"... the thesis of Daniel J. Levitin's lively, ambitious and occasionally even persuasive new book, "The World in Six Songs." Music, Levitin argues, is not just something to help pass the time on road trips and a swell facilitator for meeting girls: it is, he writes,"the soundtrack of civilization"— a force that shaped us as a species and prepared us for the higher-order task of sharing complex communications with one another.
If that sounds like a slightly esoteric argument (and all but unprovable without the use of a time machine), it's also one that Levitin is supremely qualified to make. A musician and former record producer who still pals around with the likes of Sting and David Byrne, Levitin now runs the Laboratory for Music Perception, Cognition and Expertise at McGill University; he covered adjacent turf in his 2007 best seller, "This Is Your Brain on Music." And to the extent that "The World in Six Songs" succeeds, it works much like a great piece of pop music, whose combined elements can induce feelings of enlightenment and euphoria, even when some of the words don't hold up to closer scrutiny.
Levitin divides his book into impressionistic chapters that address the six categories he believes all songs (or at least those possessing lyrics) fit into: songs of friendship, songs of joy, songs of comfort, songs of knowledge, religious songs and love songs. There's a nice parlor-game feel to the book as Levitin sets up these distinctions and the reader tries to figure out which groupings his or her favorite songs belong to. Is the Mothers of Invention's exuberant "Take Your Clothes Off When You Dance" a song of joy or a song of comfort? Is Meat Loaf's "Bat Out of Hell" a love song, or does its cautionary motorcycle-crash conclusion make it a song of knowledge?
..." (emphasis mine -- DD)
Anybody up for the game could name their six from the folk world... ;-)
I'll submit this, and see if I can come up with a list from my favorites.