10 Perfect Hit Songs That Are Insanely Long

The world of popular music has never really lent itself that well to the long song format. The rules of the game have always been to not bore us and get to the chorus, and some of the greatest songs in the world have been able to reach the top of the charts and get everything finished in 3 minutes or less. The charts are unpredictable though, and sometimes bands like to mess around with something that’s a bit stranger than what the pop crowd expects.

Rather than just make the same cookie cutter song over and over, these artists took a risk by making songs that were a bit more lengthy, taking their time and stretching things out from anywhere to 5 minutes to even breaking the 10 minute mark in some cases. This should have spelled disaster for any radio station, but that’s not what happened. Almost changing the game through one song, every one of these bands actually were considered forward thinking for making this stripe of song, letting people immerse themselves in the experience and dance all of their cares away most of the time.

While most other pop songs became flashes in the pan, these songs have become modern classics, becoming influential on just what you can put on the radio at any given moment. You can say that pop has gotten stale, but you’re always going to have artists like these that make it that much more interesting.

For as much as Live Aid has been dogged on in the past, there was at least a good idea at the heart of it all. Despite the millions of punks bashing it for being a bunch of celebrities being self absorbed with themselves and trying to boost their own sales figures, you could tell that they really were coming together to try and help the world. So when you have that many people spread out over a few days, how do you translate that kind of energy to a single?

Operating almost concurrently with Live Aid, USA for Africa gave us We Are the World, which brought together every single living legend you could imagine at the time. Though the actual hook of the song is pretty basic, that gives every single vocalist room to flex their chops, going from the smooth sounds of Michael Jackson and Lionel Richie to Steve Perry from Journey to bringing in Bob Dylan to kind of speak-sing his way through his own separate verse.

In between some of the more iconic people though, you also have Dan Akroyd in the mix as well. Though this was assumed to just be a representation of the Blues Brothers, Akroyd has said that he had no intention of being a part of things, just walking into the wrong studio one day and setting up shop behind the rest of the living legends. The premise of the song and even the structure may be a little bit too basic, but there’s a fine line between coming off as trite and becoming universal.