The Chain makes '100 best songs of all time' list

[louielouie2000]

I noticed this article on NBC News just now, and had to wonder if our beloved Mac made the cut:

http://entertainment.nbcnews.com/_ne...e-top-100?lite

Apparently they did:

http://consequenceofsound.net/2012/0...s-ever-100-51/

[michelej1]

^Nice. Here's the list.

01. The Beach Boys – “God Only Knows”
02. Talking Heads – “Once In a Lifetime”
03. Bob Dylan – “Like a Rolling Stone”
04. Michael Jackson – “Man in the Mirror”
05. The Beatles – “A Day in the Life”
06. The Velvet Underground – “Sister Ray”
07. The Rolling Stones – “Sympathy for the Devil”
08. Aretha Franklin – “Respect”
09. The Notorious B.I.G. – “Juicy”
10. Radiohead – “Idioteque”
11. Nirvana – “Smells Like Teen Spirit”
12. Marvin Gaye – “What’s Going On”
13. Led Zeppelin – “Dazed and Confused”
14. The Knife – “Heartbeats”
15. Jackson 5 – “I Want You Back”
16. Bruce Springsteen – “Jungleland”
17. Otis Redding – “Try a Little Tenderness”
18. Bob Dylan – “Shelter from the Storm”
19. Prince – “When Doves Cry”
20. Kate Bush – “Running Up that Hill (A Deal with God)”
21. Public Enemy – “Fight the Power”
22. Pulp – “Common People”
23. The Beatles – “Tomorrow Never Knows”
24. The Rolling Stones – “Gimme Shelter”
25. John Coltrane – “A Love Supreme Part 1: Acknowledgment”
26. Beastie Boys – “Shadrach”
27. The Who – “My Generation”
28. Neutral Milk Hotel – “In The Aeroplane Over the Sea”
29. Joy Division – “Love Will Tear Us Apart”
30. Jimi Hendrix Experience – “All Along The Watchtower”
31. Patti Smith Group – “Rock N Roll Nigger”
32. Black Sabbath – “War Pigs”
33. The Clash – “London Calling”
34. Neil Young & Crazy Horse – “Hey Hey, My My (Into the Black)”
35. Daft Punk – “One More Time”
36. The Ronettes – “Be My Baby”
37. The Replacements – “I Will Dare”
38. Sam Cooke – “A Change is Gonna Come”
39. Talking Heads – “This Must Be The Place (Naive Melody)”
40. The Stooges – “Search and Destroy”
41. Al Green – “Let’s Stay Together”
42. Michael Jackson – “Billie Jean”
43. David Bowie – “Space Oddity”
44. LCD Soundsystem – “All My Friends”
45. N.W.A. – “**** Tha Police”
46. Madonna – “Like a Virgin”
47. The Beach Boys – “Good Vibrations”
48. Can – “Halleluhwah”
49. Metallica – “One”
50. Pavement – “Summer Babe (Winter Version)”
51. The Who – “Baba O’Riley”
52. Jay-Z – “99 Problems”
53. Arcade Fire – “Wake Up”
54. Pink Floyd – “Comfortably Numb”
55. Bob Dylan – “The Times They Are a-Changin’”
56. Stevie Wonder – “Superstition”
57. Thin Lizzy – “The Boys Are Back in Town”
58. Black Flag – “Rise Above”
59. Television – “Marquee Moon”
60. Nick Drake – “Pink Moon”
61. The White Stripes – “Seven Nation Army”
62. Johnny Cash – “Hurt”
63. U2 – “Where The Streets Have No Name”
64. OutKast – “B.o.B”
65. The Velvet Underground & Nico – “Waiting for the Man”
66. Portishead – “Roads”
67. Chuck Berry – “Johnny B. Goode”
68. Leonard Cohen – “Suzanne”
69. The Cure – “Just Like Heaven”
70. Ben E. King – “Stand By Me”
71. Björk – “Army of Me”
72. James Brown – “I Got You (I Feel Good)”
73. The Ramones – “Blitzkrieg Bop”
74. The Smiths – “The Boy With the Thorn in His Side”
75. Blondie – “Heart of Glass”
76. Missy Elliott – “Get Ur Freak On”
77. Sly and the Family Stone – “Hot Fun in the Summertime”
78. Run-D.M.C. – “Rock Box”
79. Fleetwood Mac – “The Chain”
80. Yo La Tengo – “Autumn Sweater”
81. Wu-Tang Clan – “Protect Ya Neck”
82. Depeche Mode – “Enjoy the Silence”
83. Grandmaster Flash & The Furious Five – “The Message”
84. Sufjan Stevens – “John Wayne Gacy, Jr.”
85. My Bloody Valentine – “Only Shallow”
86. The Band – “The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down”
87. PJ Harvey – “Down By the Water”
88. Buzzcocks – “Ever Fallen in Love (With Someone You Shouldn’t've)”
89. Kanye West – “Jesus Walks”
90. Pixies – “Hey”
91. Funkadelic – “One Nation Under A Groove”
92. Aphex Twin – “Windowlicker”
93. Devo – “Uncontrollable Urge”
94. Underworld – “Born Slippy .NUXX”
95. Sleater Kinney – “Dig Me Out”
96. Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds – “From Her To Eternity”
97. A Tribe Called Quest – “Scenario”
98. Kraftwerk – “Autobahn”
99. Sonic Youth – “Teen Age Riot”
100. Phil Collins – “In The Air Tonight”

[michelej1]

http://consequenceofsound.net/2012/0...s-ever-100-51/
79. Fleetwood Mac – “The Chain”

Rumors, 1977

Maybe it’s the way the kick drum seems to quite literally find a way into your heart, setting the pace for how your body will work for the next four minutes and 31 seconds. Or the slight rattle of Lindsey Buckingham’s guitar string before the vocals kick in. Perhaps it’s the way his voice sounds knocked next to Stevie Nick’s howl, especially when you remember they were staring into one another’s souls as their relationship broke when this was written in 1976. It could be John McVie’s classic, chest-pumping bassline that creeps in halfway, created first before Buckingham musically adopted it, and Nicks wove lyrics around it. It’s hard to pick the best thing about “The Chain” because it’s the inseparable nature of these elements that makes it Rumour’s classic centerpiece, and the only song from the era credited to Fleetwood Mac’s five members. -Amanda Koellner

[MacShadowsBall]

I'm glad to see Fleetwood Mac and The Chain on this interesting list of songs.

[Sleepless-Child]

I love this list! It has some of my favorite songs (Hey, Ever Fallen in Love, Love will tear us apart, running up that hill, just like heaven, autobahn and of course God only knows) plus The Chain, which is objectively definitely Fleetwood Mac's best song, IMO.

[PolishStevieFan]

Not so great list but that's good they recognized one of the best songs from FM.

[mottabam]

Originally Posted by PolishStevieFan

Not so great list but that's good they recognized one of the best songs from FM.

I agree, The Chain live literally gives me chills, I just love it. It is one of my favorite songs. I could watch the Dance version over and over again, simply great.

[mylittledemon]

Originally Posted by mottabam

I agree, The Chain live literally gives me chills, I just love it. It is one of my favorite songs. I could watch the Dance version over and over again, simply great.

Same here. It's one of the few songs that I react to the same way each time I hear it.

[johnnystorms]

even though i am Team Stevie, i still think Go Your Own Way is the best slab of pop music i've ever heard! i like the Chain, but would put GYOW higher on the list!

[michelej1]

[You can listen to the cover, on the linked page]

God is in the TV

http://www.godisinthetvzine.co.uk/20...deo-for-fixer/

Death Rattle have released their video for ‘Fixer’, a track featured on their forthcoming EP HE&l out on Frontal Noize on October 15th 2012.

The video is part of a trilogy; Death Rattle’s first two videos for ‘The Dig’ and ‘Do As You Please’ were both released earlier this year.

You can watch all three videos on Death Rattle’s YouTube channel now. Please note, ‘The Fixer’ contains strobe effects throughout the video.


The band are offering a free download of their Fleetwood Mac cover ‘The Chain’ for anyone who pre-orders the EP before the October 15th release date. ‘The Chain’ is currently available to stream via Death Rattle’s Soundcloud page but will not be released properly until next year.

[michelej1]

osted: Thursday, June 16, 2016 12:00 am
BY LAUREN CARTER FOR THE SUN CHRONICLE


CARTER: Messy moments make a masterpiece

http://www.thesunchronicle.com/vip/o...ba40764ff.html

I recently subscribed to the Tidal music service, which has given me access to virtually every song and album in existence.

Naturally, I started diving deep into Fleetwood Mac's collection (if you don't know about my obsession with the Mac, that's for another column altogether) and found the "Rumours" super deluxe edition, which includes loads of demos, out-takes and rough cuts recorded during the making of the album.

I've listened to "Rumours" dozens of times, but I've never heard the early versions of songs that, in my mind, are the definition of pop/rock perfection, and getting a behind-the-scenes look at the evolution of those tracks from rough ideas to polished gems was illuminating to say the least. I couldn't help but see a parallel between the process of recording music and the process of living life.

Very often when it comes to any type of achievement, we see the finished product, the best-selling album, the masterpiece. It's rare to see the process it took to get there, the early sessions and experiments and songs that were scrapped and songs that became other songs and songs that sound nothing like how they started out.

We're quick to celebrate success, and rightfully so, but we seldom recognize the value or necessity of the toil and struggle that led up to it.

I've experienced what felt like pretty big setbacks and failures in my life. Situations that didn't go the way I planned, times when I didn't achieve what I wanted, times when I lost in some respect. As painful as those moments were, when I looked back months or years later, those perceived setbacks and failures were actually the very things that set me up for future success down the road. So many accomplishments in my life literally would not have been possible without first experiencing what felt like disasters or detours that were taking me off course but were actually bringing me exactly where I needed to be. Rough cuts and out-takes, if you will.

One of the standout moments on the "Rumours" special edition, and the moment when I really understood that recording an album is a process akin to living life, was when I heard the two songs that ultimately became the group's iconic hit "The Chain."

There's the Stevie Nicks demo by the same name that included the chorus "and if you don't love me now, you will never love me again/I can still hear you saying you would never break the chain." And then there's the second half of a bluesy Christine McVie track called "Keep Me There," which becomes the hard-driving finale of "The Chain."

The two original songs sound nothing like each other. They were written by two different artists. But elements of both songs were combined while the remainder of each song was scrapped to create one of the group's most instantly recognizable hits, the song that's opened virtually every show since 1977.

Did any of them foresee that result when they started out? I doubt it. Was the process of blending those two distinctly different songs into one chaotic and frustrating? I'm guessing it was. But the end product was something so beautiful and perfect that you'd never know the messy route it took to get there.

If you stopped and listened to "Rumours"- or any great album, for that matter - in the middle of the recording process, you might have been unimpressed. But you also would have missed the point. Each moment in the process was not an end in itself, it was a step leading to something greater - and it was precisely by working through the rough, imperfect, messy moments and improving upon them with each new take that the masterpiece was revealed.
Lauren Carter can be reached at bylaurencarter@gmail.com and on Twitter

[michelej1]

From a Ringer article on Nicole Byer by Alison P. Davis

https://theringer.com/nicole-byer-is...fd8#.n6m6nbacl

[The Chain ... has never invoked those kinds of feelings in me]

Enter, on cue, Byer, a late twentysomething woman who is probably as used to hearing that as I am. She is dressed like an adult-teen — polka dot tunic, black leggings and a jean jacket — and bounces in the doorway for a moment before making her way over. “We’re gonna need to take some money out!” she booms, unfazed by our underrepresented status in the bar, or by the woman currently dry-humping the floor to a Fleetwood Mac song.

“I’ve always been sort of dirty. Even when I was little,” she shouts over the dulcet tones of “The Chain.”

[bwboy]

Originally Posted by johnnystorms

even though i am Team Stevie, i still think Go Your Own Way is the best slab of pop music i've ever heard! i like the Chain, but would put GYOW higher on the list!

Right with you, Johnnystorms. I would have put Go Your Own Way on here in lieu of the Chain, but am happy to see FM recognized on the list.

[SisterNightroad]

The Life of a Song: Fleetwood Mac’s ‘The Chain’
The hit was born of a romantic geometry complex enough to baffle the Bloomsbury Group

In early 1975, two Americans, Lindsey Buckingham and his girlfriend Stevie Nicks, had just joined a once-famous British blues band now down on its uppers. Buckingham, a perfectionist, buzzed around showing the other members how to play their parts on the songs he was bringing to the project. The bassist was unimpressed.

“The band you’re in is Fleetwood Mac,[/I]” John McVie told him. “[I]I’m the Mac. And I play the bass.” And that — as Mick Fleetwood, who was the Fleetwood, records in his autobiography — was that.

A couple of years later Buckingham and Nicks had been integrated into the band, and the new line-up had a successful album under their belt. It was now Fleetwood and McVie together who laid down the signature bass-and-drums riff that would define what was (with all due deference to former members Peter Green, Jeremy Spencer, Danny Kirwan and Bob Welch) the high water mark of Fleetwood Mac: “The Chain”, from their globe-conquering album Rumours.

Fleetwood Mac were in the throes of romantic geometry so complex it would have bemused the Bloomsbury Group, and recording in a Sausalito studio in a blizzard of liquor and cocaine. All of them were writing bitter songs about each other. Steve Nicks essayed a song she called “The Chain”. “I’m down on my knees/begging you please/baby don’t leave me/”, she sang — presumably to Buckingham. In demo form, at least, the song is pretty but abject.

At the same time, Christine McVie, John’s by now former wife, was working on “Keep Me There”, a throwback melodically to her solo album of a few years previously. The opening may have been nugatory, but the chord progression up into the chorus had a driving tension. And three minutes in, her ex-husband let fly with that 10-note bass riff and the song raced through an extended coda, with Christine McVie playing jazzy electric piano.

Nearly all the elements were there. The two songs were forged together. New lyrics emerged, turning the submission into defiance. “Damn your love, damn your lies”, Nicks now sang. The sound-world of the song became bleaker. McVie’s keyboards were toned down. To knit the whole thing together, Buckingham recycled the instrumental guitar passage that opens “Lola (My Love)” from his and Nicks’s earlier Buckingham Nicks album. The resulting amalgam simultaneously hymned the pain of personal separation and the strength of community within the band. “I can still hear you saying/you would never break the chain.” It was the only song from this line-up credited to all five members of the band.

Many songs from Rumours were released as singles, but not “The Chain”. In the UK, though, the song achieved ubiquity when the BBC used it as the theme music for its Formula One coverage — the Doppler rush of the instrumental break perfectly mirroring the head-turning swivel of watching race cars. This must have delighted Fleetwood, at least, a car enthusiast from his youth.

Cover versions are surprisingly rare. The Saskatchewan hair metal band Kick Axe fuzzed the riff into unintelligibility. Florence + The Machine performed it at Glastonbury in 2010, casting around valiantly for the appropriate key but fully channelling its tribal intensity.

US country-folk singer Shawn Colvin, tasked with reproducing the song for a 1998 track-by-track version of Rumours, made “The Chain” slinky and soulful; her take fades out just before the bass riff. By contrast, the Los Angeles punk experimentalists Liars, on Mojo magazine’s Rumours Revisited, doubled down on the darkness: their reading is glitchy, murky, obsessive — and again, riffless.

But the world of hip-hop can tell a powerful riff when it hears one. Cleveland rappers Bone Thugs-n-Harmony’s “Wind Blow” is essentially freestyle rap over a more-or-less unchanged middle section of “The Chain”, foregrounding the bass melody. A more ingenious homage came in “Up Your Speed” by the British rapper Sway DaSafo. His song is a tribute to automotive antisocial behaviour, with a video full of souped-up monster cars performing doughnut handbrake turns. It ends with just a snatch of the outro from “The Chain”, combining the band’s imperiousness with a cheeky nod to Formula One.

Fleetwood Mac themselves fell out, broke up, recruited new members, grew up, and eventually reunited in their five-piece form. The centrepiece of their live sets is still, inevitably, “The Chain”.



https://www.ft.com/content/a92b3436-...b-680c49b4b4c0

[James89]

How is the list compiled? It's so subjective. There are some songs on there that certainly don't belong. How ridiculous.