This Must Be...Pop

I always think I should post more links to things I read on other sites. (See also: previous post) Such as: the ongoing Ultimate Pop Song Tournament at The Critical Condition. It's fun to read and vote, to see how others comment, to ponder the selection and seeding of songs; for example, while I think "Since U Been Gone" is a perfectly fine song, its high seeding and presence in the total absence of Britney Spears is baffling to me.

You can see to some extent how the age of the bracket-makers leaves some gaps in the field. The overall field of sixty-four skews about 2:1 in favor of songs released between 1980 and 1995, as opposed to 1996 through 2011, which is interesting in that it's prompted me to think about what songs have been formative to my taste in music and what I see as quintessentially "pop." I'm twenty-five now, so I was ideally positioned for pop music's resurrection in the late nineties with the attendant rise of TRL and the introduction of the Now That's What I Call Music series to the US, and thus probably place more importance on the status of the Spice Girls, Hanson and their immediate successors than someone whose formative years were in the eighties would.

Anyway, it makes a pretty solid playlist, suitable for scoring, say, a three-hour drive down the highway with stretches spent sitting in traffic. (She notes, from recent experience.) I love that it's reminded me how much I liked "Not Ready to Make Nice," and prompted me to finally hunt down songs I've waffled over adding to my collection for years, like "What's Love Got to Do With It" and "Edge of Seventeen." It's a compelling project; given the set of parameters - 1980-2011, top 40 charters, one song per artist - how would you select a top 64 (50? 100?) that represented what you understand to be the ultimate in pop music?