"Music ranky thing"

[rone]

This meme has been vectored from pootrootbeer.

Your job, should you choose to vector it further: take the following list of artists and order them from Most Essential to Least Essential. To keep things interesting, remove one artist of your choosing from this list, and add one new artist of your choosing.

Then post the results on your journal.

My list:

• Pink Floyd
• Pixies
• Queen
• The Beatles
• The Who
• Rush
• Fleetwood Mac
• The Grateful Dead
• REM
• Steely Dan

(removed from list: Queensrÿche)

It's a bit tricky due to the mutable nature of 'essential'. The Beatles, say, are ultimately essential to understanding pretty much all of rock and pop nowadays, but they're not the most essential group in my musical Weltanschaunng because i find that their work is spotty and hasn't aged well. I removed Queensrÿche because they're completely irrelevant, but if i could i'd dump REM and Steely Dan because their legacy of pussy rock is emasculating the youth of the world and it Must. Be. Stopped.

Comments

[ikkyu2.livejournal.com]

Steely Dan because their legacy of pussy rock is emasculating the youth of the world

Fuck, dude, there's a line, and you just crossed it. Are you still running the Kook of the Month club? Because you just nominated yourself.

There's more thoughtfulness, more nuance in one line of a Steely Dan song than in the entire soppy soggy sappy-ass Beatles' pop-rocks oeuvre. When John Lennon sings "Imagine," I imagine a world where shitty crap-rock ballads based on juvenile fantasy worlds didn't captivate the listening ears of the populace.

Then again, I liked Underworld.

[ronebofh.livejournal.com]

Yeah, Lennon totally jumped the shark when he went solo. All those bad Yoko Ono vibes are too much for any one man.

It's easy for me to diss Steely Dan because i've barely listened to their stuff. It's just that the few songs i've heard have so monumentally blown that i can't bother trying harder, you know? You can be lyrically thoughtful and nuanced, but if your music sucks, you're just a slam poet with a recording contract.

[ikkyu2.livejournal.com]

Well, check out some of their stuff that didn't make A&R, you know? Leave 'Babylon Sisters' and 'Rikki Don't Lose That Number' aside for a minute, and check out some of the cuts off Pretzel Logic, like 'Parker's Band', or 'Through With Buzz,' or if you're into something more proggish, 'The Royal Scam' can be parsed as a concept album; or just listen to Aja, there's not a bad note played on that entire album.

Or, it's hard for me to actually pick out a favorite track - once you understand just exactly what cynical area they're coming from, I think all the songs take on a new aspect - but Any World (That I'm Welcome To), off Katy Lied, or King of the World, off Gaucho, or I.G.Y., off a movie soundtrack - I dunno, it doesn't remind me of other pop music I've heard.

I've been into Steely Dan for about 10 years, though, and I just get more enamored, so I guess your mileage may vary.

SSC

[pobig.livejournal.com]

The idea that Steely Dan may have named a song after the International Geophysical Year intrigues me more than anything else in this comment.

Re: SSC

[ikkyu2.livejournal.com]

Actually, this was on The Nightfly put out ostensibly as a Donald Fagen solo album, although no fewer than 9 members of Steely Dan, including Walter Becker, played on it.

From the liner notes:

Note: The songs on this album represent certain fantasies that might have been entertained by a young man growing up in the remote suburbs of a northeastern city during the late fifties and early sixties, i.e., one of my general height, weight and build.

D.F.

The song is indeed about the International Geophysical Year, and suggests "90 minutes from New York to Paris" and "there'll be spandex jackets, one for everyone," among other things.

This was one of the first albums ever recorded all-digital, and apparently people used to take their CD into the hi-fi store in the early 80's to test out the systems.

[kodi]

Awesome. Queensr::che only survived one hop.

I think that's the problem with this meme - the starting bands are too fundamental. Anything someone adds is going to be a ripe target for elimination. This would have been SO much cooler if the list had started out with, say, 3 acts from each of the past 3 decades, with one shitty pop band, one infulential-but-unpopular band, and one overblown "greatest band of all time."

Or make it "either add one or delete two." That would have been fun.

[wisn.livejournal.com]

That's the trick, isn't it? I considered starting over with your recommendation, but instead I decided that any list would slowly devolve to a sample of a common 100 or so bands, assuming mostly U.S. participation and accomodating a minority sample of outliers.

It makes sense, though. If I started a list with, say, Mason Williams, most people would say 'who dat?' and strike his name, despite his having single in the 70s that's probably influenced every large-scale pop music arrangement up through and including the sampling era. ("Classical Gas". You've heard it many times, unless you grew up in Afghanistan or something.)

My list? I'm not going to make one. My tastes are too idiosyncratic, and I'll overintellectualize a parlor game.

[kodi]

I actually didn't associate "Mason Williams" with "Classical Gas," although I'm familiar with both. Oddly, I knew Mason Williams only as the author of "The Mason Williams Reading Matter," which I had always assumed was the sole work of a mild lunatic. Now I see that he's actually written quite a bit. Neat.

I think it would be a lot more fun to start this game over, but eliminate "category" entirely - just grab 10 popular, unlerated nouns. I'm not so interested in whether Queen is better than Oasis, but I'm dying to know if Queen is better than Dairy Queen.