Down To 150...

The Decade Countdown is starting to get down to the semifinals, down to the best 150 songs. This process has gone fairly quickly for me. A friend was asking me about my criteria for the countdown. I've basically followed the same rules since I started doing this in 1986 (!). My "rules":

1) I have to like the song. It is my countdown, after all. So no "Moulin Rouge," country, Jonas Bros, etc, etc, no matter how popular the idiotic public might have found it.

2) My favorite artists get some special treatment, but not alot. There will be more Sheryl Crow or Foo Fighters than someone else might have, but I try to limit each artist to 5 songs in a countdown. How much fun would a top 100 be if I had 35 Sheryl songs?

3) The song should have some lasting power. As much as I might have liked a Chingy song back in 2003, do I cringe hearing it now? That said, music changes so much in 10 years, so it's important to accurately represent the entire decade. Which leads to #4..

4) Every year gets equal play, at least until the semi-finals. This is similar to sports, where every conference gets so many teams in a tourney, then whatever happens, happens. I certainly have my favorite years of music (2004 and 2007 were particularly good), but it's not a fair assessment of the whole body of work.

5) Perhaps most importantly, the songs that form the tapestry of my decade will be much higher in the countdown. Songs that "take me back" to my beloved Atlanta, meeting my wife, starting in baseball, friendships, road trips, lost loved ones, etc, make the soundtrack of my life. Why wouldn't they get the honor being played closer to midnight on New Years? This is a small but significant factor that can break ties between songs and bump a song into the top 20, or 10.

So there it is. The next step? I will be listening to all 150 songs over the next few days to find the top 100. Then the ranking will begin, which is the most difficult part, but also the most fun!