There is an adage—I forget who coined it—that in the short run, the public taste is dreadful; in the long run, it's impeccable. Not really true, of course, or tons of brilliant older tunes, songs and compositions would have resurfaced instead of mouldering in the darkened recesses of history, and many old pieces that are fairly dreadful would have died away instead. But if one examines the bulk of the tripe which survives in published form in various archives, one does see a partial truth in the saying; older music gets filtered by the public's backlashes and more objective evaluations after the initial fad and furore have passed.

Sadly, songs, like celebrities, are often known for being known, not because of intrinsic worth. "Yesterday" is a brilliant song, but would it be remembered today had it been a one-off written by a member of Freddie and the Dreamers rather than by Paul McCartney? Mudcat is a perfect example of the hit-and-miss taste of the public: threads about silly or frankly dull songs are revived endlessly for years, whereas you often have to dig to find threads on wonderful songs that have somehow escaped the public radar. (Of course part of this is because someone may have added "the last word" in terms of substantive information, and the only sort of comment left to make is "Like" or "I remember that from ....") I sometimes wonder if Mudcat should have a random thread listing, so there's a simple, democratic means of tripping across threads and songs one might have missed. One may say that's what "like" voting is for, but it suffers from the cult of celebrity syndrome—people mainly vote for what's already familiar and popular to them (the tyranny of mediocrity).

The hallmarks that make songs last are often the very traits that may drive one to distraction and characterize hackneyed writing. More important than the identifiable hooks themselves may be the ineffable synergy a writer or performer creates between them.