In the half of this century that I've lived in, it's quite common to encounter "best-of-the-year" lists of movies or records in newspapers and magazines, starting in late December. Indeed, the "idea" for this book came to me tonight when I noticed a "First Annual International Music Writers Poll Ballot" lying on the floor of my workspace, waiting to be filled in, and the notion entered my head that, um, this is January 25, 1998, must be time to start thinking about my "best-of-the-century" list....

Hence the title and structure of the book. It's a tease. Intended to tease out of me (I have to entice the Muse, or the Writer within) comments on a buncha seemingly unrelated works of art of various sorts that have gotten my attention and greatly enriched or enlightened me in the last 50 years (I was born May 19, 1948, in Boston, Mass.– conceived nine months earlier in Northern California, also U.S.A.). Including works from earlier in the century that I eventually discovered thanks to their reputations or serendipity or good luck. Okay, Picasso was always there, indeed there was one odd print of a card game with strangely shaped people and hunks of cheese, on the wall of the hallway in my childhood home... But I hadn't actually made a connection with this well-known gentleman's oeuvre until a lucky day in 1980. I happened to be back in New York City with some free time (I'd lived there in '67-68 and '72-76) , and a friend gave me his Museum of Modern Art membership card and pointed me (from his midtown publishing office) towards MOMA's then-current exhibition, "Pablo Picasso: A Retrospective." I wandered through the chronological presentation for a long afternoon–hey, the show was only there for four months, and all that stuff hardly ever has been together in one place before, nor, probably, will it ever be again...I really did get lucky; ignorance would have kept me from the show, but for a gentle shove from my guardian or guiding angels–and on that day I got religion. Wow. What's the difference between that experience and seeing/hearing the Grateful Dead and Jefferson Airplane at the Fillmore Auditorium 12/31/66? Uh, you could say that in the MOMA case the artist wasn't present at the same time as the observer, but to say that you'd have to deny the extraordinary degree to which the painter, especially that painter, is present in his work.

And I digress, or get ahead of myself. What I really want to be sure to say is that I'm teasing if I give the impression I'm going to try to rank the "top" artistic creations of this just-ending century in the Western world, or any world... That kind of hierarchical approach is contrary to certain philosophies of life that I hold dear. True, I did once write a book about "the 100 best rock and roll singles." I didn't rank 'em, but I did enjoy selecting 'em, even knowing that the best I could hope for was a 50% overlap between my list and the list any reader might construct for her- or himself. This book, though, is something different. It's a minuscule cross-section, a few of the 20th century's greatest aesthetic hits, necessarily limited to the rather small sampling that could reasonably come to one person's attention. I'm not even trying, actually, to make a carefully thought-out representation (or list) of my own preferences. These are all creations I believe are worthy to be on a list of, or in a collection of, great artistic works (achievements) of the 20th century. Okay, a catalog for some kinda future (multimedia) museum show.

They have been blindly selected by my Muse, or her seeing-eye-dog, with the intention of demonstrating (and therefore arguing; an essay is a kind of argument) that "art" is what we, the receivers, observers, listeners, readers, experience when we encounter it. "Great art," then, is not some objective phenomenon; it is an essentially subjective, and often profoundly spiritual, personal experience on the part of a person or many persons reading a book, listening to a recording, looking at a painting, watching a play or a film... The greatest hits of the 20th century happened mostly in private places. Um, even at a boxing match (speaking of hits in private places) there is a private catharsis of feelings experienced within each spectator. It's a public place, a public show, but the feelings generated are mostly internal, and personal. And so let us move on, ladies and gentlemen, to the first entry, here not because it is my favorite Beatles song, nor a recording that almost anyone would rank among the century's best. More because it isn't, and thus can be enjoyed simply for itself, not for any pretentious critical reasons. And because it did in fact hit me hard at one moment in my life (and still can), and because it speaks quite directly of the odd temporal nature of such experiences. Art exists not so much in the moment when it is created as in the moment when it is received. "Then we will remember..." True indeed.

#1: "Things We Said Today" (recorded June 2, 1964) by The Beatles

"Things We Said Today" has always for me been a visionary song. Although it is a marvelously direct and unaffected love song, somehow for me the chorus has always sounded as though the singer (and I, the listener) are conscious at this moment of how precious these moments, these years (of the Beatles' creative flowering and of the listeners' youth and collective great awakening) will seem to us whenever we think of them in our future lives. What a wonderful message, and how perfect the melody and rhythm that accompany and carry it: "Someday when we're dreaming/Deep in love, not a lot to say/Then we will remember/Things we said today." This is what this book is about: things once said, moments shared, and how they endure.. All great art is an expression of, and an opportunity to experience, this moment. What it puts us in touch with is this love for life, or this pain, that we are experiencing, and perhaps talking about, right now, today.

I get chills when Paul sings that word, "today," and the music changes, opens into another realm, moves forward and circles back to itself. This is a "hook," a quintessential device in rock and roll and most 20th century popular music. The song (the performance, the recording) begins with a dramatic guitar flourish, fingers quickly down and up, repeated twice before the first word of the song, "You." This flourish returns (very satisfyingly) after the end of the first verse-and-chorus, the word "today." By the time another verse-and-chorus have gone by, we are waiting for, anticipating, that guitar flourish, but this time it's a little different, bass and drums and percussion echoing but not reproducing the expected guitar riff, and then the third verse starts so suddenly it feels more like a bridge, some kind of intriguing leap forward rather than a return to familiar territory.

Elegant simplicity. Four verses, each ending in a four-line chorus that ends with the title phrase. Great simple words that allow/encourage the reader to project profundity onto them. The guitar flourish/hook opens the song, closes the first verse, is echoed but teasingly held back at the end of verses two and three, and finally returns at the end of the fourth verse and of the song–a fulfilling reprise, still somewhat restrained so you're left hoping to hear the song, and the sound of that full flourish, again.

Simple but not dumb. Remarkably artful. The gentleness of the vocal is moving after the energetic guitar opening, and this gentleness and the simple beauty of the melody notes that count out the first six syllables of the song (immediately repeated in the next six, the next line) all serve to communicate the singer's wish to be as lovingly "kind" as he praises "you" (the object of the song, the "girl") for being.

The subtleties of the verse structure, when you look closely, are surprising. The first verse is four lines, rhyming ABAB (nice two-syllable B rhyme: "love me"/"of me"). Then the four-line chorus, ABCB. Verse 2 rhymes AAAA, but with the marvelous twist that the first and third A rhymes are followed by an extra word, "girl" ("mine, girl"/"kind girl," similar to the "love me"/"of me" in the previous verse, except this time it's AAAA: "mine"/"time"/"kind"/"find." Whew. The second chorus transforms itself with a lot of new language and shifting pronouns: "Someday when I'm lonely" becomes, "Someday when we're dreaming." This rewritten chorus, which stays the same through the rest of the song, is a sharp change from first verse-and-chorus, which seem to be about someone (presumably the singer) facing a period of separation from a dearly-loved one (like a world tour?) and being comforted by assurances of the power of love to transcend space ("You'll be thinking of me/Somehow I will know"). In the second verse and chorus the subject is not spatial separation but instead closeness enduring in time ("You say you will love me/Till the end of time"). Masters, or at least magicians, of space and time, singing in your ears right now, in 1964, and, presumably, till the end of time.

And the structural inventiveness continues. The third verse has eight lines instead of four, and as if to compensate for this break in symmetry, the fourth verse is the third verse repeated. And so the song ends. Those eight lines have this elegant rhyme scheme:

ABABACAC. The third and fourth A's have "girl" appended: "kind"/"blind"/"mine girl"/"time girl." If that went by too fast to assimilate, don't worry, it's about to be repeated.

Just as those things we said today will be repeated, in our loving memories, for years (or perhaps centuries) to come. Listen, my man William Shakespeare, trying either to express love or to get living expenses from his Sponsor, said circa 1595, "So long as men can breathe or eyes can see/So long lives this and this gives life to thee." "This" is the poem, and man was he right!! In the same way, for many centuries, as long as humans can breathe and hear, we will indeed remember these "things" Paul and John and George and Ringo said that day. Many things, many days, many songs. But this special song acknowledges and describes the process.

That's enough on craft, perhaps, but it's hard to stop praising it. That powerfully gentle-and-assertive six-beat melody recurs in the first line of the chorus, part of that refrain's great power: "Someday when we're dreaming..." And how about those half-rhymes? The most brilliant is in the repeating verse (3 and 4): "be the only one"/"we'll go on and on." And they make it work. Milton would smile.

I realize, and hope, that some of you reading these comments are not from around here, temporally speaking. So it makes sense then that I should tell you (no way you would know, unless Beatles 101 is a required high school course in your century) that "Things We Said Today" was not a hit record in the Beatles' era, despite its prominent place in this book (#1 isn't higher than #2 or #40 in my system, but opening act is an honorable position anyway). "Things We Said Today" was the B-side (backside) of the hit single "A Hard Day's Night" in the U.K. In the U.S. it was on a little-remembered album called Something New. (Both were released in July 1964, close to the Gulf of Tonkin turning point in the Vietnam War.) Not a song that got a lot of attention in its day, as Beatles songs go. Nor since then, thus far. But listen: people don't just love the Beatles for their best-known or most-praised records. Talk to real listeners, real fans, and you'll find that there are "lesser" records and songs that are as precious to them as any of the famous ones. They have very strong feelings for and allegiance to certain songs, not just for sentimental reasons but because something about that song speaks to and for them. No matter when they first heard it. What I'm trying to say is that a common, and legitimate, relationship with great art is you find something, even in the repertoire of the century's most popular recording artists, that somehow is your secret treasure. This is one of mine. So as a "greatest hit" I'd like it to stand in for many hundred thousand other great moments in the art history of our era that won't necessarily make it into the curricula, you know, the official greatest hits lists of academia and scholarship.

The Beatles themselves, like Picasso, are one of the obvious huge hits (artists like meteorites are measured by impact) of the 20th C. What isn't always said is this was not simply a natural consequence of their enormous talent. Certainly they had talent, but also they came along at exactly the right moment. And to their credit, they made the best possible use of that moment. They let the world's attention inspire them. Again and again, starting over with each new record. For seven years.

There can't be another Beatles nor a reunion of the old Beatles, because the moment was part of the music, and that moment is not around any more. But the music that did get made then is eternal, and its moment lives on within it. Like the fellows said, "Love is here to stay/And that's enough to make you mine." Like Shakespeare, they dare to boast that the love and attention of the "you" they're singing to will not fade in times to come. I like it that the song can be heard this way. And I like the rhymes and the guitar hook and the evident loving-kindness and sincerity of the writer and the singer. At least at the moment of writing and singing.

And now for something completely different... That's what we want from art, isn't it? That's what we get from "Sister Ray." Henry Rollins once reminisced about this song (recording) being used at youth parties to clear rooms (because of its relentless discordant noisiness). It can also be used, and often is by informed music lovers of all ages, to clear minds (self-administered). A tonic. I absolutely guarantee its restorative powers. And it would be difficult for me to think of a single 20th century work of art (um, perhaps to a lesser degree Fritz Lang's Metropolis?) that so powerfully and accurately evokes the human and other-than-human environment we find ourselves in at our historical moment. The noise of the machines. But most of all the inflamed racing of our own hearts as the awakening process rushes forward. These four artists (Moe, Lou, John, Sterling) captured the era in a performance so eloquent it literally created a new musical and aesthetic language that has been of enormous use to many generations of avant-garde musical artists since. And that's not all. "Sister Ray" has been and continues to be a fantastic jumping-off place, and as such has had tremendous influence, but what's even better is that (I'm certain) it speaks to the ages–never going out of date because it provides its own context. This piece of artwork (using the relatively new "recorded music" medium) is another that "age cannot wither." It is a remarkably compact (although at 17_ minutes it was and still is one of the longest works of its kind, rock and roll album tracks) articulation of a vision, a vision of an Order beyond what can be grasped by the cognitive mind. Structure and anarchy, coexisting in powerful (vibrant) interrelationship. A revelation. Not for the faint-hearted. "Just like Sister Ray said..."