The Best (Whatever) of All Time.

And other millennial notions

The new millennium is almost here, and somehow things don't seem ready. All those books, magazines, TV specials, and Y2K conferences, and still it doesn't feel as if the whole thing has sunk into the popular culture. Where's the official millennial cheese dip? The 5,000 Elvis impersonators singing in the year 2000?

For years now, I've been imagining driving along sometime in December 1999 and hearing the radio announcer say: "And now, the Top Ten Tunes of the Millennium!" But it doesn't feel as if we're going to get there.

Years ago I did talk three music writers, John Rockwell and Jon Pareles of The Times and Robert Christgau of The Village Voice, into coming up with just the kind of list we're missing out on. Their Top Ten Tunes of the Millennium are:

* "Ave Maria"

* Brahms's "Lullaby"

* "La Donna e Mobile"

* "Greensleeves"

* "Happy Birthday"

* "La Marseillaise"

* "A Mighty Fortress Is Our God"

* "L'Homme Arme"

* "Oh! Susanna"

* "Louie, Louie"

Like all experts who get sucked into this sort of effort, my list-makers apologized for sticking to European sources. But in my experience, those who demand that their millennial overviews have planetary scope are going to spend their New Year's Eve waiting for the phone to ring.

I get a stronger feeling of connection to the march of history with the Top Ten Tunes than with millennial big thoughts, interesting as they are. I like hearing about the rise of the nation-state, but I got a bigger kick trying to pick the worst wedding of the millennium. (A tie between Blessed Oda of Hainault's nuptials in the 12th century, which were interrupted when the bride cut off her nose, and Empress Zoe of Byzantium's marriage, which took place after her fiance was given the choice of going through with the ceremony or having his eyes poked out.)

BEST PARTY

My vote for best party of the millennium was the feast given by the Earl of Leicester for Queen Elizabeth I in 1575, which lasted a week and featured a water pageant starring a 24-foot mermaid. Worst party would be the costume ball given by Charles VI of France in 1393 at which the Duc d'Orleans accidentally set fire to six guests.

The great thing about the whole turn-of-the-millennium celebration is that it gives us a chance to immerse ourselves in history, to contemplate the fact that the world was really there before we were born into it. A thousand years ago, Europeans were still living in small villages surrounded by impenetrable forests, so cut off from the rest of the world they could go their whole lives without seeing a stranger. Ghosts and saints were more real to them than the pope or the king. They never saw a book, a calendar, a clock.

Looking back from the millennium's other end, we can barely make them out. But if we use our imaginations, they can come to us for just a moment, maybe humming a tune.