Look, I'm a very busy man, and by that I mean that someone put the ENTIRE run of Seventh Doctor stories online for free, and I can't be bothered talking to you people about music all the dingalong day when that's waiting for my rapt attention.
Unfortunately, the editor was all like, "Write or you don't get paid," and I was all like, "You're not my real mom," and, well, it didn't get any better from that point. [Ummmm... -- ed.]
So music journalism, let's see... a pop song is three minutes long and it goes ABABCAB. That's what Mr. Radio taught me, at any rate. The truth is, some folks can do more in a few seconds than a prog-rock anthem can do in ten minutes. Today we salute the tweet-level tunes, songs just long enough to cleanse the artistic palate while you wait for the next episode to cue.
10. Stormtroopers of Death, "The Ballad of Jimi Hendrix" Any discussion about short songs must begin with S.O.D.'s "tribute" to the one and only Jimi Hendrix. You can't sum up reality better than "You're dead," which makes me think this song was actually a musical attempt to contact the restless spirit of Hendrix and assure him it was time to ascend to glory and not haunt the living. Yeah... that's totally it.
9. Descendents, "Eunuch Boy" There may be no greater masters of the under-30-seconds song than the Descendents, and picking just one was a true chore of love. In the end, I feel that the story of a boy that loses his genitals in a lawnmower is the best representative of their best album, Everything Sucks, so I went with that.
8. They Might be Giants, "Decisions Makers" Between the "Fingertips" suites from Apollo 18 and 2006's Nanobots, TMBG has made incalculable contributions to the short-song form. Since there are so few in that form that feel truly epic, I singled out the operatic brilliance of "Decision Makers," for its grandiose pretentions as well as a subtle dig on how often higher-ups in the record industry have decided for bands the length of their songs.
List continues on the next page.
