“Who’s Madeline?” is still the year’s preeminent pop-music question. But coming up close behind that: “Where the eff is Randy Newman on the New York Times’ list of the 30 greatest living American songwriters?” Or, you can fill in that blank with some other name of your chagrined choosing, like Tom Waits, Patti Smith, Billy Joel, Jimmy Webb, Jackson Browne, Stephen Schwartz, Beyonce or James Taylor.

There are several likely answers to that. One is that lists like this exist as rage-bait, deliberately or otherwise. (We here at Variety are inveterate listmakers… we are not unfamiliar with a good backlash.) Another is that representation is important, and lists like this easily drift toward whatever the opposite of recency bias is, if their curators aren’t careful. A list comprised almost entirely of 1970s veterans would earn more groans, justifiably, than this one is. So if a few white men over 70 have to be sacrificed to include a Bad Bunny or Mariah, so be it.

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But still… Randy fucking Newman is the guy you knock out to free up a slot? The mind boggles. The spirit withers. The faith in humanity disintegrates (which Newman would probably approve of, being no big believer in humanity).

There is a good answer to “Where’s Randy Newman,” though, that is not nearly so frustrating. The answer is: He’s all over the lists sent in to the Times by his songwriting peers, as are a lot of the other names you or I are upset about. These “experts” — people like Aimee Mann, Berry Gordy, David Byrne, Justins Tranter and Vernon, etc. — were invited to contribute their suggestions, on the way to their votes either counting or not counting as the Times’ in-house panel of five made the final selections on their own.

I don’t mean to discount the NYTs’ own ultimate list; it’s actually fine, as these things go, if you are willing to accept that some head-scratchers are a deliberate part of the equation and give into it as a conversation-starter. (And any list with Valerie Simpson on it is inherently not a bad idea.) But the most fun, and maybe greatest gratification, will come in taking a peek at who Jeff Tweedy or Jermaine Dupri voted for.

The Times ran a list of 36 ballots from music insiders; you can look it over here. If you’re prone to counting, you can wonder how some of the world’s most revered songwriters could have gotten so much support from a jury of their peers and still lost out when it came to the........

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