Suppose you were tasked with identifying one definitive song from your list of favorite songwriter or songwriting team. First you’d really need to define what you mean by “definitive”.<\/p>\n
A definition that appeals to me focuses on the song’s impact. How deeply did a song influence the culture? Did it change the very way we think about music? In the event of a tie, consider which song first comes to everyone’s mind when thinking of that songwriter or songwriting team.<\/p>\n
Given this definition, some choices are easy. For Nirvana, it would be “Smells Like Teen Spirit”. For Irving Berlin, it would be “White Christmas”.<\/p>\n
But other cases are trickier. What is Paul McCartney’s definitive song? Or Joni Mitchell, Rodgers and Hammerstein, Carole King, Robert and Richard Sherman, Taylor Swift, Bob Dylan or Ellie Greenwich?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Suppose you were tasked with identifying one definitive song from your list of favorite songwriter or songwriting team. First you’d really need to define what you mean by “definitive”. A definition that appeals to me focuses on the song’s impact. How deeply did a song influence the culture? Did it change the very way we … Continue reading “Definitive song”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/25369"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=25369"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/25369\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":25370,"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/25369\/revisions\/25370"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=25369"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=25369"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=25369"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}