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We Made a List of the 30 Greatest Songwriters. Now, Readers Have Their Say.

More than 25,000 people voted on a list of top songwriters. Here are their choices.

As soon as we decided to make a list of the 30 greatest living American songwriters, we could guess how readers would respond to the results: with a combination of enthusiasm and outrage, quickly letting us know which of their favorites we had unconscionably forgotten.

We didn’t want all that passion to go undocumented. So we invited readers to assemble their own list — with a formal poll.   Read More

Each voter could write in up to 10 names. More than 25,000 ballots were cast, producing nearly 12,000 distinct choices. A rough first pass at standardizing votes brought that down below 7,000 names, which we spent weeks combing through to combine more variants (say, “Al Yankovic” and “Weird Al”), weed out candidates who were not quite living or American (say, Giuseppe Verdi) and start tabulating readers’ top 100.

Dissecting ‘The New York Times’ Top 100 Songwriters Poll

Attempting to name the 30 Greatest Living American Songwriters couldn’t have gone any worse for The New York Times when they published their list in April. It wasn’t just who they picked, but frankly, the entire methodology of their approach that was flawed from the very beginning. Though they bragged about consulting more than 250 experts and meticulously curating their results, it was doomed if for no other reason than cutting the list off at 30 left it scandalously incomplete. “Look, we only had 30 slots to play with,” says Wesley Morris, one of the list’s authors on an episode of the Cannonball podcast where he and the other authors smugly tried to defend themselves. But why only 30? Who made that decision? Was it decreed from God on stone tablets carried down the mountain by Moses? You could have as many slots as you wanted. Wesley Morris also cites the “Impossible task we faced.” But the only reason it was impossible is because you made it that way for yourselves. Sure, any list is going to be polarizing, torn apart, scrutinized, and sized up and down. But you screwed yourselves by stopping it at 30. That wasn’t the only mistake they made though. Ultimately, the list and their attempted cleanup afterwards was a catastrophe, and counter-productive to the effort to promote The New York Times as an authority on music because it exposed how publications like The New York Times are not always here to objectively report. They’re often here to impose their ideology upon the people from on high, and make you accept it. The publication’s pop reporter who participated in the “30 Living Songwriters” piece is Jon Caramanica, who incidentally, has openly and smugly criticized Saving Country Music many times in the past after being called out for his poor reporting on country music. “I feel like everybody in that room was willing to think expansively about what songwriting is,” Caramanica said in the damage control podcast after the publication of the list. “And songwriting is such a peculiar thing. It has so much baggage. It comes with attachment to certain communities, certain subgenres, and engaged fans who have an extremely fixed idea of what constitutes songcraft.” Notice how in this sentence, he figures out how to substitute “songwriting” for “songcraft.” Caramanica continues, “I think it’s a heroic white man with a guitar struggling through his emotions, sitting in a room, no collaborators, no contact with the outside world, perhaps alcohol, perhaps drugs, accessing some kind of pure emotional truth, and putting it in a rock, country, or otherwise roots affiliated genre. To me, as much as I enjoy some of that music, I do not mistake that for the totality of American song, and I do not mistake that for the best examples of songcraft.” But when Jon Caramanica replaces “songwriting” with “songcraft,” he’s allowing that term to incorporate things that would generally be considered “production,” meaning the making of beats and rhythms, sampling, sequencing, etc., which isn’t necessarily inherently evil in music, but is also not “songwriting.” Songwriting is melody and lyrical composition. The list was not titled the “30 Great Living American Songcrafters.” What Jon Caramanica basically came out and said is that anyone who fits his stereotype of what a “songwriter” is was discounted on the list, and anyone who didn’t fit that stereotype was emphasized on the list, because that was the ideological slant he chose to impose on the list as opposed to a more objective perspective that gave equal weight to all songwriters. Respected music producer and YouTube commentator Rick Beato had a pretty good take on the matter in a video he titled “Watch This NYT “Music Critic” Embarass Himself … AGAIN.” For the record, The New York Times damage control podcast only received some 90,000 views, while Rick Beato’s takedown of it received 1.5 million. “So songwriting is not the best example of songwriting,” Beato chided Jon Caramanica. “Who are these people?” Beato then went to explain how everyone involved in the original article was an Ivy League graduate except for one from NYU, including a Harvard alum, two from Yale, and one from Princeton. None of them were actual musicians or songwriters, or had music degrees. “Here’s four Ivy League educated people … that are the most pretentious, cork-sniffing, smug people, that are all music critics with no background in music … exactly what you would expect from a New York Times music critic,” Beato says. “Now I shouldn’t rag on these people because of their education … [but] these people’s takes are absurd.”And the sad thing is, this doesn’t just relate to The New York Times and so much of their music coverage, but Rolling Stone, and the recent horrifically-uninformed NY Mag/Vulture piece about politics and country music that got so much wrong—and just like the 30 Greatest Songwriters List, had people from both the right and left universally calling foul. But The New York Times did do something last week to help address the continuing controversy, and it became an excellent illustration of the deeper cultural rot at the heart of elite music media coverage. “As soon as we decided to make a list of the 30 greatest living American songwriters, we could guess how readers would respond to the results: with a combination of enthusiasm and outrage, quickly letting us know which of their favorites we had unconscionably forgotten,” NYT said. “We didn’t want all that passion to go undocumented. So we invited readers to assemble their own list in a formal poll.”More than 25,000 ballots were cast, producing nearly 12,000 distinct choices, which were then culled down to the top 100 songwriters, according to New York Times readers. Below are the results, and some thoughts from Saving Country Music.

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