Music is subjective, but so is the idea of perfection. What makes a perfect song?
-Is it about a tight intuitive arrangement, and meaningful lyrics?
-Is it about capturing the spirit of the times?
-Is it about being inventive, ahead of the curve, groundbreaking?
-Is it about that perfect chord change before the key change?
-Is it something intangible?
We’ll be debating all that and more as we create our perfect songs playlist. We need your help, too – as fellow curators of this list, you will need to attempt to be impartial, knowledgeable, fair. You will need to both harness and kill your inner music snob.
Whether or not you personally like a song is beside the point, this is a collection of ‘perfect songs’: a genre-blind, gender-blind, era-spanning power list of those songs that simply got it 100% right.
Even if part of that ‘perfection’ is a sloppy, imperfect recording that perfectly captures the energy and youth of a performance.
Even if the reason the song is perfect is because it is inventive or progressive for its times, such as an eight-minute radio song in the late ’60s, or a Motown single – written to a tempo that is double the speed of the human heart, so your body has a physical reaction to it.
Even if Celine Dion sings it…
It might just be a perfect pop nugget, three minutes of joyful bliss that sounds so innate to the universe that you can’t believe it took so long for someone to come up with it.
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So, curators – help shape this list into a living document of perfect musical moments.
Vote a song onto the list, argue one off. Have fun, get passionate, take it personally. Be super specific, be extremely general.
What makes a perfect song? What perfect song would you put on this list?
Start curating. Vote below, and join the debate in the Perfect Songs Group.
