"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

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.