Five Songs

by Rick Rockwell

If you could only play five songs, what would they be?

In a way, that was the challenge presented by WVAU, the student online radio station at American University: come to our studios with your five songs to play and talk about them.

How could I resist? I hadn’t been on the radio as a disc jockey since the 1980s. (And not the late ‘80s either.) This was the last show of the semester for something called “Dueling DJ’s.” You know the premise of these shows: part pro-wrestling, part “Total Request Live” from MTV. The DJ’s talk smack about their music, the audience sends in e-mail about what they like, and there’s voting involved for the best songs and DJs. This is not my idea of great radio. I’ve always believed radio should be celebratory about the music it plays. There’s too much competitiveness in the marketplace already. Why introduce more? Just play some interesting music for people to enjoy.

Luckily, that’s mostly what we did.

(Can you tell I’ve had it with disc jockeys who think they are comedians or who think they are auditioning for some shoutfest on FOX TV or some badly produced sports program? Just more reasons commercial radio is losing to iPods, satellite radio, and Pandora.)

The challenge: play the five greatest songs of all time, but keep the total music time to under 24 minutes.

Well, if that is what you want and you want to pander for votes, just cue up songs from the best selling releases of all time and sit back.

Personally, I rejected that philosophy. I took a different approach: play some of the under-programmed rock of the past. Although rock really stretches back to the 1950s and some musicologists would say to the late 1940s, I stayed in the comfortable 1960s-to-the- present mode. I wanted a song released in each decade. Here were my five songs:

1) Jimi Hendrix “Voodoo Child (Slight Return)”
2) Sex Pistols “Anarchy in the U.K.”
3) Frank Zappa “Whippin’ Post” (yes, a cover of the Allman Brothers’ classic)
4) Nine Inch Nails “Where is Everybody?”
5) The White Stripes “Fell in Love With a Girl”

For me, that’s a pretty typical soundtrack. Ever consider what your five songs might be?

(Photo used with a Creative Commons License from Flickr. Photo by RUDEWORKS of Barcelona, Spain. By the way, that photo is mostly nostalgia, we played the entire hour program from a computer and an iPod.)

(And for those who think "Five Songs" might be an interesting meme game, why not backlink here and start playing.)

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