Greatest Music Of All Time...

Great Debates
41

Best band: OK, all of you Beatles wusses have bought the hype. The greatest rock and roll band is without a doubt THE ROLLING STONES!!!. Do yourself a favor. Go listen to Hot Rocks. Then listen to More Hot Rocks. Then listen to any compilation of the Stones’s 70’s work. Then for good measure, listen to Sticky Fingers all the way through, or maybe Exile on Main Street. The candy-ass Beatles don’t come close to the Stones, who produced consistently excellent music for 20 years and are still one of the best live performance bands you will ever see.

Best Song: Gimme Shelter.

Best “New” Band: Hmmm. Probably not “new” enough to qualify, but I’ll go with Pearl Jam. Their refusal to make videos, and their war against Ticketmaster, have cost them some of the recognition they richly deserve. I guess they bit the hand that feeds them, to some extent, but did so in the name of artistic integrity (with regard to the lack of videos) and on behalf of the fans (with respect to the tiff with Ticketmaster).

42

Best Band: Dead Kennedys

Intelligent, overtly political lyrics…funny…nice music. Influenced a lot of today’s bands, like the Offspring, etc…

Best Song: Chopping Broccoli, by Dana Carvey…no, um…Revolution, by the Beatles (as someone has already said)

Best “New” Band: Nine Inch Nails (1989)

43

I invite you all to check out The Shaggs.

these girls cannot play, cannot sing, and their songs frankly suck. But there is something about them that makes you listen to them over and over. There is something about these songs that is hypnotic - I guarantee that you’ll show your friends.

http://www.cgocable.net/~focus23/shaggs/index.html

And now in keeping with the spirit of the thread my personal favourites:
Toss up between the Beatles and the Doors
Alice’s Restaurant Massacre (it’s spoken word, does that count? if not then Sulatans of Swing always does it for me)
Dunno about new bands… the only album I own that would fit into this category would be The Whitlams, but even though I like them I wouldn’t nominate them as the best…

44

Best “band”? I dunno, Los Angeles Philharmonic.

Best “song”? I guess Sibelius’ “Our Native Land”. It is a lovely choral piece, and a current favorite.

Best “new band”? Well, since Essa Pekka Salonen (sorry, probably not spelling his name right) started to be conductor for the LA Philharmonic, I guess it is a “new band” of sorts.

45

: Category B: Best Song of all time (All genres)

There are so many possibilities it’d be hard to say. While not technically a “song”, you’d almost want to go with something like Dvorak’s 9th symphony, or if it has to be something short, maybe the C# minor Chopin etude from Opus 10. I could also see a case for some early jazz pieces.

: Category C: Best new band (formed from 1990-, all genres)

No idea. I heard some entertaining music written in the past 10 years, but little of any real significance.

Some other categories you didn’t mention:

Best musician, overall: Bach, Johann Sebastian. His legacy dominates that of all other musicians before or since. He probably singlehandedly had more influence on music as a whole than any other single human.

Best musician, piano: Chopin, Frederic. Possessed a level of pianistic genius that has not since been matched. There have been other great composers for piano, including the likes of Scriabin, Liszt, and Rachmaninoff, but no one that can claim to have contributed as much to the field as Chopin, either musically or in expanding virtuoso technique.

Best musician, guitar: Hendrix, Jimi. Again there have been other technically excellent guitar players, but ask them who they compare themselves to and more often than not you’ll hear “Hendrix”.

Best musician, trumpet: Gillespie, Dizzy. Listen to “Night in Tunisia”. 'Nuff said.

Best musician, 1800’s: Beethoven, Ludwig van.

Best musician, 1900’s: Definately a dark horse, but I’m going to go with Igor Stravinsky. One could perhaps make a better case for Maurice Ravel or Sergei Rachmaninoff, but I have a hunch that in one or two hundred years, history will consider Stravinsky to be greater than he’s considered in our time.

Too early to tell for 2000-2099.

46

(Italics mine.)

Ten bonus points for spelling his name correctly. Ludwig’s family name is Dutch: his grandfather was a church choir director in Flanders, currently Belgium.

47

Best song of all time:

Thag’s Quartet for Bones and Hollow Logs in “Unngh” Minor.

That Thag was an underappreciated genius.

48

Best Band: Pink Floyd
Best Song: Comfortable Numb (by Pink Floyd)
Best New Band: Nine Inch Nails

49

bantmof wrote:

I beg to differ.

J.S. Bach died in obscurity. His works were relatively unknown until Felix Mendelssohn re-discovered them and took pains to have them played up-and-down Europe. And even then, they usually weren’t played as Bach wrote them: they were often slowed down and turned into large, stately, somber pieces, even when they were written as trite little quick dances. Bach was admired for his mastery of tonal counterpoint and for his ability to improvise, but his influence on subsequent music was minimal.

Now, Beethoven, on the other hand, was THE turning point for all the music written for the next century after him. He practically invented the Romantic Period. Even Richard Wagner, one of the most arrogant musicians of all time, was only willing to say that he had become the successor to Beethoven, not that he had eclipsed the man. Orchestral music even today would be very, very different – and, I believe, less potent – had it not been for ol’ Ludwig van.

50

And just so’s you don’t thing I’m making all that stuff about Beethoven up:

The textbook we used in our 2-year Undergraduate Music History curriculum at UCLA was A History of Western Music, by Donald Jay Grout. It contains chapters like “The Gregorian Chant period”, “Early polyphony”, “The Ars Nova period”, “The Late Middle Ages”, “The High Renaissance”, “The Late Renaissance”, “The Early Baroque”, “The High Baroque”, “The Classical Period”, and “Beethoven”. There is an entire chapter in my music history textbook devoted to Beethoven. No other composer had a chapter all to himself.

“He is neither classical nor romantic,” the text gushes, “He is Beethoven – and his figure towers like a colossus astride two centuries.”

51

It accually makes sense, they do it on the Grammy’s, if a(n) artist/band breaks around the awards, they won’t nominate them for new artist, but they will next year, even though they were in reality, from the year before.

Same with this. A '99 or '00 band wouldn’t get my vote, but I would take a serious look at an '89 band. If you don’t see the logic, that’s ok, but it happens in any awards show, Music, movies or whatever.

Besides, if you wanted to include Blink 182, then you would want to have them held over for the next ten years, just in case they have 15 more songs, because if you take the 2 songs by them, alot of people would rank higher than them.

Verification:
Example-
1990-2000
Blink 182 v. Sheryl Crow
Blink 182: One album, moderate success, 2 singles, One smash hit and the other moderate.
Sheryl Crow: Three albums, moderate success, 11 singles with varied success from smash hit to moderate.

2000-2010
Blink 182 v. Hypothetical competitor
At this point, if Blink 182 is still around, then they may have alot more singles here, and adding the 2 from before (Which would get pulled over with my logic), then they would have a chance here. With the hypothetical competitor having maybe as much success as Sheryl Crow.

If you don’t get it at this point, then just trust me.

-PPKue

52

My point was that Blink-182 is not really new. Actually, Blink-182 has released 4 albums. Only one was heard by mainstream audiences,but hey, they are punk after all.

Again, if you have stood the test of time ( 5 years is a long time), you are not really ‘new’. Perhaps I should not have listed them as ‘best new band’ for that reason.
But this was the first album of theirs to get airplay and I understood ‘new’ to be synonymous with ‘rookie’ (like basball).

53

::snicker:: Yeah, they are. They’re punk like Cheap Trick or Sweet were punk.

Blink 182 are garage band power pop (not that there’s anything wrong with that–it’s a genre I happen to like, but I don’t think they’re particularly memorable). Piercings and nudity don’t make you punk.