Andrew Collins started a blog in July 2013 - Circles of Life: The 143 - he's about half way through now.
There are no embedded youtube clips or sound files because he "rejected it on the grounds that an embedded clip or sound file would detract from the purpose of the project, which is — selfishly — for me to exercise my fingers and brain in describing and contextualising 143 songs".
Doesn't mean I can't do it though (this Chrome extension may come in handy):
• - ABC, Unzip (1983) [when he delivers the killer line in the second verse, "She's vegetarian except when it comes to sex," I blush every time.]
• - The Rakes, We Are All Animals (2005) [This is catchy stuff, with witty lines that stay in the mind]
• - Public Enemy, Rebel Without A Pause (1987) [This is black power, pure and simple, its urgency communicated by the unusual 109bpm velocity (I looked that up) and the JBs' hornsqueal, which were signatures of a hip hop crew with their own agenda.]
• - David Bowie, Be My Wife (1977) [It's the pub piano of the intro that does it for me, banging away throughout as if by Mrs Mills, the perfect ironic underlay for Bowie's Chas & Dave vocal.]
• - Colourbox, Just Give 'Em Whiskey (1985) [a rattling, guitar-led sprint through sci-fi thrillers Westworld and The Andromeda Strain, via dialogue lifted wholesale from videotapes and set to modern rock, ricocheting gunshots and soundtrack stings.]
• - The Elgins, Put Yourself In My Place (1966) [A saccharine, heady, insistent tune that grips your heart]
• - Clock DVA, 4 Hours (1981) [Over a grumbling bass, a blunt-instrument drumbeat and the pained wail of a sax, we are indoctrinated into a neo-noir nightmare]
• - Beastie Boys, An Open Letter To NYC (2004) [It's nostalgic, defiant, together and stirring.]
• - George Harrison, Ballad Of Sir Frankie Crisp (Let It Roll) (1970) [There aren't many "ditties" (George's word) about rich men who had houses built and designed their gardens, grottos and follies, full stop, but I doubt there's one that channels its subject like this one.]
• - The Wedding Present, My Favourite Dress (1987) [There are two reasons why this song is magic. One is the decisive moan Gedge delivers after the last line. There are a lot of important "oh"s in pop music, but this is one to bruise your ribs from the inside. The second is the one minute and 24 seconds of outro, which rises and falls from that thousand-words "Ohhh" to the final, undressed jangle.]
• - 10cc, I'm Not In Love (1975) [its haunting choral effect was achieved in 1974 at the band's own Strawberry Studios with each layer of voice recorded separately (all four band members are involved), until they had 256.]
• - The Jesus & Mary Chain, Never Understand (1985) [From the squall, a grumbling bassline, then a crackling guitar riff and rudimentary drum signature emerge, and an oddly sweet but half-hidden voice makes recognisable words amid the interference.]
• - Burial, Archangel (2007) [The song is all hints and vagaries. You fill in the blanks, and dubstep has many blanks.]
• - Wu-Tang Clan, Let My Niggas Live (2000) [its "rigorous moves" glower, rumble and stalk to create a soundtrack to a film about a world I do not know, and that, I guess, is the allure.]
• - Bob Dylan, Tell Me That It Isn't True (1969) Stirling Castle [less than three minutes long but lifted by an enthusiastic drum part from Kenneth Buttrey, twinkling with all those guitars, enhanced with a bit of honky tonk piano and made airborne by Dylan's almost cheekily accessible vocal.]
• - Everything But The Girl, Each And Every One (1984) [plaintive brass, school-orchestra percussion (what is that hollow, ridged wooden thing you scrape a stick across?) and voices spun from silk.]
• - The Orb, Little Fluffy Clouds (7″ Edit) (1990) [ a remarkably disciplined sonic creation, whose voices drift across the production's blue sky like clouds]
• - The Jackson Sisters, I Believe In Miracles (1973) [so positive, so airborne, so persuasive, it has you hammering thin air and kills all known melancholia dead. ]
• - The Sisters Of Mercy, Lucretia My Reflection (1988) [a track to drive a tank to. It consolidates all the dreams and fantasies I entertained during my Goth years of death and horror and sex and power.]
• - The Source feat. Candi Staton, You Got The Love (Now Voyager Radio Edit) (1991) [Sometimes a classic song comes together in a roundabout way, but as when the stars align, we should savour the moment. You Got The Love is one of those moments.]
• - Pink Floyd, Shine On You Crazy Diamond, Parts I-V (1975) [Big, beaty and bold, it's also personal and emotional, a prog-rock movement that actually moves.]
• - Elvis Costello and the Attractions, Beyond Belief (1982) [About a minute in, Pete Thomas goes all over his kit, and the song prepares to go up a gear; there's even a gunshot, or what sounds like one. By the time Steve Nieve's piano cascades we're into full pulp fiction mode: a lot going on at a high level of emotion, in a very confined space. It's head-spinning.]
• - The Fall, L.A. (1985) [driven by a chuffing synthesised sound and a keyboard pulse, and some of Karl Burns' heaviest but metronomically tumbling drums, and most of it feels like an instrumental, with that dirty twanging guitar and guttural bass, the vocals more of a wash than a foregrounded detail]
• - The Temptations, It's Growing (1965) [disarmingly simple, high-pitched piano signature, not a riff but a warm-up and picked out, it seems, on a pub upright]
• - The Cure, One Hundred Years (1982) [Remember: this magnificent sound was created by three blokes from Sussex, exhausted, drunk, high on drugs and at each others' throats, imagining they were making their last album]
• - Electric Light Orchestra, Mr Blue Sky (1977) [they cook with gas for a full five minutes, using Vocoder and choral effects to tip a simple pop tune into sepulchral glory.]
• - Jim Bob, Cartoon Dad (2007) [the brass band intro exquisitely pitched, the drama subsequently built up through a rat-a-tat-tat staccato section and a daringly literal chime before a reference to Big Ben striking.]
• - Morrissey, Everyday Is Like Sunday (1988) [Wet sand, pebbles, a bench, stolen clothes, the promenade, the etched postcard, "greased tea" and that glittering prize of a "cheap tray" – this is poetry by any other name, just set to a tune capable of giving even the stout-hearted the vapours.]
• - Lionrock, Fire Up The Shoesaw (Original Album Mix) (1996) [It begins, as these things so often do, with a disembodied, echoey sample of an American announcer, seemingly reacting to a primary election result of some kind and the establishment of "a new candidate" and, less conventionally, a "new favourite vegetable which is... asparagus" and then we're off]
• - Adele, Rolling In The Deep (2011) [But I love the smokiness in her voice; the cracks; the scratches; the way she pulls back from total vocal acrobatics; always patting her heart.]
• - Scott Walker, Montague Terrace (In Blue) (1967) [The orchestra swirls around the narrator, as if in some West End musical, Walker nudged into the background by the swell as he hits the lamenting heights with a brass-backed chorus that finally names Montague Terrace... in blue]
• - Pet Shop Boys, Always On My Mind (1987) [Its synth pulse pumps new life into what is a country song, but the sincerity of the sentiment is not lost in Tennant's characteristically nasal delivery.]
• - The Rolling Stones, Wild Horses (1971) [It's a little bit country, a little bit rock'n'roll, and that combination of acoustic and electric guitars is enough to break anybody's heart.]
• - Frank Wilson, Do I Love You (Indeed I Do) (1965) [The rat-tat-rat-a-tat drum signature hallmarks the kind of record later pressed into service on the sprung dancefloors of Lancashire, but it's the chiming notes that single this song out.]
• - Joy Division, She's Lost Control (1979) [the song's riff is played on the bass, by the man with the beard. It's radical in so many ways.]
• - Manic Street Preachers, Motorcycle Emptiness (1992) [whistleable rock'n'roll majestry]
• - Billy Bragg, Tank Park Salute (1991) [Floated on musical confidante Cary Tievey's plangent piano – that's plaintive rather than funereal, and all the more touching for that (Trust is also piano-led) – Billy's voice is far from the Essex bark that got him noticed in the mid-80s, yet raw in a different way.]
• - The Smiths, Rusholme Ruffians (1985) [descriptive, evocative, fast, funny, fleet of foot and ripe with imagery]
• - Gang Of Four, 5.45 (1979) [it has a melodica; perhaps the most effective and beautiful use of that remedial wind instrument in all of post-punk.]
• - Crosby, Stills & Nash, Marrakesh Express (1969) [a locomotive little ditty that encapsulates all that was heady and infused about the late 60s and Laurel Canyon]
• - The Clash, Groovy Times (1979) [ I can't think of a more definitive Strummer vocal performance ("Hey, Groovy!"), those words spat out with such righteous fury and agitated saliva.]
• - Blind Boys Of Alabama, Way Down In The Hole (2001) [quite dainty, with a tickled bossa nova drum beat, and minimal blues guitar.]
• - Dr Dre (feat. Snoop Dogg), Still D.R.E. (1999) [Underpinning all this vocal tennis is one of the great pilfered-or-otherwise cinematic/orchestral riffs in all of hip-hop]
• - Led Zeppelin, Whole Lotta Love (1969) [it loops off into a prog hinterland of tickled cymbals, errant percussion, scraped strings, spectral echoes, space traffic, orgasmic monkey noises and then, at the three-minute mark, to the sound of radio station playlist managers heading for the car park, Bonzo signals the song back in,]
• - Cocteau Twins, Ivo (1984) [It even has a guitar solo – which is a bit like letting off a firework during a fireworks display.]
• - The Kingsmen, Louie Louie (1963) [From that seductive organ intro, offset by the warning-sign of a single offbeat on the snare, the arrangement crashes through the wall, fully formed, driven by a rhythm that must have sounded deeply satanic]
• - The Beatles, Blackbird (1968) [A simply picked tune on a Martin D 28 acoustic (you know I looked that up), recorded outside, there is on the millpond surface so little to it, musically, although archaeology reveals roots in a tune for loot by JS Bach, Bourrée in E Minor]
• - The Lotus Eaters, The First Picture Of You (1983) [the magic force of this song's feelings – the sort that feel as if they could actually bring on a change in season – is forever.]
• - The Human League, Being Boiled (1980) [a truly pivotal moment in pop music is born: a singer uses the word "sericulture",]
• - Dave Brubeck Quartet, Take Five (1959) [It's wordless. A play without dialogue. A tune sung by percussion and wind.]
• - Diana Ross, Upside Down (1980) [Ross's voice, high in the mix (maybe higher than intended), is light, sexy and seamlessly authoritative throughout]
• - Radiohead, Idioteque (2000) [Rattling like a little girl's toy, it makes you jerk your elbows, it makes you think, it makes Thom Yorke enter the same seizure-like state of grace that once possessed Ian Curtis.]
• - Tom Waits, Jockey Full Of Bourbon (1985) [The voice, low and ravaged, sings of drop-dead suits, mohair vests, downtown trains and "a two dollar pistol",]
• - Pixies, Debaser (1989) [Frank Black tears into this recording with its highbrow nonsense lyric as if these were his last two minutes and 52 seconds on earth]
• - Nick Cave and The Bad Seeds, City Of Refuge (1988) [It rolls into view out of a heat-haze of howling harmonica and guitar strummed in readiness for something wicked which presumably this way comes.]
• - The Farm, All Together Now (1990) [A "terrace singalong" is how it might be dismissed by people who've never stepped foot on a terrace, or sang along. But community singing is important]
• - Happy Mondays, Mad Cyril (1988) [This beat poetry from the back-bar Bukowski or – according to the late, kingmaking Tony Wilson – the Wine Lodge Yeats, gives vital shape to what is otherwise a near formless barrage of noise.]
• - Johnny Cash, Hurt (2002) [Mortality stalks Hurt like a ghost at a wedding. "You could have it all," sounds like our man preparing to do a deal, and a jabbed piano and second guitar underline the importance of what's afoot.]
• - Talking Heads, Born Under Punches (The Heat Goes On) (1980) [A chattering, Brian Eno-doctored mutant of guitars, squeals and beats speaks in musical tongues, while Byrne, a perspiring Norman Bates-like figure, affects a near-parody of the possessed funk vocalist]
• - Faces, Ooh La La (1973) [It's a glorious, sunshiny, folksy ditty about the passage of time and I do wish that I knew what I know now when I was forty.]
• - The The, Uncertain Smile (1983) [a copper-bottomed attention-grabbing lament to romantic loss and solipsistic regret]
• - New Order, Regret (1993) [It's oysters without grit, a city skyline without TV aerials, a billboard panorama without imperfections, a sound so deep and wide and tall it bleeds off the edges of most pop music's expectations and resets the aspect ratio.]
• - The Velvet Underground, Venus In Furs (1967)> [This song sounds like forbidden fruit, a sacrificial drone recorded in a secret place behind a secret door with a secret knock, in a thick fug of analgesic vapour among cross-dressing whiplash folk.]
• - Bobby Womack, Across 110th Street (1973) [this vivid, urgent, soulful lament to social exclusion and ethnic deprivation becomes a freedom song]
• - Kevin Coyne, Dynamite Daze (1978) [The beat gallops, time is kept, guitars are thrashed, and through it all, Coyne's almost comedic gurgle; impossible to tear your ears away from, it hiccups and free-forms, rising to a crazy, yodelling falsetto with total abandon]
• - The Ronettes, Be My Baby (1963) [her promise on Be My Baby to give three kisses for every one hypothetically provided by her prospective "baby" is one of the high watermarks of all recorded pop.]
• - Cud, Rich And Strange (1992) [a tight, bright, almost claustrophobically self-contained glam racket.]
• - The Fire Engines, Candy Skin (1981) [A goosebumping obstinate that crystalises everything about 1981 in one electrifying, melodic phrase, augmented thereafter by an entire jumble sale of bashes, squeaks, voices, vibrations and even chocolate box strings, which unite to attain a certain kind of DIY nirvana.]
• - James Brown, Get Up (I Feel Like Being A) Sex Machine Part 1 (1970) [There's steam coming off this recording, and yet the lid stays on]
• - Echo & The Bunnymen, The Killing Moon (1984) [elegant, aromatic, sincere, torrid, spooky, luxurious, deep, wide and long]
• - Blondie, Heart Of Glass (1978) [Debbie Harry's diaphanous, triple-tracked vocal, all hard edges removed, actual words tricky to pick out, is more of a cloud than a statement. A kind of magic.]