Faulty reasoning signals

• Confirmation Bias - 4.6% (67 hits)
• Anchoring Bias - 0%
• Availability Heuristic - 7.9% (115 hits)
• Representativeness Heuristic - 4.1% (60 hits)
• Hindsight Bias - 1.7% (25 hits)
• Overconfidence Bias - 2.5% (37 hits)
• Framing Effect - 5.9% (86 hits)
• Loss Aversion - 0%
• Status Quo Bias - 1.4% (20 hits)
• Sunk Cost Effect - 0%
• Optimism Bias - 1.6% (23 hits)
• Pessimism Bias - 1.3% (19 hits)

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America 250: Ten records that explain America

In Focus delivers deeper coverage of the political, cultural, and ideological issues shaping America.

Published daily by senior writers and experts, these in-depth pieces go beyond the headlines to give readers the full picture.

You can find our full list of In Focus pieces here.

The course of popular music has been shaped by many countries, but modern commercial music as we know it originated in New York City’s Tin Pan Alley district in the late 19th century, where singers, songwriters, pianists, publishers, and other musically inclined hustlers gradually turned melody into mass culture.

Before records became the dominant medium, songs were printed on paper and sold to parlors, vaudeville stages, and dance halls.

If you think independent musicians are underpaid by Spotify today, just ask a lowly pianist in the early 20th century how he was doing.

Like many great facets of capitalism, America invented the modern machinery that made music popular, portable, profitable, and, eventually, unavoidable.

So, in honor of America’s 250th birthday, here are 10 records that pushed the musical boundaries of their day, expanded the grammar of popular music, or captured some essential American mood or ideal.

*The Complete Recordings* — Robert Johnson (1936-1937)

While older civilizations have their hymns carved into stone and passed down through ritual, America has blues records wrapped in mythology about a man selling his soul to the devil at the crossroads.

But the real magic of Robert Johnson’s music is not supernatural virtuosity.

It is how personal and human it remains.

These stark recordings have been covered and imitated for generations, but it is the lo-fi originals that transport you back to the Mississippi Delta of the 1930s and offer a haunting glimpse into the American soul and landscape, shaped by hardship, longing, and determination.

*Elvis Presley* — Elvis Presley (1956)

Before the jumpsuits, impersonators, and lavish excesses that made him more myth than man, there was the young Elvis Presley, born to a blue-collar, working-class family who arrived in Memphis with little more than a dream to channel the entire inheritance of American music through his velvety baritone voice and animated hips.

Elvis’s ambitions are even more impressive because he was stepping into the unknown.

In 1956, there was no pop-star template to follow.

Through sheer talent and charisma, he synthesized country, blues, gospel, and R&B into a performance art that was simultaneously scandalous, commercial, and irresistible.

He created the rock ’n’ roll superstar by becoming patient zero.

And the frenzied vigor driving recordings such as “Blue Suede Shoes,” from his debut album, channels that incipient hunger.

*West Side Story* — Leonard Bernstein (1955-1957)

Leonard Bernstein was America’s musical renaissance man.

He helped transform the New York Philharmonic into a globally recognized institution and introduced classical music to millions through his televised broadcasts, making the highbrow art form feel accessible, dramatic, and alive.

But beyond the baton, Bernstein was also a gifted composer.

*West Side Story* represents one of America’s great musical fusions: Broadway, opera, complex jazz harmonies, Latin rhythms, symphonic grandeur, and urban tragedy compressed into a work of astonishing dramatic force.

Bernstein adapted the timeless star-crossed lovers of *Romeo and Juliet* to the bustling and daring streets of New York.

He deftly tackled issues of race and gang violence long before the progressives of the 1960s, revolutionizing American theater in the process.

*Highway 61 Revisited* — Bob Dylan (1965)

There are several Bob Dylan albums that could easily make this list.

In fact, half the list could be Dylan’s output from 1965 through 1975.

*Highway 61* represents Dylan’s break from the folk-protest movement that desperately tried to manipulate him into championing its Marxist gobbledegook.

Rather than remain a dutiful vehicle for topical anthems and ideological pamphleteering, Dylan went electric and effectively told the folk commissars at Newport to stuff it.

With “Like a Rolling Stone,” he also expanded what a popular radio hit could be.

It was far longer, less conventional, but, most importantly, more alive than anything that came before.

*Pet Sounds* — The Beach Boys (1966)

It is often said that without *Pet Sounds*, there would never have been *Sgt.

Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band*.

But the more salient point is that without *Pet Sounds*, there would never have been *Pet Sounds* — one of the great singular achievements in Western popular music, and a superior record to its English-influenced offshoot.

Brian Wilson took the whimsical architecture of surf-pop and rebuilt it as something symphonic, melancholy, psychedelic, and beautiful.

The result is equal parts pop, jazz, avant-garde studio experiment, and teenage heartbreak, while remaining infectiously melodic and suffused with those swooning Beach Boys harmonies.

Brian Wilson, God only knows where we’d be without you.

*The Velvet Underground & Nico* — The Velvet Underground (1967)

Though it seems almost prudish by today’s standards, when shock-pop songs such as “WAP” go viral every other year, *The Velvet Underground & Nico* was a genuinely abrasive and taboo-breaking record.

Released in 1967, it dragged rock music out of the flower-power haze and into a harsher urban world of prostitution, drug addiction, sexual deviance, spiritual vacancy, and glamorous decay.

While much of the counterculture was busy lauding its own virtues with delusional kumbaya nonsense, the Velvet Underground made music for the people who had already seen the vapid underside of the Summer of Love.

*Are You Experienced* — The Jimi Hendrix Experience (1967)

It is difficult to convey the atomic energy unleashed by the opening chords of “Purple Haze.”

I was nowhere near alive in 1967 when it was first released, but the shock waves it sent out upon arrival continue to reverberate today.

Ask 10 guitarists who the GOAT of guitar is, and nine of them will invariably be correct.

Jimi Hendrix was the Michael Jordan of rock ’n’ roll guitar, except there is no LeBron or Kobe with whom to debate his dominance.

Rock guitar existed before Hendrix, but only after him was its true potential revealed, and still never channeled with such unrestrained virtuosity and elegance.

On *Are You Experienced*, Hendrix fuses blues, psychedelia, R&B, feedback, and erotic swagger into a language entirely his own.

Few records have ever sounded so much like the future from their opening bar.

*Bookends* — Simon & Garfunkel (1968)

Paul Simon is one of America’s great short-story writers in song.

His music, especially in collaboration with Art Garfunkel, is filled with travelers, loners, lovers, college graduates, and spiritually exhausted young people trying to locate themselves in a changing country.

*Bookends* is a compact study of alienation, youth, and national dislocation.

On “America,” we follow a young couple hitchhiking across the country in search of that national identity.

Fundamentally, the song asks whether America is merely an arrangement of highways, commerce, and movement — “counting the cars on the New Jersey Turnpike” — or whether there is some deeper cultural meaning beneath it all.

*Cosmo’s Factory* — Creedence Clearwater Revival (1970)

There is much debate over which band most purely “sounds” American.

Numerous answers could suffice, but to me, American rock ’n’ roll is the voice, twang, and roots-rock propulsion of John Fogerty and Creedence Clearwater Revival.

Between 1968 and 1970, Fogerty released an astounding run of six records (and they are all great).

It is impossible to listen to songs such as “Run Through the Jungle” without picturing scenes from the Vietnam War set to swampy rock ’n’ roll.

It is loud, suspicious of authority, free of any pretension, and unmistakably American.

AMERICA 250: HOW THE US TOOK OVER THE WORLD’S JUKEBOX

*Born to Run* — Bruce Springsteen (1975)

I don’t know how Bruce Springsteen celebrates America’s birthday these days.

For all I know, he is delivering mopey land acknowledgments and delving into hackneyed dirges on American immigration policy.

But none of that matters because in 1975 he recorded a little album called *Born to Run*, capturing the broad spectrum of American angst and optimism.

The record is both grandiose and sincere.

Across eight theatrical tracks, Springsteen tells a rich story of youth, love, escape, and the intrepid drive to pursue large dreams before the world closes in.

From the tender ballade “Thunder Road” to the thunderous title track, powered by Clarence Clemons’s monstrous saxophone solo, to the urban opera of “Jungleland,” which ties us right back to Bernstein’s *West Side Story*, *Born to Run* is one of the great albums about wanting out, wanting independence, and believing, against all evidence, that freedom and a better beginning is worth all the risk in the world.

It is one of the great albums about America.

Harry Khachatrian (@Harry1T6) is a film critic for the Washington Examiner.

He is a software engineer, holds a master’s degree from the University of Toronto, and writes about wine at BetweenBottles.com