50 Nonconsecutive Years Of Joyful Noise

Did Pitchfork come up with the "20 songs that spark joy" meme? Somebody else on Twitter? I dont wanna look. I love Marie Kendo to much to explicitly co-opt her phrase, but I'll still share a bunch of songs that make me joyful, with some extra criteria (one song per year, one song per act) to make it easier for me to indulge. I'll even throw in some blurbs that make explicit what sounds from the last 60 odd years are most apt to bring me joy. Sorry so alternaboy, but if you aren't into the joys of an alternaboy, what on earth are you doing here?

1958: Huey "Piano" Smith & The Clowns, “Don’t You Just Know It”
(Assumes profound Bono voice): Joyful noise was born in New Orleans. And if it already existed, then it was bathed in the mouth of the Mississippi river, and born again.

1960: Fats Domino, “Natural Born Lover”
A gloriously long B-side where Fats can rest his feet and tickle the ivories, knowing he's made it to New Orleans, ready to start again.

1963: The Beatles, “She Loves You”
Young men glowing with the knowlege of love.

1964: Rolling Stones, “It’s All Over Now”
Young men glowing with the knowledge they're not in love.

1965: Little Jimmy Dickens, “May The Bird Of Paradise Fly Up Your Nose”
The joy of hating some petty asshole, and the joy of being one.

1966: Animals, “Inside - Looking Out”
The Animals turning a prison chant into proto-metal, Eric Burdon rising like a goddamn phoenix.

1967: Stevie Wonder, “I Was Made To Love Her”
"I was knee-high to a chicken/ and that love bug bit me." By the end of the song, he's a giant, and still growing.

1968: Bob Seger System, “Ramblin’ Gamblin Man”
TS: "Ain't good lookin', but you know I ain't shy" vs. "you can have your funky world. See you 'round!"

1969: Velvet Underground, “What Goes On”
I've spent most of my life saying I'd like to live in the solo on here. I've got a dozen or two songs on twenty-odd-years-old cassettes where I multi-tracked guitar breaks to prove it. If only I'd mastered that endless groove...

1970: Van Morrison, “And It Stoned Me”
Seriously, it's wild how good a glass of water can be sometimes.

1971: James Brown, “Get Up, Get Into, Get Involved - pt. 1”
Play this for somebody younger than you, and remind them there's no loops on it.

1972: Roxy Music, “Re-Make/Re-Model”
I don't call this kind of thing "proto-punk." I call it "art-garage." Better to recognize the dizzying glory of the synthesis, rather than reduce it to cultural prelude.

1973: Steve Miller Band, “The Joker”

1974: Brian Eno, “The True Wheel”
This could have been "Seven Deadly Finns," "King's Lead Hat," or just about anything from Here Comes The Warm Jets. Fifty years later, the sound abandoned by its author before I was born, nothing signifies the thrilling, addictive possibilities of semipopular rock studiocraft more.

1975: David Bowie, “TVC15”
Leave it to Dave to cross Eno with Huey "Piano," and then claim he has no memory of recording it.

1977: Clash, “Complete Control”
It's not about whether the rock & roll lifestyle can be thrilling and triumphant while progressive and ethical. It's about whether a band can make you want to believe it, even for a couple minutes.

1978: Television, “Glory”
There's a Bill Callahan lyric, "have faith in wordless knowledge," that I always misheard as "have faith in worthless knowledge." Adventure, the album this leads off, is basically a gospel album celebrating the mondegreen, leading the listener in a prayer that bohemian beauty is enough.

1979: Swell Maps, “Spitfire Parade”
I don't call it "post-punk," if I can help it. I call it "artpunk," with this the most maniacal song on the genre's most uproarious album.

1980: Killing Joke, “Pssyche”
Probably the most psychotic example of joy on this playlist, foaming furiously about the abusive hypocrises of the powerful, questioning your complicity and blasting the listener with white noise while the bassist keeps asking us to get up and boogie.

1981: Adam & The Ants, “Stand And Deliver”
You think the last joke was sick? Here comes more artpunks on horseback, yodeling about how fashion and fun are infinitely better than record collections, "excuses, and deep-meaning philosophies where only showbiz loses." As I said in regards to the Clash, they just have to make you believe it for a few cacophonous minutes.

1982: Siouxsie & The Banshees, “Slowdive”
In which artpunks accept they might just be making a sexy, spooky new type of dance music.

1984: Replacements, “I Will Dare”
In which a dorky midwestern boy, too self-conscious to dress punk, gets up the nerve to ask a girl at the new wave party to dance, and have his band play something they could dance to.

1985: New Order, “The Perfect Kiss”
Artpunk techno euphoria!

1986: R.E.M., “I Believe”
Another prayer to bohemian beauty, this one from the band that defined my precocious bohemian-aspirant youth.

1987: Prince, “Housequake”
Another Stevie/Eno type, one capable of sitting alone in a studio and creating the James Brown party of his dreams. Loops may be a factor here, though. And he did outsource the horns. But still! Damn!

1988: LL Cool J, “I’m The Type Of Guy”
A mack fantasy so ridiculously smug - the chuckle, the smooch, the casual air of proud pity - that many rappers, guys who bragged in rhyme for a living, identified with the cuck and resented LL for it. While my exploits are nowhere as impressively amorous, I do know the joy of hearing some guy whine "oh, you think you're so great" while you resist the urge to blow.them a kiss.

1991: Ministry, “Jesus Built My Hotrod”
"Surfin' Bird" almost made the cut, please accept this art-metal update instead.

1992: Flaming Lips, “Frogs”
More bohemian middle American artpunk gospel with lots of wild overdubs.

1993: Stereolab, “Crest”
In which French & English intellectuals reduce the righteous art-garage aesthetic to its blaring, bombastic essence for six minutes. Entire lyric: "If there's been a way to build it, there must be a way to destroy it. Things are not all that out of control."

1994: Beastie Boys, “Sure Shot”
Their finest moment, proving that joy and maturity aren't antithetical.

1995: Rocket From Crypt, “Human Torch"
A frantic, runny-nosed blitz of boy-on-boy violence in the name of hating hate. There's calmly sharing a meme about the need to physicaly confront threats to others, and then there's finding yourself forced to stop some shit, pulse racing and feeling good about it (at least for the moment). "There's a guy who spits up blood, and he knows my name...here's to you, human torch, you're so fucking lame."

1996: Busta Rhymes, “Woo Hah!! Got You All In Check”
Or maybe you're used to finding yourself in some shit by now.

1997: Sleater-Kinney, “Things You Say”
A deep cut on Dig Me Out, probably due to preceding "Dance Song '97" on the tracklist. Maybe its Rust Never Sleeps guitar, turbulent grind and valkyrie vocal are too familiar at this point in the album for people to realize what a thrilling refusal to abandon dreams of transcendence it is. But somewhere over the last 25 years I realized nothing on the album gave me more goosebumps.

1998: Scrawl, “Public Image”
Midwestern women at the new wave party doing righteous artpunk for themselves.

2000: DMX, “Party Up (Up In Here)”
Did I say Killing Joke was the most psychotic thing here? Debatable.

2001: Fugazi, “Full Disclosure”
Another band that excelled at various keywords celebrated above, reduced to hysterics by the farcical, bullshit grind of it all, before atypically bringing in some ladies to coo in concurrence that the only answer is honesty (and violently strumming your guitar with your hand way up the neck).

2003: Superchunk, “Beat My Guest”
The B-side of "Stand & Deliver," recorded in 1992 for a split-single of Antmusic with Rocket From The Crypt, not released until a rarities comp in 2003 (Rocket released their "Press Darlings" a decade earlier). Nobody covers artpunk more joyously than these guys.

2004: The Futureheads, “Hounds Of Love”
Unless turning Kate Bush into a sensitive man's pub chant counts.

2006: Hot Chip, “Over And Over”
Goofballs who can't understand why more bands don't emulate New Order, giggling at their own meta (play Laid Back's "White Horse" and then play this again) and celebrating "the joy of repetition." My dudes!

2007: Queens Of The Stone Age, “Misfit Love”
I apologize if this is getting repetitive, but how can I not include a song that crosses "I'm That Type Of Guy" with "Crest," or maybe "The Joker" with "Full Disclosure."

2008: Electric Six, “We Were Witchy Witchy White Women”
Art-garage acolytes mistaken for a novelty band by everyone who hasn't heard the dozen plus albums they released after their novelty hits. This playlist lacks any New York Dolls, Wire or Pere Ubu. Let this absurd gossip-blog-era blitz with extended instrumental coda be my apology.

2009: MSTRKRFT, “Click Click (feat. E-40)"
I love techno-rap-rock collaborations where the vocalist acts like nobody has ever done this before. This might be my favorite.

2010: Justin Bieber, “Baby”
I am not saying this is better than Jackson 5 or even the Osmonds. But I'll never forget the joy I felt hearing this for the first time, amazed to that a new pop single could force me to memorize the hook before it was over (I was less amazed when I learned it was written by The-Dream and Tricky Stewart). Also, this playlist lacked Ludacris, king of the rare guest rap that is both spirited and cognizant of the lyrical content bracketing it.

2011: M83, “Midnight City”
I wrote this off as too derivative of earlier M83 highlights, until a comedy video made me appreciate it as definitive, the climax of their John Hughes dreamscape. From about 2010-2020 I was too high on dreams of maturity and the ability to explore old shit on Spotify to bother with new music. Only Top 40/alt hits at their most rapturous made my radar. Like this one.

2013: Capital Cities, “Safe And Sound”
Ah, the music industry. If MGMT wasn't going to record a "Kids" redux with straightforward romantic lyrics, radio would find someone who would! It's miracles of commerce like this, a declaration of devotion in the face of apocalypse with a trumpet hook, that make it hard for me to fully rage against the machine.

2014: Becky G, “Shower”
Or this! Where someone heard Robyn's "Be Mine" and said "ok, but what if we found a goofy American teenager rather than a goofy adult Swede pretending to be an American teenager to do it."

2015: !!!, “Bam City”
Don't get me wrong, there's nothing wrong with being a goofy adult. These guys have been a sassy, self-impressed Stop Making Sense tribute act far longer than the Talking Heads were even together. And I'm delighted they're still preening over the beat. As If has two great singles that celebrate how they get to tour the planet and you don't. I flipped a coin and included this one.

2016: Beck, “Wow"
When I was a kid, the radio was full of dudes around 40 making digital asses of themselves, aping modern trends and refusing to give up airspace. Generation X was either too demure or too small to enjoy the same privilege, so I truly appreciate Beck bucking the trend, and delivering the essence of Dadpop on this track. Giddy up!

2017: Eagles Of Death Metal, “Blinded By The Light”
Eagles Of Death Metal are kind of a hyper-charged Canned Heat where the guy with the high-voice sings everything, and the drummer plays like he still wants the attention he gets leading Queens Of The Stone Age. I could have included almost anything they recorded in the '00s on here. Instead, I included one of their contributions to the Super Troopers 2 soundtrack, a Manfred Mann/Bruce Springsteen cover based on memory rather than fidelity, with a tighter arrangement and an unmistakable deployment of "wrapped up like a douche." The work of heroes, in my opinion.

2021: Illuminati Hotties, “MMMOOOAAAAYAYA"
Though I listen to lots more new music these days than I did in the '10s, I don't expect it to provide me the uncomplicated joy I find in songs from earlier years. Life has a hard enough time doing it, why should it be easy for millennials and zoomers with guitars? This manic quirkfest from Sarah Tudzin gives me hope they can make something undeniably giddy of the modern mess we find ourselves in, though.