Jason Ankeny

“Free Bird” is the sacred text of Southern rock, and like all sacred texts, it is the object of both devotion and derision. Lynyrd Skynyrd’s elegiac magnum opus is so deeply burned into the collective musical consciousness, so inescapable across decades of nonstop radio airplay, that it’s all but impossible to separate the song from the passions it inspires. Because everyone knows “Free Bird,” everyone has an opinion about “Free Bird” — which is its blessing and its curse. You either love it or hate it; indifference is not an option.

Jason Ankeny

“Hook” holds you in contempt for succumbing to its charms. Blues Traveler’s savagely satirical follow-up to its breakthrough single “Run-Around” skewers all facets of the hit-making machine, from creatively bankrupt artists to soulless corporate media outlets to listeners who gobble up whatever tripe the music industry conspires to shove down our throats — tripe including “Hook” itself, as the song gleefully reminds you at every conceivable turn. Whether you love it, hate it, love to hate it or hate to love it, “Hook” declares checkmate the moment it enters your consciousness: it’s a metafictional hall of mirrors from which there is no escape.

• /songs/601L401Q44018H3

JD Scott

“Bringin’ on the Heartbreak” isn’t simply the best power ballad of the 1980s; it’s also the savviest. The second single from Def Leppard’s sophomore album High ‘N’ Dry ushered power ballads squarely into the pop mainstream, demonstrating that ostensibly earnest love songs burnished with the sound and spirit of hard rock could dominate commercial airwaves — a formula for success proven time and again throughout the decade, and beyond.

• Bringin' On The Heartbreak

Jason Ankeny

As a song, “Here It Goes Again” is a footnote. But as a marketing stunt, it’s a milestone — a harbinger of a world where fame and fortune are measured in views, likes and shares, not record sales, radio airplay or downloads. Released online roughly a year prior to the introduction of Apple’s iPhone, the philosopher’s stone of the social media age, “Here It Goes Again” unleashed the power of viral video to chart a new path to celebrity, vividly demonstrating digital media’s unprecedented capacity to establish more direct connections between performers and audiences while disintermediating labels and broadcasters from the star-maker machinery.

KORD

No rock act better encapsulates the zeitgeist of the Reagan Era than Huey Lewis and the News, whose slickly inoffensive bar-band anthems dominated the Billboard Top 40 from 1982 to 1987. And no song better encapsulates Huey Lewis and the News than “I Want a New Drug,” which embraces the “Just Say No” fervor of its times by rejecting chemically-induced euphoria in favor of an altogether different kind of narcotic buzz: the thrill of infatuation.

• I Want A New Drug

Jason Ankeny

“You’re Nobody ‘Till Somebody Loves You” bottles for all eternity the essence of mid-20th century cool. Dean Martin’s 1960 classic is insouciance incarnate, a singularly swinging evocation of postwar America on the cusp of a new frontier. Sure, Martin’s pal Frank Sinatra was the matchless pop stylist, the Chairman of the Board, the undisputed leader of the gaggle of crooners, movie stars and sycophants known as the Rat Pack — those golden gods in sharkskin suits and tilted Homburg hats who defined style and swagger for generations to come. But Martin was the straw that stirred the drink, the unflappable, sleepy-voiced buddha who made fame and fortune seem so effortless, even meaningless. He was a man who had it all, and wanted almost none of it — what biographer Nick Tosches dubbed a true menefreghista, Italian for “one who simply did not give a fuck.”

• You're Nobody Till Somebody Loves You

Jason Ankeny

“Shotgun” is the Motown classic that sounds nothing at all like a Motown classic. Junior Walker and the All Stars’ roadhouse R&B juggernaut is untamed and unbound — a wild card in a catalog synonymous with sequinned style and silk-trimmed sophistication. Released on Motown’s Soul subsidiary in early 1965 (a pivotal year in the company’s commercial and creative ascent, thanks to crossover blockbusters including the Four Tops’ “I Can’t Help Myself [Sugar Pie, Honey Bunch]” and the Supremes’ “Stop! In the Name of Love”), “Shotgun” delivers gutbucket grooves to rival the grittiest, greasiest records from competitors Stax and Atlantic, but despite topping the Billboard R&B charts for four nonconsecutive weeks, it remains an outlier in the Motown canon, its primordial energy unmatched by the label before or after — a tantalizing taste of a more incendiary Motown Sound that might have been. 

KORD

Close your eyes, and you can picture them with startling clarity: six impossibly wholesome American teens (three boys and three girls, the latter with hair of gold like their mother, the youngest one in curls) dancing on the checkerboard stage of a televised talent showcase,  lip-synching the corniest, campiest pop song imaginable — a song so indelibly seared into your memory, you couldn’t dislodge it even if you wanted to.

Jason Ankeny

“American Pie” is the baby-boom generation’s elegy of choice for the Sixties, a requiem mass for a decade that for Don McLean, the song’s writer and singer, came to a screeching halt sometime around the Summer of Love, just eight years after the tragedy McLean famously proclaimed “The Day the Music Died.” Viewed more than half a century out from its introduction into the cultural consciousness, it sure seems like a strange choice for a generational anthem — a self-consciously mythopoetic campfire ballad that surveys the changes wrought by the counterculture, and embraces a very different path forward. Perhaps “American Pie” has been poked and prodded so often, and by so many, that over time virtually all of its original meaning has been lost. Or maybe it just never had much meaning to begin with.