Cocaine has had a significant impact on popular music. While booze is far more likely to result in sloppy work and an unsightly beer gut in middle age, coke leaves you wired enough to ensure that you will produce a whole lot of something, and thus ups the odds that you will actually produce something good.

Keith Richards may have fallen out of a tree in Fiji while out of his gourd on other than vitamin supplements, but he is what rock n’ roll is all about: debauchery. And, while a sober Eric Clapton was quoted as saying, “I hate listening to my old records, which I did stoned or drunk,” he’s alone in that camp as most fans of his music hate listening to anything that he’s done straight.

Keith Richards’ entire career, Neil Young’s coked out performance at “The Last Waltz”, Stevie Nicks having built up such a tolerance to cocaine that she had to have it blown up her rectum to get a high (this never happened, apparently, but is nonetheless one of the more entertaining urban legends), cocaine use is an integral part of the rock-star lifestyle. It’s what young boys dream about: One day, if I practice enough and work on perfecting my skills as a singer-songwriter, I too will be able to snort cocaine off of the breasts of a vacant-eyed stripper whose name I’ll forget before I’m back on the tour bus and liquidating a savings account by mobile phone to settle debts with unsavory characters.

Here we have compiled a list of the Top 10 Cocaine Songs of all time — songs about, influenced by, and more than likely written on clouds of Peruvian marching powder:

In this one, the good Reverend regales us with the modern day parable of a farmer out in his field pulling corn and carrots “when two low-flying aeroplanes, ’bout a hundred feet high/dropped a bunch o’ bales o’ somethin’, some hit me in the eye”. The farmer cuts the bales open and notices a mysterious powder inside. Being a rube, for whom presumably white lightnin’ is still the biggest thrill in town, he has no idea what it is and brings it to his “Crazy Brother Joe”: “He sniffed it up and kicked his heels, said, ‘Horton, that’s some blow!’” Our lucky farming friend then heads into Dallas, becomes a millionaire by selling his find, ditches his farm in Texas and buys another in Peru. Think of it like the Bill Paxton movie “A Simple Plan”, only a whole lot happier and without Billy Bob Thornton in the role of a mouth-breather. We can safely assume that at some later point in this farmer’s life the drug dealers whose fortune he stole would have tracked him down and introduced him to the latest in Columbian necktie attire, however, for taking a different angle on the cocaine song and for its appreciation of the entrepreneurial spirit, we salute the Reverend Horton Heat and include “Bales of Cocaine” on our Top 10 Cocaine Songs of All Time list:

Bales of cocaine, fallin’ from low-flyin’ plane
I don’t know who done dropped ‘em, but I thank ‘em just the same
Bales of cocaine, fallin’ like a foreign rain
My life changed completely by the low-flyin’ planes

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Hopefully no one is coming to this looking for something they can sit down and play brilliantly in one sitting. There is no such thing as a great-sounding piano piece that can be learnt in seconds, but these are some of the simpler ones, that, if mastered, could convince everyone you’re a true pianist. Bear in mind though, the key to this, like anything, is practice. If you want something to sound good, you have to be prepared to work on it, but these are the top ten pieces, in my opinion, that sound amazing, and can be performed with not too much difficulty on your behalf. If you disagree with any of these, by all means, give your opinion in the comments.

This is far and away the most difficult piece on this list, and I’m sure there’ll be lots of criticism about the level of this piece, but when you really break it down, it’s based on quite simple arpeggios and very repetitive hand movements. The right hand theme is also relatively simple, presenting only a small challenge to someone with a particularly small hand. Chopin’s music wasn’t about creating technical difficulties for the pianist (that’s more Liszt’s field of work, some reasoned that Liszt was the world’s first three-handed pianist), but about creating flourishes and runs that are based upon the basics of piano playing. The hardest part of this piece by far is the speed factor, but even played slowly, this is sure to blow everyone away, if you have the discipline to learn it as a slow piece, and avoid the temptation of running away with it.

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This is a list of the most influential metal bands. If it were the best bands list, it would be very different. All bands here deserve props for what they did and should never be forgotten through the music made today. Narrowing down the selections was difficult and I almost feel like I cheated Metallica, but I think if they had stayed true to their original sound, they would have had a much greater impact.

Napalm Death are the creators of grindcore. On top of that they influenced all sorts of death and doom metal bands around their time. They have had great members in their band, some of whom found success over the years in bands like Cathedral and Carcass.

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Pink Floyd - one of music’s most successful acts - they have sold over 200 million albums around the world. They are considered to be a British progressive rock band, gaining early recognition for their psychedelic or space rock music. This is a list of their ten greatest songs.

In 1985, Roger Waters left Pink Floyd and declared the band dead. Two years later, David Gilmour and Nick Mason released A Momentary Lapse of Reason and proved him wrong. Although the album is arguably worse than anything else in the Floyd catalog, the songs “Learning to Fly”, “On the Turning Away”, and “Sorrow” stand as some of the best of the post-Waters Floyd. This performance is from the Pink Floyd concert film Delicate Sound of Thunder.

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