There are songs that command you to adore them. There is no other way to listen. Put on a six-minute track by The Velvet Underground and you’d better commit your every flash of attention to it, otherwise it will disappoint you.
Songs like those are art in the way that an abstract painting or a modernist novel is. One must enter with understanding, patience and expectation. They are great, but don’t belong in this article. This is for the Renaissance paintings of Top 40 music. Anyone who looks at the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel will say, “Woah.” They’ll love it on its own, contextless. They won’t have to think too hard to do that, either. Every extra minute that they spend with it multiplies the awe, and makes them notice another layer, and another, and another.
So it is with music. There are bad, fluffy pop songs and good, complex indie songs. But those are not the only two options. There are a sliver of songs that are candy-like entertainment and brilliant, serious art, songs that don’t demand your smart, critical brain, but give it things in case it wants them. After a year when the best explosive action movie, “One Battle After Another,” was also great and beautiful cinema, it makes sense to show that all media can do both.
All of the songs I’ve chosen here are old, mostly because I’d need to understand today’s scene way better than I do if I wanted to be some authority on the great pop music being made now.
“Sir Duke” by Stevie Wonder (1976)
I mean, come on. This is a get-up-and-dance-at-the-eleventh-hour song. You roll your windows down and turn the volume up when it plays. It does not leave your head without a fight. The rhythm alone could reanimate a corpse.
“Sir Duke,” which Wonder wrote for his album “Songs in the Key of Life,” could feel a little cheeky. He dedicates it to music itself, and especially to the Black artist and singers who challenged every idea of what music had to be. Here Wonder is, loving the slow crooning of people like Ella Fitzgerald and “Satchmo” (the trumpeter Louis Armstrong’s nickname) with a beat that’s made more for a dance floor than a cocktail hour.
But anyone who has listened to those artists knows that Wonder’s celebration is true. Music is supposed to be ecstatic. Wonder gets that. That is why the song never stops hitting you.
There are long, theory-dense, unspeakably boring explanations of “Sir Duke”’s harmonic weirdness out there, which are fun for musicians but remind me of the joke about how explaining humor is like dissecting a frog: not many people are interested, and the frog dies. So just go and listen to it for yourself. Hear all the parts working together. Dance to it, if you want. And you will.
“Something” by The Beatles (1969)
When the Beatles went into Abbey Road studios to cut their last album, everyone knew that they were knocking on heaven’s door. John Lennon and Paul McCartney hated each other, Ringo Starr had upped and left several sessions for their last album and George Harrison’s spirituality was bound to separate him from his old life eventually. Its cover, which everyone in the world can picture, is them, unsmiling, walking away from the studio.
The Beatles were miserable, and their last breath was the freest one they had ever taken.
Along came “Something.” Following the weird, word-associating “Come Together” that starts the album, Harrison’s sweet love tune feels like an after-storm walk.
He plays with conventions in the chords he uses, the time he bends, the sections that transition between parts of the song — all of it.
Starr’s drumming bleeds out of the corner where, in pop music, his instrument usually stays. The cymbals ring out for seconds. The lowest-pitched, most guttural drums get played. It all makes the love described into a kind of magic.
There are key changes, B sections, complex instrumentation, but none of it feels like the song wasn’t naturally, organically destined to go where it went. There is no force. Gentleness wins.
“Silver Springs” by Fleetwood Mac (1977)
I could have filled this list with Fleetwood Mac. Three world-class singers with an extraordinary band behind them will not come up with just one work of great art in their tenure. I picked this son for the same reason why I picked all the others: its movement.
“Silver Springs” takes a minute to get going. It is pure soft rock: clean guitars, chimes, pianos. It doesn’t bend genres or shatter norms or showcase insane talent. It just builds on itself, minute after minute. The first time you get to the famed chorus (“Time cast a spell on you / but you won’t forget me”), it’s pretty well-tempered, like Stevie Nicks is trying to reconcile. By the second time, there are harmonies and instrumental flares. Nicks, known for her soft and reserved delivery, is screaming.
What’s so good about “Silver Springs” is that it sounds like the feeling of heartbreak itself, not like someone trying to convince you that they’re heartbroken. The second-person lyrics do a lot for this, along with Nicks’ random, improvised lyrics in between passages. Just wait until you hear her wail “give me just a chance” after a line from the chorus. You’re right there with her. And you don’t want to leave.
“God Only Knows” by The Beach Boys (1966)
This is the highest musical achievement on this list. Maybe one of the highest ever. The Beach Boys toured without the visionary Brian Wilson for a year and a half, playing the bubble-gum pop that made them famous, while Wilson recovered from a mental health crisis and dreamed up “Pet Sounds.” The album had all of the band’s old pep plus heaps of beautiful arrangement. “God Only Knows” begins its B-Side.
“I may not always love you / but long as there are stars above you / you’ll never need to doubt it / I’ll make you so sure about it / God only knows what I’d be without you.” A band that, two years prior, sang, “I’m getting bugged driving up and down the same old strip / I gotta find a new place where the kids are hip” had committed itself to a maturity and altitude that could’ve killed its career. Thankfully, it did not.
Listen to “God Only Knows” piece by piece. Take in the full song, then give your attention to the harmonies, the bassline, the high, ringing instrument that I can’t even identify and so on. Spend a full listen on each of those features, individually, and feel how they talk to one another.
Most other music will bore you to tears this way. “God Only Knows” is so bottomless that all you’ll want to do is listen to it a dozen more times. In a moment when music is chopped up and shoved into one-minute videos, scavenged and played over terrible ads, we badly need to sit with things in the way that this song — this absolutely perfect song — can be sat with.
Alternatively, put it on in the car, on low volume, and let it play. You will love it. And there is its genius.
