the bridges. The "hallelujah" melody is also weirdly affecting - so beautiful and sincere, such a spiritual ghost this android's guts.

Lyrically, ideas are fixated on creativity, spirituality, and inhumanity. Why do I think of Yoda's line, "Luminous beings are we"? There is validity to this idea that the creative mode, the trance we enter when these things come, has less to do with humanity and more to do with a spiritual condition beyond our base, animalistic presets. 

I mean, are angels (whether you consider them real or fantasy) Earthly residents or alien? If a soul does exist, it is something non-physical and thus completely free of this slippery rock. When the soul/whatever contacts what it contacts to divine its inspiration, it's an extraterrestrial process. It's a luminous connection. And maybe in that aspect, the creative mind is something closer to the Otherness of the cyborg than when the mind is engaged in the default "eat, compete, survive" setting.

There may be something racially implied in Monae's theme of android perfection, too. From Diana Ross to Tina Turner to Michael Jackson to Tiger Woods to Barack Obama, you see many examples of Black Americans who earned mainstream respect by creating not just brands for exacting perfection but ultra-perfection. That Michael Jackson's manic precision eventually fell out of favor for the slacker rock of mostly white musicians is telling. There is no way Michael Jackson could've ever made slacker sounding music and "earned" a place in our zeitgeist. Look at the genius-level intellect and charisma of Barack Obama, then look at the slovenly disarray of his privileged successor. To be Black and successful carries, apparently, a pressure to be perfect beyond perfect. It requires almost android qualities. We apparently expect this level of perfection from Black folks even at police traffic stops.

When will this end? Will it only end when the rise of sophisticated artificial intelligence (and presumably intelligent androids) puts us all in our place and lays bare the fallibility in all of us? That day is coming faster than maybe you realize. Will we then stop praising superiority in all forms and learn to cherish the impurities that truly define us, all of us? Will Wondaland then finally come back to Earth?

350. "Windowlicker" by Aphex Twin

All the rhythmic and non sequitur magic of Aphex Twin music is present in "Windowlicker," but it brings in some melodic chops as well, pushing this as close to a traditional hit single as electronic music composer Aphex Twin will ever experience.

The virtuoso time-splicing opening drum fanfare reminds everyone just who we're dealing with, in case we forget while we're treated to a four-minute zombie dance. Nothing simply just unfolds in a linear way, of course, so in the midst of the lurching shuffle, we have additional detours into some mightily proficient space funk, a completely fractured cadenza, and other pure imagination.

As a rocker at heart, I melt at the use of distorted guitars in the final passage. The distortion intensifies into a screaming static force field, pure sarcasm.

The 1990s witnessed a strange phenomenon. The decade started off strong as the era of grunge and other brash, principled, inventive alternative rock. But the suicide of Kurt Cobain left the music world in shambles, and the middle part of the decade briefly became a rudderless nightmare of Bush, Hootie and the Blowfish, the Backstreet Boys, Chris Gaines, and Smashing Pumpkins attempting dollar store industrial music for the worst Batman movie ever made. All the electronics had black exteriors.

But help came from the most unlikely of places, a largely European wave of colorful electronic surrealists, trading in a momentous, abstract strangeness that turned the last years of the 1990s into a bizarro disco reawakening. We had Aphex Twin, Daft Punk, Bjork, the Chemical Brothers, Fatboy Slim, and so many other greats leading music out of the mosh pits and onto darkly glowing dance floors. (The U.S. was also represented by folks like Moby and I'd even argue a matured Beck.) Even the greatest rock band of the late '90s, Radiohead, eschewed heaviness for spaced-out arrangements that fully welcomed electronic sounds.

The decade opened with folks slam dancing in flannels and closed with humanoids conga lining in space suits. One moment, Eddie Vedder dangling from PA speakers; the next, Richard D. James's face spliced onto sexy dancers.

And Steve Jobs returned to Apple.

Someone's always dreaming.

349. "Wildflowers" by Tom Petty

"Wildflowers" is maybe the best example of what Tom Petty seemed to stand for: You don't need to know all the chords on that guitar, just the best ones.

How can a song that was never released as a single be so revered? It's amazing how many people know, and not just like but adore this song. It touches something deeply idyllic in everyone. When it plays in the house, my boys always want it again. There will be days that one of the boys will come up out of nowhere and ask for "Wildflowers."

Pure-as-earth-and-sun major key strumming, warm piano coloring, the brisk shuffle pace, Tom Petty's hall-of-fame whispy voice, words of peace and comfort, and then the melancholy shades of those instrumental refrains. For all time.

348. "Wild Horses" by The Rolling Stones

In American history, the career of the cowboy was only viable for the briefest window of time. The invention of barbed wire in the 1880s spelled the end of the sweeping open ranges of the American West that cowboys traversed while driving their herds. But much like some intense periods of music, that brief window spawned an unending universe of lore.

And a key piece of that lore is the lone cowboy, out on a drive across the range, resting on a bedroll under the panorama stars, strumming his guitar in the glow of the cook fire, humming tunes about getting back home.

"Wild Horses" is a cowboy song for a different era of lore, the era of the touring rock musician. That musician, too, left home for long periods to ply the only trade they knew. And that musician also strummed songs longing for home, and for the idealized loves they left back there. All these ideals pining for ideals.

Now, musicians have been traveling the land for much longer than rock n' roll has been around, for much longer than cowboys were ever around. The medieval troubadours are an era of lore all unto themselves. The traveling chanting poets of classical Greece and China also appear in the tapestries of my daydreams. But make no mistake, the rock n' roll era is something unique that will endure long into the future with its own iconography. And that iconography was largely devised by this group right here, them Rolling Stones.

Their name itself represents it.

"Wild Horses," by calling back to the cowboy era, contextualizes it. There is comfort in knowing your loneliness comes as part of a long human tradition.

Ian Stewart, who played pianos and organs on all classic Stones records (but wasn't allowed to be an official member due to his incongruous age and clean-cut look), actually sat out tracking the piano on this song. His reason: Too many minor chords, which he disliked playing. He let his strict prejudices bar him from taking part of one of the greatest pure minor key songs, one that justifies the minor mode rather than contributing to any banality. It would be like an actor refusing to take a part in Star Wars because they disliked "sword movies."

I'm not a massive Charlie Watts fan, but his drums, particularly that popping snare, sound perfect when they enter for the chorus. They add just the right kind of lift to support that beautiful downward chord shift.

Mick Jagger, if you didn't know, is one of the best vocalists of any era. For a voice that can be so easily parodied, he really had so much flexibility, allowing him to be constantly inventive. He could go from the pep of "Satisfaction" to the pained, long yowls of "Wild Horses," and it was all in his wheelhouse.

Keith Richards deserves so much credit for fashioning the ultimate strummed guitar patterns, over and over, in their heyday. He was no Hendrix-esque finger contortionist. But he was no mere punk rocker either. The best period of the Rolling Stones, in my opinion, was based on his ability to craft basic yet brilliant strum patterns for songs like "Brown Sugar," "Jumpin' Jack Flash," and clearly "Wild Horses."

I've never owned Rolling Stones records, because it's my policy of only enjoying them in the rare moments I encounter them on the radio, in movies, or what have you. So each time I happen upon "Wild Horses," it's the same elated feeling. Today's a day I get to hear one of the purdiest of purdy songs!