The NYT Named 30 Greatest Living Songwriters. Young Thug Is on the List.

The New York Times Magazine asked more than 250 music industry insiders and six of its own critics to identify the 30 greatest living American songwriters. The result is unranked, which is the right call for a list of this scope, and it includes Bob Dylan, Kendrick Lamar, Taylor Swift, Missy Elliott, Young Thug, and Stephin Merritt of The Magnetic Fields in the same document. That range is not a failure of criteria. It is the list doing what it was designed to do: map the full spectrum of what "American songwriting" means in 2026 without forcing Dylan's "Blowin' in the Wind" into competition with Swift's "All Too Well" on a single numerical scale. ## 250 Insiders and Six Critics Built This Together The methodology matters. This is not a critic's list or an industry list. It is a hybrid, which is why it feels broader than a Rolling Stone 500 Greatest Songs tally and more grounded than a Twitter poll. The 250 insiders include A&R executives, publishers, session musicians, producers, label heads, and managers, people whose professional position depends on knowing which writers will still matter in a decade. The six Times critics provide editorial coherence. The unranked format prevents the kind of hierarchical argument that turns a list into a debate about placement rather than a conversation about craft. ## Kendrick Lamar and Jay-Z Side by Side Both appear on the list without qualification. That is significant because the case for each is built on different structural arguments. Jay-Z's claim rests on volume, commercial dominance across three decades, and the documented influence of his cadence and internal rhyme structure on every rapper who followed him. Kendrick's claim rests on "To Pimp a Butterfly," "DAMN.," "Mr. Morale & The Big Steppers," and the Pulitzer Prize for Music he received in 2018, the first hip-hop artist to win it. The list puts them in the same sentence because American songwriting contains both of them equally. ## Young Thug's Inclusion Is the List's Most Honest Argument Young Thug's presence alongside Paul Simon, Carole King, and Dolly Parton is the decision that reveals the most about what the Times and its 250 insiders were actually measuring. Thug's approach to melody, his use of the voice as a melodic instrument independent of lyrical content, influenced a generation of artists from Travis Scott to Gunna to Roddy Ricch. The technique is a form of songwriting even if it does not resemble what Brill Building session writers produced in 1962. His inclusion is not provocation. It is honest documentation of how influence actually moves through American music. ## OutKast and Missy Elliott Hold the Atlanta Argument OutKast's presence as a duo, Andre 3000 and Big Boi credited together, places the compositional partnership at the same level as individual writers. This is appropriate. "Aquemini," "Stankonia," and "Speakerboxxx/The Love Below" are not attributable to a single writer in any meaningful way. Missy Elliott's inclusion is long overdue by any metric. Her production partnership with Timbaland produced some of the most structurally unusual pop and hip-hop of the late 1990s and early 2000s. "Get Ur Freak On" uses a tabla-driven bhangra sample in a 2001 Top 10 pop record. The songwriting decision in that room was to not compromise the rhythm. ## Romeo Santos and Bad Bunny Extend the Frame Past English Romeo Santos, the bachata artist and former lead of Aventura whose 2007 album "God of Bachata" sold more than 10 million copies and made bachata a mainstream American genre, appears alongside Bad Bunny, the Puerto Rican artist whose "Un Verano Sin Ti" was the most streamed album on Spotify in 2022. Neither writes primarily in English. Their presence on a list titled "Greatest Living American Songwriters" is the list acknowledging that America's music culture is bilingual and has been for longer than the industry chose to track it. ## Stephin Merritt and the Cult of the Constructed Song Merritt of The Magnetic Fields wrote all 69 songs on the 1999 triple album "69 Love Songs" with deliberate conceptual constraints: each song had to work as a love song, each had to be brief, and the project had to span dozens of subgenres. His inclusion alongside Dylan and Parton is the list's acknowledgment that craft, concept, and structure count as much as cultural footprint. He has never sold at the scale of anyone else on the list. He is on it anyway, because 250 music professionals understand what it costs to write a structurally perfect song that most people will never hear.