A Decade in Music: FAQs

• Over 2,100 songs?  Almost 120 hours of music?  Multiple playlists? How am I supposed to listen to all of this?
• What possessed you to do a ‘60s comp, anyway?  I thought you were all about the new music. Is this some sort of mid-life crisis?  Aren’t you afraid of losing your hipster license?
• What was your research process for listening?  Surely you didn’t know all this music beforehand.
• What genres of music did you include?  Or, better said, what did you choose to leave out?
• Couldn’t you have edited it down a bit?
• Are these playlists comprehensive, then?  I mean, they have a ton of music, so they must have all the key tracks from the ‘60s, right?
• What’s with all the singles?  I thought your compilations were always just three tracks per album.
• Is it supposed to be written ‘60s or 60’s?

Over 2,100 songs?  Almost 120 hours of music?  Multiple playlists? How am I supposed to listen to all of this?

Um, well, I’m not sure.  It took me years to select and compile it all, so it’s not something to be digested in an afternoon.

I’d recommend starting with one playlist—maybe the Best Albums of the 1960s, Top 50. Listen to it several times over a week or so, or until you’re familiar with it.  Then maybe choose a year and check out the Year in Review playlist. This might be enough (or even too much) for many of you.

The ultra-curious might then move to the Singles and Further Listening playlists.  Finally, in one final gesture of endurance and dedication before your head explodes, listen to the entire monstrous sequence of Comprehensive playlists in one week-long sleepless sitting.

What possessed you to do a ‘60s comp, anyway?  I thought you were all about the new music. Is this some sort of mid-life crisis?  Aren’t you afraid of losing your hipster license?

It may be a mid-life crisis, for all I know, but it was prompted by the real-life circumstance of moving from New England to Spain. I probably had at least a couple thousand CDs that I wasn’t going to take with us, and I had to rip them all. It took ages. During the process, I realized I had the makings of a set of playlists and commentary similar to the ones I’d been making yearly for friends since the early 2000s.

As for my hipster license, I don’t really keep up with what’s hip, at least not directly. But for all you and I know, maybe it’s hip all of a sudden to be looking backward to the ‘60s.  You can never tell.

What was your research process for listening?  Surely you didn’t know all this music beforehand.

No, I most definitely did not know most of this music beforehand.  My knowledge of the ‘60s was mostly limited to the prominent acts.  Indeed, it was my curiosity and yearning for new discoveries that kept me going throughout this process.

I started out with what I already knew. Naturally, there was the standard Beatles, Stones, Who, Hendrix, and other stuff from my adolescent classic rock radio days. I also had a ton of other great stuff that never received radio play when I grew up, which I discovered through the rock critical press (mostly SPIN and Rolling Stone)—stuff like Dylan, the Velvet Underground, Captain Beefheart, and more.

Then I dug up a bunch of best-of lists from various US and UK magazines and critical outlets on the internet. I found many of these on the website RockList.net.  The lists I found on this site expanded my listening a good amount, especially the UK lists, which often differed substantially from the US ones I was more familiar with.  I used AllMusic.com to broaden my knowledge of bands I discovered through these lists.  I thought I was nearly done.

Then I discovered a musical goldmine:  AcclaimedMusic.net.  This site compiles critical opinion from around the world into a massive database of the 3,000 best albums and 6,000 best songs of all time, with another 2,000 or more “bubbling under” the top of each list.  Here I discovered a wealth of albums and bands I’d never heard of.  I didn’t always agree with the rankings, of course, but the playlists and commentary on this website are immensely indebted to over a year of additional listening that AcclaimedMusic.net provided me.  Again, I used AllMusic.com to expand my listening on the new acts I discovered.  I made a final search of AllMusic.com for all five-star albums from the decade, and found some new stuff there, too.

I should also give a shout-out to my 4-disc Nuggets compilation—a box set I’d owned for years but hadn’t listened to extensively—and the corresponding British version, which was new to me.  Probably more than half of the singles from 1965-67 were from one of these compilations.  I also explored many bands further, based on my exposure to them on these compilations. Both are fantastic.

Also, Spotify has been a tremendous resource, allowing me to listen to countless tracks and albums without having to hunt them down other ways.

What genres of music did you include?  Or, better said, what did you choose to leave out?

Almost immediately I knew I would not include any instrumental jazz.  That’s for another compilation, some other time.  I’m a big jazz fan, especially of the jazz from the late ‘50s through the ‘60s, and to me it deserves its own separate project. I eventually included a few jazz pieces that were more important to the pop music world than to jazz itself.

I also, after some listening, decided to omit most show tunes, except when they were highly relevant to pop music and the counterculture in general (as in Hair, for instance). As much as I love watching Mary Poppins and The Sound of Music with my kids, that style of music seems to have a different type of aesthetic than most of what’s here.

Other than that, I listened to just about everything I came across in my research. There’s a smattering of contemporary classical music (especially by minimalist composers) and early electronic music here. These have had a profound influence on anything that uses synthesized sounds, samples, and trance-inducing repetition—in other words, a large part of the forward-thinking music released in the past few decades. And there’s more than a smattering of world music, too. (I must be honest that here especially I’ve stuck close to my sources, and my knowledge doesn’t stray much beyond them.)

But most of what’s here is the type of thing you might expect:  rock, pop, R&B, blues, country, folk, etc.

Couldn’t you have edited it down a bit?

Well, yeah, probably.  However, I tend to like most everything when I really start listening to it; even things I initially dismissed as lame I began liking after I forced myself through the first few listens.  Hindsight is fairly clear, too, so most albums that are still remembered after 50 years are the ones that are still worth hearing; almost everything I listened to was at least pretty good.

Really, though, the main reason I didn’t edit this down is that that would be beside the point, in a way.  I mean, why edit it down to the fifteen or so bands you already know?  The whole point of this was to uncover the overlooked gems that I didn’t hear on the album rock radio I grew up with, to paint a picture of the breadth and variety and gradual evolution of the music during this pivotal decade.  I intended it to be expansive.  And so it is.

Are these playlists comprehensive, then?  I mean, they have a ton of music, so they must have all the key tracks from the ‘60s, right?

Um, well, almost.  But not quite.

For example, the song that AcclaimedMusic.net’s aggregate ranking lists as the number one critically acclaimed song of all time (Bob Dylan’s “Like a Rolling Stone”) is not on any of these playlists, even though it’s from the ‘60s.  In this case, this omission is due to my self-imposed limit of three tracks per album.  It just so turns out that the aforementioned song is not, in my opinion, one of the three best songs on its album (Highway 61 Revisited).  So it didn’t make the cut.  Sorry.  Yes, it’s an essential song for any serious music-lover—and certainly more recognized than any other on the album.  But it ain’t the best.  (That should tell you just how excellent I think that album is, by the way.)

There are plenty of essential Beatles and Stones and other artists’ songs that also didn’t make the cut for the same reason—they weren’t among the three best on their respective albums.  Many an essential album has far more than three essential tracks.

Then there were the classic songs I omitted because, even though their fame made them familiar, they didn’t actually seem that great to me. In general, my tastes lean toward the extremes without completely embracing them.  I can love an upbeat, sunny pop song and an angry garage-punk anthem and the occasional saddening slow dirge, but many classic mid-tempo hits strike me as a bit of a snooze, and the sappiest love songs make me want to hurl. So there are some pop hits many would consider essential that didn’t make my cut.

Finally, there was something about a few songs that I just couldn’t stomach.  The Righteous Brothers “Unchained Melody,” for example, has some pretty Ghostly, er, I mean ghastly associations I just can’t shake.  Yes the production is exquisitely lush, courtesy of Phil Spector; but the end result still sounds as sappy to me as it did in the equally sappy film that spawned the song’s early ‘90s comeback.  And can anyone sing “Sweet Caroline” in any way other than ironically? I can’t.

What’s with all the singles?  I thought your compilations were always just three tracks per album.

I’ve always been an album guy.  With my yearly compilations in the 2000s, that’s been my thing: pick the three best songs off of a broad selection of the year’s critically acclaimed albums, pick the best 30-35 albums of the bunch, and make the compilation with that.  Occasionally a non-album single or two might pop up on the track list, but rarely more than that.

With the 1960s, though, that wasn’t going to work.  Back at the start of the ‘60s, albums just weren’t the thing.  It was all about the singles; albums were an afterthought.  Sometimes an artist’s best songs never even appeared on a non-compilation album.  By the end of the decade, albums were the primary vehicle for an artist to express his or her musical ambitions, but for the first half of the decade this wasn’t the case.

So it was essential, really, to include plenty of singles here.   And I did.

I should note that the album as a musical art form is becoming less significant these days, with the shift from listening to purchased physical recordings (such as albums and CDs) to listening via streaming services.

Is it supposed to be written ‘60s or 60’s?

Well, technically, an apostrophe is for abbreviations and possessives, not plurals—at least that’s how they taught it back in the day.  So since the term is an abbreviation of 1960s, and the “s” at the end is clearly a plural not a possessive, ‘60s is obviously the correct way to write it, not 60’s. I can still remember moments of collective, conspiratorial laughter in my high school English class at all those uninformed, ignorant buffoons who incorrectly wrote it 60’s.

But nowadays I see grammar texts saying 60’s is okay.  Go figure.  All grammar is going to hell, and civilization along with it.

In a related grammatical/formatting note, I give song titles in quotation marks (like poems, short stories, and television episodes) as they are a part of a collection; I italicize album titles (like poetry and story collections, television series, novels, and films).  The Brits seem to do this differently, and some US magazines, too.  But to hell with them, too.

The 1960s: A Decade in Music

Art Citation:

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