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"  Originally published in the May 2011 Music Issue We live in the Age of the Good Song. No, really. It&amp;#039;s amazing how many good songs are out there. You can spend two hours on the Hype Machine before you hear a great song, but you can listen for two days before you hear a bad one. Even the songs that are supposed to suck \u2014 the soulless, engineered-by-the-beat dance pop \u2014 are pretty good without trying to be. Katy Perry&amp;#039;s &amp;quot;Teenage Dream&amp;quot; is a really good song. So is Bruno Mars&amp;#039;s &amp;quot;Grenade&amp;quot; and Rihanna&amp;#039;s &amp;quot;What&amp;#039;s My Name?&amp;quot; So, God help me, is Ke$ha&amp;#039;s repugnantly catchy &amp;quot;We R Who We R.&amp;quot; So, a question: What&amp;#039;s a good song? A good song is a song that makes a claim on us, that gives us pleasure for as long as it lasts. It&amp;#039;s a song we like, a song we respond to without thinking too much about it. But that&amp;#039;s why the Age of the Good Song is problematic. It&amp;#039;s not only amazing how many good songs are out there; it&amp;#039;s overwhelming. Because the Age of the Good Song is also the age of technology that asks us to think about what a good song is \u2014 that asks us to &amp;quot;like&amp;quot; a song, in the Facebook sense of the word, almost before we listen to it. Your computer does not specialize in playback, like a stereo; it is also or even primarily an instrument of acquisition, and so it has erased the distinction between listening to music and acquiring music. The hour you spend listening to songs on the Hype Machine is also an hour spent deciding what songs you want on your computer. A good song, in this context, is simply a song that you decide to download. It&amp;#039;s a song you agree to, almost the way you agree to the terms of a licensing agreement \u2014 and then winds up shuffled with thousands of others in your iTunes library.  This wouldn&amp;#039;t be problematic if the technology that asks you whether you like a song didn&amp;#039;t also happen to be technology that insulates you from hearing songs you don&amp;#039;t like \u2014 if the technology that asks for your discrimination weren&amp;#039;t also designed to frustrate it. The whole point of iTunes and Pandora is to expose you only to songs you define as good, in advance, and are consistent with your tastes. We&amp;#039;re not asked to like songs so much as we&amp;#039;re asked not to dislike them, and so it&amp;#039;s possible to live in the Age of the Good Song without knowing whether we live in the Age of the Really Good Song or the Age of the Song That&amp;#039;s Just Good Enough \u2014 the song that&amp;#039;s evolved to be acceptable to how we acquire and listen to it. Which might be why the present musical moment feels so small and ephemeral, despite its richness. The songs get better and better at the same time that music becomes less and less important in the culture; the music becomes less and less important in the culture at the same time that it becomes more and more important on your computer.  I have eighteen thousand songs on my computer; I like them all, almost by definition \u2014 because I have agreed to them, when prompted. I listen to them in an unending state of enthrallment while at the same time suspecting that what really enthralls me is my own taste. And so while I&amp;#039;d like to say that we live in the Age of the Good Song, what I really mean is that I live in the Age of the Good Song. And so do you. "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.esquire.com/entertainment/music/a9785/what-makes-a-good-song-0511/>