Unlike Rolling Stone 's list of top 100 pop songs , the NPR 100 seems contrived, the result of a government-mediated list merger rather than a coherent viewpoint. This year's Charles Ives is another illustration of how protean our most American composer remains. Whatever the shortcomings of the process, the result is a fascinating mirror of elite and popular musical taste today. Equating the song genre with American music does, however, represent a growing convergence of popular and critical opinions. In the past decade film scores have begun to attract similar scholarly attention.
Most American cities have a couple of oldies radio stations.
Numbingly repeated ads on late-night TV urge us to buy anthologies of the greatest hits from the fifties to the eighties. It is easy to dismiss oldies as the ephemera of the Me Generation. Oldies are forever linked to their actual historical setting, naming the moment of our fortunate fall into identity and conveying a palpable sense of place and time. Oldies are our inner classics. They shape the soundtrack of our lives around indelible emotional moments that remain as vivid as a presidential assassination or an earthquake.