The Wiki Man | 7 November 2009

I recently read of a music writer who believes the perfect pop song lasts precisely two minutes and 42 seconds. Crazy though it sounds, he may be on to something. Try ordering your iTunes collection by duration and you may find as I did that songs of that length seem slightly better on average than any others.

For the record, mine include ‘Michelle’, Elvis’s ‘Funny How Time Slips Away’ and ‘Love me Tender’, Johnny Cash’s ‘Folsom Prison Blues’, Josephine Baker’s ‘Si J’étais Blanche’, ‘California Dreamin’’ by The Mamas and the Papas, ‘The Wanderer’ by Dion and the Belmonts and ‘This Charming Man’ by The Smiths. So, just as you could build a decent music collection by buying music only by people who died in plane crashes, I suspect you could also survive with only a playlist called 2’42”.

(Incidentally, Dion — of Dion and the Belmonts — nearly ended up on both lists. Had he not needed money for drugs and drink, he could have paid to join Buddy Holly, Ritchie Valens and companions in the Beechcraft Bonanza rather than going to the next engagement by bus. So, thanks to heroin, he’s still alive and well in Florida, aged 70. They don’t tell you that in school, do they?)

Hitting on the optimum length for any creative form is a strange process indeed. The pop song was in part defined by what fitted on a single side of a 78rpm record. The play and the opera are constrained by many external variables, including the size of the human bladder. Movies need to be of a reasonable length to justify the price of a cinema ticket and the effort of going to the cinema (though many of the best black and white films are surprisingly brief — possibly because they were bolstered by a supporting feature).