This website is dedicated to Albert Barger, my friend and former roommate who passed away in December of 2020.
Albert produced music recordings, ran for the U.S. Senate and for a short time had his own local television show.
One of Albert's projects I had the most insight on was inspired by a book that ranked songs.
Albert had decided to write his own book which he was working on with his Macintosh Laptop (affectionately called "The Devil Box").
As his room mate I remember him playing several songs repeatedly while trying to think what to write about each them.
Unfortunately, the hard drive of the laptop stopped working and Albert had not backed up any of his work.
With the prospect of starting everything over from scratch again, Albert lost hope in completing the project and moved on to other things.
In memory of Albert I have decided to revamp this project but in a different way.
First of all I have no way of second guessing what Albert would have said about these songs or even what songs he chose.
Albert and I had some musical differences and there are sure to be some songs we would have disagreed on.
Second of all I will be using a website format rather than writing a book.
For my list I am choosing songs that from my perspective which had special meaning to me.
I have mainly focused on popular music and will not include parodies, lesser known songs or classical music.
I am also not much of a fan of country music or rap, so very few of these made the list.
I will include links to commentary for some songs which may include any memory of what Albert may had said about it.
The list of songs span more than six decades.In establishing this list I tried to select only one song per artist or group.
In some cases there are groups that have the same artist or the artist went on as a solo act.
Originally I was going to limit the number of songs to 100 but that became too difficult so I expanded the list to 200.
Even so it was still difficult just to select my top 250 songs. I move several songs around many times but had to settle on the order.
There are sure to be some songs that have ended up left out of the list.
These songs, and some newer songs which I really can not place yet, were put in a special honorable mention list.
For the most part I did not take into consideration the personal views or politics of the artists themselves.
Just because I like a song does not mean I agree with the message of the song or and personal views or antics of the artists.
There are some artists who I either just don't care for their music or I find repulsive enough that I did not care to list them.
So if you are wondering why a song might not be on my list, I have created a list of artists I don't care for.
There will also be songs that I have forgotten about and when I run across these, I will add them to the honorable mention list.
At some point I have to finalize the list and can not keep making changes. The list will never be perfect and my views may change over time.
Whether you agree or disagree with my rankings, I hope you enjoy looking through the list.
I will continue to add comments as I find time to do so.
The python code used to create the web pages is available for anyone who wants it.
The List
To learn more HTML/CSS, check out these tutorials!