Tuesday, May 12, 2015

This list doesn't include 1952 Black Vincent Lightning or Fairytale of New York...

...or have Hank Williams at #1; ergo, I'm officially calling bullshit on it. Though it gets one right:
25. Bruce Springsteen – “The River”

Bruce Springsteen’s “The River” isn’t just sad—it’s absolutely soul-crushing. A brief summary of its events: a teen couple in a dead-end town accidentally get pregnant. There’s a shotgun wedding, and Bruce does all he can to remind us no one’s exactly psyched to be getting hitched (“for my 19th birthday I got a union card and a wedding coat” ... “no wedding-day smiles, no walk down the aisle, no flowers no wedding dress”). The narrator works construction, but there’s no work because the economy is terrible. Their relationship is a shell of what it once was, and memories of their early sparks “come back to haunt me, they haunt me like a curse.” And if that’s not enough, it also contains one of the biggest bummers of a line ever: “Is a dream a lie if it don’t come true, or is it something worse?”—Bonnie Stiernberg

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