Stand and Deliver!

I was amused to discover a couple of weeks ago that the greatest song of all time, topping a list of five hundred songs as voted for by a panel that included song-writing music types like Elvis Costello and Joni Mitchell as well as critics, turns out to be Bob Dylan’s ‘Like A Rolling Stone’. Number two on the list was ‘(I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction’, by the Rolling Stones. And the list was published in the music magazine entitled… Rolling Stone!

I realise other commentators ran with this at the time of publication – the irony… or coincidence… or shameless self-promotion entailed in the top positions of the list. But if this is clever marketing or self-aggrandiszement on the part of that magazine, good luck to them! It’s worth noting that no other publication is in a position to pull the same sort of stunt. How could Mojo, say, execute the same sort of subliminal reinforcement? They’d be hard-pressed to name The Mojos or the Smokin’ Mojo Filters or even Modjo as being responsible for the best songs of all time; and not even Elvis Presley’s version of ‘Got My Mojo Working’ is going to make an appearance near the top. Although maybe The Doors could get a mention somewhere for ‘LA Woman’, in which the Lizard King babbles about a ‘Mr Mojo Risin’’ (an anagram of ‘Jim Morrison’, and the pseudonym under which he’d resurface, after faking his own death, apparently; which is why many fans believe that bloated corpse fished out of the Parisian bathtub and sealed inside a coffin without an autopsy or even a proper examination is someone other than his Regal Lizardness!)

And as for New Musical Express – well, the NME clearly doesn't have a hope in hell. Unless, of course, it manages to name Public Enemy topping a ‘most influential hip hop band’, or some such.

I’ve obviously milked the idea as much as possible, but before I leave it, I just want to point out one interesting fact that I discovered, a context for which may never arise in conversation again: the title of the magazine Uncut is an anagram of ‘U cunt’!