"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

[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.