Customer Reviews

The 20th Century's Greatest Hits: A Top 40 List

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Everyone loves lists -- the best of, worst of, what's hot, what's not. We love to argue with the picks, think of what we would have added or deleted. Now Paul Williams has produced the ultimate thought-provoking list: The 20th Century Greatest Hits, a collection of forty essays comprising a unique "top 40" list of art worth remembering.

First things first. Paul Williams? you ask. No, not the chubby blonde-haired songster of the 70's, but Paul S. Williams who in 1966 at age 17 founded Crawdaddy! the first American rock magazine - precursor to Rolling Stone. He's been referred to as "legendary rock historian," "one of America's foremost writers of rock" and "our best rock journalist" by critics and musicians alike.

Williams is a prolific writer of "observation" books (some forty books in all, most available here on Amazon.com) that include insightful reviews of important musical artists that have influenced us over the past 30 years. He has written extensively about Bob Dylan (three books in print, with a fourth in the works.) He's also written about Neil Young and Brian Wilson and is the author of the best selling underground classic Das Energi. He's a keen observer; a mirror trying to reflect with crystal clarity what he hears and feels about not only music, but artistic events and those who create them.

"Great art, then, is not some objective phenomenon; it is an essentially subjective, and often profoundly spiritual, personal experience on the part of a person or many persons reading a book, listening to a recording, looking at a painting, watching a play or film..."

Williams has a way of touching your soul through his unique writing style and he's out done himself with this latest observation book. "It's a tease actually," he affirms because it's not a top 40 music review. It's a play on his own Rock and Roll: the 100 Best Singles, published in 1993. Only this book, The 20th Century Greatest Hits, is not limited to rock or even music. It's any work of art that he deemed memorable enough to make his "top 40" list of the century. He includes literature, music recordings, paintings and performing artists. In the book, he asks and answers the question "What is a unit of art?"

"...there are great artists whose works are performances before a live audience. I am a passionate appreciator of this type of art and have written a series of books about Bob Dylan as a performing artist in which I argue for the recognition of live performances, recorded or unrecorded, as works of art that can add up to a great and memorable body of work just as surely as artworks that endure as physical objects."

An odd mishmash of "art", you might think, when you first glance at The List and find Eleanor Roosevelt's Universal Declaration of Human Rights next to Winnie-the-Pooh and later followed by a concert performance of Umm Kulthum. Not to worry, once you read Williams' tantalizing and convincing arguments for their inclusion, you'll be thankful you found this gem.

The List also includes songs by the Beatles and Billie Holiday; works of Picasso and Matisse; books by Philip K Dick, Jack Kerouac and James Joyce; short stories of Borges and Sturgeon; a translation of The I-Ching; movies, poems, live performances and so much more.

"That's a primary purpose of the book is to talk about and to stimulate people to think about what art is and what that means to us personally," Williams says about his unusual selections. All I can say is, he's successful. He makes you want to run out and read, see or hear all of his choices. To me, that's a Real Hit! This collection deserves 5 stars for originality and expanding our view of what constitutes The 20th Century Greatest Hits.

I loved the concept of this book. I only wish I had read an excerpt before buying it. The choices are fine, even daring. However, instead of insight, the reader gets poorly written stream-of-consciousness ramblings that add up to nothing but the author's feeble attempt to justify his choices...some of which he hasn't even experienced himself. If you like trivia or history, do not buy this book. If you like an author who thinks he is hip, smart, and funny but is none of these things, go for it.

Interesting idea and selections, but the book is agressively poorly written. His entries provide no new perspectives on the selected works. He alternates self-praise for his "Idiosyncratic" selections with rage at anyone who would critize one of the works. Liner note writers, academics, SF critics and strawmen take hits while Williams delays engaging the works themselves.

What a blunder of a book this is. It's a great idea, the artistic "greatest hits" of the twentieth century, encompassing a variety of media including literature, film, painting, and music. Unfotunately, Williams botches it badly, sucking all the life out of his great idea, making what could have been a delight a dismal chore to get through.

As stated by other reviewers, he offers little in the way of intriguing insight into these works. In the article on 2001: A Space Odyssey (greatest hit #14), director Stanley Kubrick states his intent to avoid "the schoolboy excitement of space flight" and concentrate instead on its philosophical ramifications in his masterpiece. Too bad Williams did not take the director's advice, for that's what the book is, a gushing ramble of schoolboy excitement regarding the author's enthusiasm for his choices. That enthusiasm is the starting point, its basic scaffolding, and not a desired end result of the work. Of course Williams is excited by these works, he wouldn't be writing a book about them otherwise. An intelligent reader knows that right off the bat, and a good writer would know not to reiterate that excitement directly.

Williams also makes the egregious error of continually interjecting asides in the vein of "okay, end of interruption..." or "so, let's look at the circumstances of..." or "what I wanna (wanna?!?) call your attention to..." This is juvenilia of the worst sort, poor writing of the worst sort, and as much the fault of Williams' editor, who should have told Williams to go back and take out every one of these awful asides simply out of mercy to his readers.

Then there's the choices themselves. Certainly, one cannot argue with the inclusion of the Beatles, Stanley Kubrick, Thomas Pynchon, Henri Matisse, James Joyce, William Faulkner, John Coltrane, and Billie Holiday from the list, nor works such as Jack Kerouac's On the Road or the Beach Boys' Pet Sounds. Williams is a child of the Sixties, and much of the list gravitates toward hippie shibboleths such as the I-Ching, Frank Herbert's Dune, and Allen Ginsberg's "Howl." Williams does go afield of Western culture to include Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan, Umm Kulthum, and an obscure biography of the Buddha by Vietnamese author Thich Nhat Hanh. He's welcome to his idiosyncratic picks, but it does make the book mostly a greatest hits for the Sixties generation, and the problem with idiosyncratic picks is explaining why they should be representative of the century, a "greatest hit," to a larger and future audience. Antoine de Saint-Exupery's Le Petite Prince is a nice book, but is it truly a resonant work of 20th Century art with far-reaching influence?

Part of the problem with this kind of list is that choices cannot be measured simply by personal favorites, but personal favorites within a pantheon of works that have had impact on culture as a whole through the century. You can pick certain works by Alfred Hitchcock or Orson Welles, but not just any one of them, and not just because you really like it. Citizen Kane is an obvious choice, but it's an obvious choice for very compelling reasons; F for Fake would be much harder to justify. In a sense, these choices almost all have to be obvious ones. The key is to examine why they are obvious, and perhaps even shed new light on why they are obvious. A choice of either The Graduate or Easy Rider is viable to stand-in for elements of the Sixties counterculture, but Monte Hellman's rarely seen Two-Lane Blacktop? Representing Bob Dylan not with Highway 61 Revisited or Blonde on Blonde but in a medium in which he has proven to have less expertise, the film Renaldo and Clara? The Beatles represented by a good McCartney b-side "Things We Said Today," rather than their many works that did indeed change musical culture? This is not idiosyncracy; this is self-indulgent hubris.

Again, this work is a great idea executed terribly. Someone should come along and do it right rather than leave it dormant in its current state.