Serious Contenders: Doors, "People Are Strange"

"You really seem more like a crooner, working in the rock milieu, which I like." - Rip Taylor, on Jim Morrison, in Wayne's World 2.

"He's a drunken buffoon, posing as a poet!" - Philip Seymour Hoffman as Lester Bangs, on Jim Morrison, in Almost Famous.

The Doors have a lot of appeal. They combine this level of mysticism with a level of raw street sensibility that, aside from their experimental indulgences, could be considered prototypical punk. They're known for long, drawn out compositions like "Light My Fire," "The End" and "LA Woman," but amongst their Greatest Hits are a lot of nifty, regular-sized, lean, mean tracks like this. I like it because it's sleek and bluesy, and the lyrics retain that Morrisony-spacey level of unreality. This song used to spook me as a child. "Faces come out of the rain / When you're strange / No-one remembers your name."

Morrison obviously thought of himself as strange, and spoke from experience. But instead of "I'm so strange," he wrote "When you're strange," which was a uniting lyric for young people in 1967, and is today. A lot of music lovers would consider themselves strange, and it's that strangeness that drives us to seek out the unseemly cracks in the world where we live, and to make music like that of the Doors.