This is merely my opinon. Feel free to make and form opinons of your own.
Led Zeppelin and Pink Floyd are up with the Gods.
Above them are The Doors.
Above The Doors are Simon and Garfunkel.
Above them are the elite, the best of the best.
This is, for me, David S. Annderson, the best music made in the American tradition: (In no particular order)
The Beach Boys
The Beatles
The best solo works of The Beatles, especially John and George and the first 2 Paul solo albums (McCartney and Ram)
Dennis Wilson's Pacific Ocean Blue
The Grateful Dead
Jefferson Airplane
Jefferson Starship
the early-70s Paul Kantner-Grace Slick albums
David Crosby's early-70s solo album If I Could Only Remember My Name
The David Crosby-Graham Nash albums of the 1970's
John Denver
Joni Mitchell
Yes (The Yes Album through Tales from Topographic Oceans)
Hawkwind, when experienced live in person in the mid-1970's (based on their recordings, descriptions, and photographs)
(A suggestion: read about the concerts, look up photos, put on their great mid-70s albums, and use your imagination!)
(And there might still be a live video of them doing 'Silver Machine' in 1972 up there on Youtube!)
Cream and Blind Faith
Jimi Hendrix
Inna-Gadda-da-Vida
Happy Trails by Quicksilver Messenger Service (and probably Shady Grove as well)
Piper at the Gates of Dawn
The Allman Brothers, live when Duanne was still alive (e. g. Allman Brothers Live At Fillmore East and the live sides of Eat A Peach)
Bob Dylan at his best
The few best tracks of Simon and Garfunkel (The Sound of Silence, The Boxer, Only Living Boy in New York, Bridge over Troubled Water)
The great early recordings of The Byrds (the first album and the Turn Turn Turn single, especially the Dylan and Pete Seeger songs)
Age of Aquarius/Let the Sunshine In by The 5th Dimension
Making Movies and Love over Gold by Dire Straits
Piano Man by Billy Joel, especially the lyrics
Neil Diamond
The Muppet Movie soundtrack
The best old school Sesame Street and Fraggle Rock songs
70s Marvin Gaye
The lyrics of Sly and the Family Stone, plus the album 'Stand!' and the single 'Everyday People' (I know 'Everyday People' is on the album; I still want to emphasize it)
Patti Smith
Miles Davis and his bands (Including the 'Bitches Brew-In a Silent Way' electric period- all of it thru his semi-retirement in the mid-late 70s!)
John Coltrane and his bands
The best work of Ornette Coleman
The best work of Herbie Hancock and Wayne Shorter, especially the Blue Note stuff from the mid-60s
Anything Eric Dolphy
Any great local band live in person on a magical night (or day)
And a special mention of Charlie Parker, Dizzy Gillespie, and the pioneers of bebop for inventing modern jazz and inspiring the first form of classic counterculture
*And, as theater rather than music (though the music is great), David Bowie as Ziggy Stardust (including Hunky Dory) and the 70s space-themed live shows of Parliament/Funkadelic
And finally, a special place for the legendary Blues, Jazz, Ragtime, and Gospel pioneers who created American music in the first place!
And for the country pioneers who brought Blues into Folk and made it American (people like Lead Belly, who is surely as country as anyone, and Jimmie Rodgers... especially Jimmie Rodgers, he really started it all in country... the country of Lead Belly would have remained part of Blues if Jimmie Rodgers haden't been doing it too)
Just below these would be:
Simon and Garfunkel
The very best tracks of The Doors
Please Come to Boston by Dave Loggins
Longer and Leader of the Band by Dan Fogelburg
Time in a Bottle by Jim Croce
American Pie by Don McLean
Many legends of mid-1950s through mid-1960s jazz
The pioneers of cool jazz and hard bop
Also high among legends, among others, although not quite as high as The Doors or Simon and Garfunkel, would be:
Led Zeppelin
Pink Floyd
The Who
Rush
Dream On by Aerosmith
Don't Fear the Reaper
Edge of Seventeen
The Chain by Fleetwood Mac
Born to Run by Bruce Springsteen (especially the best tracks on the album)
early Dire Straits
CSNY, including the early solo work
70s Stevie Wonder
The best of Smokey and the Miracles, The Temptations, and Sly and the Family Stone
The best tracks of Whitney Houston
Roger Miller
Old School Sesame Street music
Old School Muppet music (from the movies, etc.); Fraggle Rock Music
Old School Disney music
Anything sung by Barbra Streisand or Angela Lansbury (though perhaps this should be counted as the European tradition? (see below))
The best tracks of Diana Ross
Duke Ellington
Gershwin's classical works (Unlike Aaron Copland, this is definitely in the American tradition alongside Duke Ellington!)
The Louis Armstrong Hot Fives and Sevens
The Jelly Roll Morton Red Hot Peppers recordings from the late 1920's
The Bix Beiderbecke recordings from 1927 (Specifically those from that one year of 1927, when he had such a group of legends recording with him!)
These would still, on my list, be above Shakespeare and Dostoyevsky in their field, though Shakespeare and Dostoyevsky still belong among the 'Gods'
A special place for mid-60s Motown for making the best pure Pop in history and for paving the way for the age of Britney and the Backstreet Boys and for all the great Boy Band music through the years
A special place for the music of The Drifters and The Shirelles for expanding the language of Rock and Roll and paving the way for so much that came after from the age of The Beatles and Dylan on
And a special shout out to The Verve and Radiohead for being so great long after the end of the Golden Age!
This is my list! Feel free to make your own!
God loves you!
Sincerely,
David S. Annderson
P.S. The best European music in the American popular scene: Barry Manilow, Air Supply, John Williams, the Lord of the Rings soundtrack: these are not on the list because these are European music! (Same thing with Aaron Copland and Amy Beach, two of the finest composers in the classical European tradition!)
The Great European Music (and the Great Russian/Ukrainian Music)
The great works of European music are, along with Renaissance and Impressionist painting and the works of C.S. Lewis and Tolkien, the finest works of post-medieval Europe that do not depend on drawing from the American tradition (with its mixed roots from multiple civilizations). This is a rare opportunity to hear the finest music from an era other than our own.
In my opinion, these works of European classical music (among possibly others) belong in a high level comparable to the top level of American music above, the one where I put The Beatles and Dylan, Jimi Hendrix and Miles Davis, and represent, along with the finest Renaissance and Impressionist (and post-Impressionist) painting and the works of Tolkien and C.S. Lewis, the finest post-medieval European works that do not draw upon the American tradition:
The more ambitious works of Bach (if not all of Bach)
Handel's Messiah
Late Beethoven- the late string quartets, 9th Symphony, Missa Solemnis, and last four piano sonatas
Late-period Schubert: the last two symphonies, late string quartets, string quintet, and Arpeggione Sonata (among possibly other late works); also, the song Gretchen at the Spinning Wheel
Any Chopin piano piece
Tchaikovsky: the ballets and concertos, and the Romeo and Juliet fantasy
Rachmaninov: any large orchestral work (at least)
Borodin
Mahler, especially the first 3 symphonies
Also sprach Zarathustra by Richard Strauss
Debussy
Ravel
Scriabin
The great early ballets of Igor Stravinsky
And, if you have the stomach for tragedy, Mussorgsky; however, Night on Bald Mountain is not a tragedy
These works are among the great works of man, and along with Tolkien, C.S. Lewis, and the tradition of European painting, and European mathematics and astronomy, archeology, paleontology, and medicine, are post-medieval Europe's gift to the world
Late Beethoven, Mahler, Bach, and Handel's Messiah, and a few others among their peers, represent, along with Michelangelo and Raphael and Leonardo da Vinci, Van Gogh, Cezanne, and late-period Monet, Tolkien and C.S. Lewis, the finest strivings towards spiritual understanding in Post-Medieval European civilization before the awakening of the Beatniks out of America. Some of them a striving anew, others, like Bach and Tolkien, through an understanding of the old Christian tradition on a level that most of Europe lacks.
However, some of the composers above come from older civilizations steeped in this same Christian wisdom that Bach and Tolkien, among so few in Europe, knew so well, civilizations where this wisdom was well known, where a deep ancient spirit could be expressed by composers in the European tradition, which had long been Europe's main field for spiritual striving
For Tchaikovsky, Rachmaninov, Borodin, Mussorgsky, Scriabin, and Stravinsky are not of Europe at all, but of the older civilization of Russia, with its roots in Bulgaria and Constantinople; this same civilization gave us Pushkin, Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky, three of the finest writers of the past 200 years (as of 2025), the sublime tradition of Russian ballet, and the finest school of architecture of the past 200 years, which has, from its beginnings in 18th Century Russia, flowered all across the Orthodox world; this great flowering of culture belongs too to the Ukraine, which took part in full in the cultural flowering of the Russian world at this time
The great works of Mussorgsky, Borodin, early Stravinsky, Scriabin, and Dostoyevsky (among others I'm sure, probably including Pushkin) draw deeply on the deep spirit of ancient Rus civilization, and Borodin and Rimsky-Korsakov write stunningly on the world of unfallen Asia in the century before their own which Russia knew so well
And no recommendation of the best Russian and Ukrainian music would be complete without traditional Russian church bell ringing and traditional Russian Orthodox chant!
I also have my doubts as to how much Chopin is fully European; he takes part in full in the European world (as did Pushkin's Russia), but the deep subtle influence of the world of Bulgaria and Russia, and the world of old Constantinople, is surely very present too in Chopin's Poland; Chopin's world is perhaps rather a world with roots in more than one place, rather like America today; nevertheless, all these composers, including the Russians, were European in that they had mastered the European aristocratic arts
For after all, civilization flows and rolls and flows like a great river, and a river can have more than one source!