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But this very idea of a New American Songbook simultaneously has to account for what being part of a “songbook” could even mean for hip-hop - a genre that never really standardized songs so much as breaks, lines, hooks, in-jokes, and regionalisms - and reconcile the fact that it gave the listicle’s top slot to the most wait, is this even hip-hop? smash of the list’s 25-year purview. The results were alternately dispiriting (do people really enjoy “Smooth” or do they just like to smarmily reference it?) and fascinating (a world in which Liz Phair’s “Fuck And Run” somehow becomes a standard is a far better one than the hellworld we’re stuck with now).
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(Though at least my 21-year-old self would still be amped to know that, 20 years later, El-P and Orbital and Neko Case would still be putting out great albums.) Slate recently attempted to tackle this question with a package on “ The New American Songbook,” in which a bunch of writers tried to figure out what songs from 1993 onwards would stick with us the same way “Fly Me To The Moon” and “Mack The Knife” have. Ask me now what songs of the past two-and-a-half decades are going to keep getting covered and sampled and versioned and interpolated and otherwise made memetic long after we’re gone, and I doubt I’d have a better answer than the one I’d have given back when I was 21 when I thought my generation would discard Toto and Journey once and for all. Predicting the future of music is a dicey bet, even when you extend the footprint back a quarter-century.