Saturday, June 03, 2006

Apart from McCartney, Bowie, Morrissey & Partridge, this list is mostly a buncha shit

The results of that Paste Magazine 100 Best Living Songwriters poll that I talked about a few months ago are out. As I said at the time, I have some issues with who they chose to define as "songwriters."

For example,
80 Pink Floyd
Now: Are they talking about Roger Waters? I presume they are, since I understand him to have written both words and music for most of the songs you think of when you think of Pink Floyd. So why not just say so?

Similarly, as pleased as I am to see--
57 Morrissey
--above Sting but below James Brown, I still think it was ludicrious to nominate him separately from Johnny Marr at all. And you're telling me I now live in a world in which
36 Beck
is ranked a better songwriter than
37 Smokey Robinson?
That ain't right. And of course:
12 The Rolling Stones
What I've said before still stands. The day anyone can name one song off the last Stones album by the time the next one comes out, is the day I'll believe there's a reason to give a ratfucking piss about them for anyone not in the baby boom generation.
2 Neil Young
I look at Neil Young sort of the way I look at Michael Moore or Al Gore. Even though I know he's almost legendary to many, and there is reason for me to respect him, I think he's more about self-promotion than his fanbase suspects and I trust him less far than I could throw him.

Finally,
1 BOB DYLAN
See The Rolling Stones and double it.

1 comment:

Bill said...

Let’s take this list away from pop music to make a point. In his declining years back in the seventies, Groucho Marx was pretty much a public embarrassment: a shell of his former self. His last movie was a major train wreck (the embarrassing Skidoo) and his public appearances were excruciating for any of his fans to watch. Yet if some magazine had included him in a listing of the 100 Greatest Living Comedians, you wouldn’t have heard a peep of disagreement from anyone, simply because the man’s work from his youth was so wonderful.

Same goes for an artist like Dylan (or Jagger/Richards); their music has been so influential – and their peak material so great – that it doesn’t matter if their last decade’s work has been piffle. (For the record, though, I’d note that Dylan’s last few albums have been very fine indeed.) Argue about the ranking (I’d put Ray Davies up higher, of course) and the omissions (I’m lookin’ for Donald Fagen) – or the listmakers’ inexplicable decision to sometimes put group names over songwriters’ names (c’mon, They Might Be Giants is just two guys – give ‘em both credit!) – but to my ears, the inclusion of these Baby Boomer Biggies is still apt . . .