Top 120 Songs Under 120 Seconds (ILM Poll #95)

minor threat will get another song for sure, i'd bet the misfits get a couple too, unless they were vote-split to death

I think the Minutemen will get one or two more.

I think this will be my favorite poll ever because of how few of these I knew beforehand. so many great finds thus far (Elvis Costello, dBs, Arthur Russell). hope this just keeps getting better

I'd add the Byrds to the list of potentials for multiple winners. There were only 3 nominations so reduced risk of vote splitting. Time Between is very likely to be a winner - maybe even pretty high up the list. Wouldn't be surprised to see either of the other nominations make it. Both are worthy.

Makes me pretty worried for some of my personal favourites, as I was expecting a couple to show up at the lower end of the list.

like emil.y, i am concerned the frogs may not place.

anyone up for a sub-poll countdown? text only, as i'm working on the images for the regular roll-out

yeah!

Definitely!

i'm sorry - the results for the "songs that weren't on the nomination list" sub-poll are so ridiculous that i'm having trouble describing them. one moment.

there wasn't much consensus on the best songs that weren't on the nominations list. the self-confident path would be to claim this as proof that the nominations list was so rock solid that there was no clear non-nominated (a 'non-nom' in the biz) song that wasn't on there. others would note that the people who voted in the "best song not nominated" poll were also the same people who contributed all the nominations to the list, so it's a bit like asking someone to come up with a list of the top fifty fruits and then immediately asking them "what was a fruit that you chose not to put in your list of top fifty?" and then expecting there to be consensus.

each of these tracks received 1 vote.

Stiff Little Fingers - Here We Are Nowhere	
The Butterflies of Love - Leaving When I'm Done Drinking (1:54)	
Some AI at the University of Toronto - The AI Christmas Carol (0:57)	
University of Toronto - The AI Christmas Carol (0:57)	
Nirvana - Very Ape (1:55)	
Kleenex/Liliput - Split (2:01)	
Modern Baseball - Mass (1:45)	
Course of Action - You Smoke You Choke (???)	
Black Flag – Wasted (0:51)	
Richard Skelton - Scar Tissue (1:56)	
Randy Newman - Underneath The Harlem Moon (1:54)	
Nick Drake - Road (2:00)	
The National - Fashion Coat (2:01)	
Calexico – Train of Thought (0:30)	
Teenage Fanclub - What You Do to Me (1:59)	
Nirvana - Very Ape (1:56)	
Jorge Ben Joe - Fia Maravilha (1:59)	
Beach Boys - "Ding Dang" (:59) 	
Minutemen - My Heart and the Real World	
Perfume Genius - Hood (2:00)	
Quasi - The Happy Prole (1:42)	
Jay Livingston & Ray Evans - Mr. Ed (0:52)	
LiLiPUT – Split (1:59)	
Keith Mansfield - Grandstand (1:13)	
The Beatles - There's a Place (1:50)	
The Middle Class – Out of Vogue (1:00)	
Frank Zappa & The Mothers of Invention - What's the Ugliest Part of Your Body? (1:03)	
Gustavo Santaollala - All Gone (1:13)	
Casiotone for the Painfully Alone - We Have Mice (1:57)	
Thinking Fellers Union Local 282 - The Invitation	
The Wrens - The House That Guilt Built (1:22)	
Hüsker Dü – Big Sky, 9/5/81 live (0:55)	
Dana Westover - Beginning (1:17)	
Lee Hazlewood - I'm Glad I Never (1:05)	
Huggy Bear - Sizzlemeet (1:26)	
Benjamin Britten - Cuckoo! (1:50)	
Floor - Sneech (1:02)	
Beastie Boys - A Year And A Day (1:59)	
Elvis Costello, "Hoover Factory" (1:44)  	
Frankie Cosmos - Fool (2:04)	
Archer Prewitt - Two Can Play (1:52)	
I Hate Sex - I Fucking Hate Sports (1:53)	
Trashcan Sinatras - The Perfect Reminder (1:04)	
The Books - Venice (1:44)	
The Olivia Tremor Control - Black Foliage (Animation 2) (1:23)	
Vashti Bunyan - Window Over the Bay (1:47)	
Sean Price - One (1:52)	
Circle Jerks – World Up My Ass (1:17)	
Liz Phair - Alice Springs	
Bruce Springsteen - My Best Was Never Good Enough (1:59)	
Hank Williams - Alone and Forsaken (1:59)	
Yellow Magic Orchestra - Jingle "Y.M.O." (0:21)	
King Creosote - And I Mean 'S' (1:44)	
Floor - Assassin (1:52)	
Voice Of Authority - Fuh Fuh (0:46)	
Sleater Kinney - Slow Song (1:58)	
Phish - Quadrophonic Toppling (1:59)	
The Residents - When We Were Young	
American Nightmare - Hearts (1:04)	
J Dilla - 10,000 Watts (1:42)	
Neil Young - Birds (45 RPM Single) (1:38)	
Idlewild - Self Healer (1:59)	
Grouper - Holifernes (1:33)	
The Beatles - For No One (1:59)	
Kyuss - Caterpillar March (1:56)	
Rush - Didacts & Narpets (1:00)	
Jim Guthrie - Thousand Songs (2:00)	
The Books - PS (0:56)	
Nodzzz - Is She There (1:42)	
Nurse With Wound - This Piano Can't Think	
James Murphy - Photographs - Piano (1:55)	
Acid House Kings - This Love Is All We Need (1:52)	
Tiger Trap - Tore a Hole (1:58)	
De La Soul - Kicked Out The House (1:56)	
Black Sabbath - Don't Start (Too Late) (0:49)	
Led Zeppelin - Bron-Yr-Aur (1:59)	

and yet, one song towered above them all, with two votes. your first place winner by TKO, your latest role model

Teenage Fanclub - What You Do To Me (2:00)

Recheck that “Very Ape,” bruh

The Middle Class – Out of Vogue (1:00)

this was nominated by Sleeve, but seems to have got missed off, alas

this is basically like the side-poll where i'm like "shit in my mouth, aw jeez"

no mouth shitting intended!

lol, none taken! i'm saying i invited it through my fucked up administration of all this

i will note, though, that the official full title of that sub-poll was "Top 5 songs that aren’t on the nominations list because of a technical formality or because i fucked up or because it wasn’t nominated because this world is going to HELL, etc" and the instructions were "These could be songs that were deemed ineligible because Spotify has them for 2+ minutes even though they really aren't, or we just forgot to nominate them, or I messed something up, or whatever other reason."

so a song on the non-noms list like Beatles - For None One (1:59), which i would guess would have received many votes if eligible, was deemed ineligible because on Spotify it's 2:00. i know that may sound ridiculous and dumb, but the thing is, there were lots of songs right on the edge of 2 minutes, many of which had seconds of padding at the end after the fade-out, which means there are also many songs that are listed as 2:07 on one listening platform or device or another. as much fun as the nominations thread was - and wow, i wish i could go back and do that again and again! - i did not want to dedicate investigative and very subjective detective work to dozens of songs with ambiguous lengths. and so i supplicated to lord Spotify and used it as my reference. not everyone was pleased with the results, i know. but it made me only 42% less happy instead of 49%, and that's why i did it. sorry.

of course, there are probably lots of others that people actually nominated and i just missed. i can't expect everyone to check the threads and double-check my nominations work, so i must have missed a handful out of 2100+ nominations that made the cut from the larger pool of submitted nominations

which means there are also many songs that are listed as 2:07 on one listening platform or device or another.

er, 420 sorry. what i was trying to say was that there are songs that are 2:07 (or whatever) on spotify (or whatever) that you could argue are less than two minutes long, because the last bit of the song fades out before 2:00 and then there's just weird unnecessary silence padding the track. or maybe there's a 7" where the song length is correctly listed as 1:59, even though evil master spotify shows it as 2:07

BUT, sub-poll #2 (best tracks <30 seconds) is better!. just to be clear, it was fine to vote for the same song in both the <30 seconds and <120 seconds poll. the <30 seconds sub-poll was mainly intended to highlight the best especially shorter tracks, because naturally they get buried next to the much larger pool of tracks closer to 2 minutes.

let me get those results ready

Teenage Fanclub - What You Do to Me (1:59) 1 vote

Teenage Fanclub - What You Do To Me (2:00) 2 votes

Yes! More excited about this than the main poll tbh

xp!

the TKO has been upgraded to KO

lol, sorry, before we move on, i forgot that the other night i made this really bad halfass attempt at making a word cloud for the non-noms

https://i.imgur.com/v1vSGMv.gif

That word cloud is a work of art.

I believe a certain charming carol is also up there with TFC at the number one spot.

Yes. Both votes may have come from the same house but I don't see any of you lot doubling up when you all have the right to. FILLED WITH FLOWERS

SIDE POLL #2: <30 SECONDS

https://i.imgur.com/ZdCVeDS.jpg

#10 (tie) This Mortal Coil - Tears (0:22)
0.1200 points
three votes

#10 (tie) Naked City - Speedfreaks (0:29)
0.1200 points
two votes

#9: Dead Kennedys - Short Songs (0:28)
0.1230 points
four votes

btw, i realize that assigning points to these votes (there were up to 5 allowed in the ballot, with 20, 16, 12, 8, and 5 points awarded to them in descending order) is only one way of arranging expressions of enthusiasm. another way is just the # of votes for each of these tracks. after this rollout i'll also do a bizarro world version 2 of it, sorted by #votes rather than my stupid points scheme

Jorge Ben Joe - Fia Maravilha (1:59)

poor guy can't win for losing, he changes his name because his royalty checks keep going to george benson and then this happens :(

#8: Circle Jerks - Deny Everything (0:23)
0.1320 points
three votes

(there were up to 5 allowed in the ballot, with 20, 16, 12, 8, and 5 points awarded to them in descending order)
(...which were then multiplied by 0.003, in order to create the final tiny point total. this is all so ridiculous)

#7: Brian Eno - The Microsoft Sound (0:06)
0.1440 points
four votes

classic imo

"Split" appears twice amongst the Not Nominated votes. (Credited to both Kleenex/Liliput and Liliput, for extra difficulty.)

A tie for #1, perhaps? :)

more an XP startup sound guy myself

whatever startup noise you heard when you got your first computer is your favorite startup noise for life

#6: Limmy - Wrong Way Down A One Way Street (0:04)
0.1620 points
five votes

you might be asking, why 4 decimal places? why not just three?

you rush to judgment; you don't know what's going to happen in that 4th spot. it's been zero up until now, but it might not always be. it's a product of the binary world, maaan

Aw yeah, go Microsoft Sound!

STAR

Your father would be proud

#5: Bikini Kill - In Accordance to Natural Law (0:28)
0.2040 points
four votes

best song not included poll was a bit patronizing to say the least and doomed from the onset

flopsy as usual, thank you 80% for everything and chill the fuck out with the other 20%

How was it patronising and doomed? I prefer it when noms are guideline lists and you can have write-ins, but that makes it a lot harder for the poll-runner, so this way write-ins get their own moment in the spotlight.

#4: Can - Pnoom (0:26)
0.2070 points
six votes

Patronizing because it was put in just to appease people with 2:00 long nominations... the results were going to be predictably not appeasing but it happened anyways. Sorry if that seems offensive

I do appreciate the list of songs here - just not as part of a side poll

not offensive, just wrong and weirdly hypercritical, again. i explained why i threw in that sub-poll above - there's a bunch of ambiguous space around the 2 minute mark, and i thought that if there was a 2:000001 version of "tomorrow never knows" or whatever that would controversially miss the cut, it would reveal itself in that sub-poll. instead, it got weird results. so i thought i'd rush past the results to get to a more interesting side-poll, but you have always have to deal with the people booing on the side as you go

#3: Wire - Field Day for the Sundays (0:28)
0.2550 points
seven votes

#2: Johnny Hawksworth - Thames Television ident theme, c.1968-90 (0:07)
0.2910 points
six votes