Whitest Song by Decade: An Explainer

"I thought this was a nu-metal newsletter?"

Well, a copy paste of a tweet I made in 2020 to a walloping 5 likes is doing numbers so I figure a little explainer might be fun on this Sunday. What qualifies a song as “white” is a small number of things including but not limited to a sense of entitlement to musical trends they did not create, nostalgia for a nonexistent past, general arrogance and/or an overall sense of lame. This is also, and I cannot stress this enough, in good fun. I’m not submitting this to any scientific journals or highfalutin music publications. I’m expounding on a tweet I made two years ago cuz I love music writing and any opportunity I can get to dunk on my own race is one I can’t pass up. So without further ado:

50s - "Everyday" by Buddy Holly

Not a great pick. Selected for its literal leg slappin’ innocence but what makes that a “white” phenomenon? Understandable but there’s whiter. For instance! Sean Fay Wolfe on Twitter offered his rebuttal swapping everything except my final pick and my 50s selection was replaced with Pat Boone’s cover of “Tutti Frutti.” As a pre-predictor of whites taking black songs and absolutely suffocating the essential soul and groove out of them, oh, this is an ominous one, transforming Little Richard’s world changing rave up into a polite tune perfect for clapping on the one and three to. A generation of America’s grumpiest grumps heard this and thought “What a nice young man nothing like that filth on the radio” and we are all worse off for it.

60s - "All You Need is Love" by The Beatles

Loaaahve Loahhve Luv. God, kill me. Musically I can’t stand this - it’s drowsy melodies like The Beatles’ lush Sgt Peppers arrangements off a fat dose of quaaludes, the forced whooping and “All together now!,” and that utterly miserable descending saxophone refrain - but what really puts this over the top is the useless sentiment. It’s the definitive mantra of our nation’s comfy whites sailing through history’s long arc, benefiting from the efforts of those that have no choice but to struggle, while flashing peace signs from their VW bus. The sentiment aged poorly enough that even John Lennon had to admit it was a bit naive in retrospect, reflecting in 1980 and quoted by Jon Wiener; “Maybe in the Sixties we were naive.” Is this a lot of criticism for such a simple song? Maybe. But really I couldn’t critique it any better than the Gap did when they enlisted Katy Perry to cover it for their holiday advertisements. Maybe you need more than love after all. Maybe you need some reasonably priced slacks.

70s - "American Pie" by Don McLean

“American Pie” was the beginning of the end for rock music as a forward thinking force as it was the start of rock’s obsession with itself. An 8 minute long impossibly glum lament for the death of Buddy Holly and the Big Bopper, it dwells with lyrics that either glance off their target (I will never not be taken out of the song’s spell as soon as McLean rhymes “doorstep” with “more step”) or totally miss (“And while Lenin read a book of Marx, The Quartet practiced in the park”??) the song’s nostalgic wallowing invites little more than boomers to cast their memory back there (lord) and get misty eyed. Really, it’s not necessarily a bad song; the instrumentation has a nice forward momentum to it while McLean’s melodies travel to interesting places from time to time; but that sentiment doesn’t sit right with me. “American Pie” isn’t really a tribute to the day the music died, it’s a tribute to itself and that insistence could only drag everything down with it.

80s - "Sussudio" by Phil Collins

The current attempt at Phil Collins legacy reclamation is a mostly online phenomenon, powered by tweets about American Psycho and his Tarzan soundtrack, but there is a slightly necessary correcting the record to be done with Phil Collins. He was an impossibly dominant force during the late 80s and into the early 90s that was widely hated by critics and cooler audiences alike. But if Phil Collins wasn’t that bad he sure as shit wasn’t that good either. “Sussudio” in particular is such a brazen rip off of Prince’s infinitely superior “1999,” that also outcharted “1999,” that it truly belongs on this list as Pat Boone’s dream fulfilled. Honestly though, I think that avatar of 1980s cynicism Patrick Bateman breaks down the Phil Collins appeal better than I can in Bret Easton Ellis’ American Psycho novel when he claims Genesis’ “Land of Confusion” has “a groove funkier and blacker than anything Prince or Michael Jackson—or any other black artist of recent years, for that matter—has come up with.” Mm, is that so. I wonder if Bateman’s issues with Prince and Michael Jackson were a little more skin deep.

90s - "What's Up" by 4 Non Blondes

Maybe I’m just jaded from years of karaoke attendance because when this song comes up on that screen I know it’s time for a smoke break (I don’t smoke). My karaoke compatriots I love you and I will clap for anyone that picks this song but if there was one thing about pandemic life that I was okay with it was not hearing this belted out every weekend. That said, I don’t think this was as white as the 90s got. “Hold On” by Wilson Phillips is right there after all.

00s - "Mr. Brightside" by The Killers

See, there was a bit of confusion about this list. I didn’t mean for white to equal bad. “Mr. Brightside” is not a bad song. It’s a great song actually. I think I was more commenting on the song’s ability to send millennial whites into a buckwild frenzy. But it deserves to do that! So if I had to pick a truly bad 00s song by a truly white man I must admit Sean Fay Wolfe’s selection of “Your Body is a Wonderland” by John Mayer is a good one. And no matter how much Chappelle’s Show cred he may have banked in the black community that Playboy interview spent it all and then some.

10s - "Fight Song" by Rachel Platten

“Fight Song” will never not be associated with Hillary Clinton’s loss to Donald Trump in the 2016 election and thusly will never come untangled from the decade’s ultimate “caucasity.” Despite what the title may claim, there is no “fight” in “Fight Song.” It’s brutally time stamped compressed pianos and thundering drums sound mixed with CVS Pharmacy speakers in mind but had to suffer as the official theme of Hillary Clinton’s doomed 2016 loss to the most defeatable candidate in political history. To those of you that weren’t there the sheer arrogance of this era is impossible to explain- we thought this was in the bag. It wasn’t. I’m not saying a song with more fight in it than Rachel Platten’s more appropriate for triumphant coffee runs than presidential campaigns anthem would have turned the tide but it couldn’t have hurt either.