VH1's "100 Greatest Women in Music" - whuah?

Cafe Society
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Recently, VH1 aired another “Greatest _________ of _________” countdown. This time, it was an oddly specific category; “The 100 Greatest Women in Music in the Past 20 Years.” (On the website, VH1 simply says “from 1990 and later” so you get an extra couple of years, I suppose.) Hmm. OK, I guess that narrows things down a bit and gives the newer artists a chance. This could be good.

Now, I know that these kinds of lists are always targets of criticism and conjecture because of the obviously subjective nature of “Best of” lists and the deliberately ambiguous qualification of “great.” What, exactly, do they mean by “great” anyway? Best-selling? Most play in the clubs or on the radio? Most Grammy awards? Most influential? Most talented? The website blurb says, “This one’s all about the ladies. It’s time to recognize the women who changed music history–and the ones aiming to someday become legends themselves–in VH1’s 100 Greatest Women In Music.” It seems like they tried to get a little bit of everything in this list, which certainly does more to confuse matters than anything. On the one hand, they have Kim Deal (of the Pixies and the Breeders) and P.J. Harvey on the list, which might lead one to believe that the list is about talent and influence over sheer popularity… but then they have Miley Cyrus ranked higher than either of them, and they’re talking about “Party in the U.S.A.”, which, by the way, Miley Cyrus had no hand in writing, according to the handy Pop-Up Video segment that aired between countdown segments. Really? Why is Miley Cyrus even on this list? And then they have Cher on the list, and they’re talking mostly about the video for “If I Could Turn Back Time” where she’s walking around in a fishnet onesie thong thing and also about the song where she introduced the world to the scourge of Autotune. “If I Could Turn Back Time” was from an album from 1989, guys; unless this list was made in 2009, that’s past your cutoff point. In any case, Cher’s overall presence on the music scene over the last 20 years has been rather steadily low-key. Saying she’s one the greatest in the last 20 years is like saying Led Zeppelin is the best rock band of the last decade because Robert Plant is still making music.

Still, the fact that they’re jumping around in regards to what qualifies as “great” gave me hope that some really good choices might be near the top. I mean, we all know Madonna’s gonna win this thing, right? You might as well just do a list that’s called “The Greatest Women in Music (Other than Madonna) to make it more interesting. But then they start having these little bits before the commercial breaks about “Lady Legends”. explaining that these are women whose importance and impact are so great as to defy any attempt to rank them. Huh. So you have a list of the greatest women in music over the last two decades EXCEPT for these women who are SO great they can’t be ranked… Well, I guess that’s great, a way to say that these women unquestionably transcend the criteria for ranking and all that, except you would think that Winner-Of-Everything Madonna would be heading up that list by now, along with Whitney Houston and the rest of the usual list-toppers from the past decade or so. Instead, they list Ani Difranco as a “Lady Legend” (which I think is appropriate, if for nothing else than the sheer volume of her work and her business acumen; I personally am a fan of her music, but I know it’s not everyone’s cup of tea) along with some others and they don’t really talk about these transcendantly great women at all! They talk about Miley Cyrus and M.I.A. and Ke$ha at length, though…what the hell, VH1? What was your measuring stick for “greatest” on this list? How in the world can you say, “Well, we’re just going to say this one group of women is too great for any list, but then we’re still going to have Madonna and Whitney Houston up there at the top of the actual list, right?”

Congratulations, VH1; you’ve managed to achieve previously unreachable depths of incomprehensibility.

So, that rant out of the way, did anyone else watch, and who do you think got left out or undeservedly put on the list?

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VH1 is not alone…

Joe

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I’m with WheresGeorge04… Your OP was pretty incoherent and rambling so I’m not sure if you mentioned how they put together the list, but I’m guessing they probably had an online poll of some sort.

And as much as I hate to say so, Miley Cyrus probably *should *be ranked higher than Kim Deal or PJ Harvey on this kind of list. Girl’s sold a hell of a lot of albums.

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One of the reasons they limited it to “the last 20 years” was to give “anybody but Aretha” a chance of being #1. It’s on a par with “greatest guitarists of all time” lists which always ends up with Hendrix being #1.

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To be fair to the OP here, I did have a problem when they put Miley on that list.

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Kesha has a lot more talent than people give her credit for and certainly does belong on the list. I would have put her at #1, although I may be a bit biased.

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OK, apologies for the rant; rambling, certainly. The concise version: “VH1 aired a list called “100 Greatest Women in Music” (in the last 20 years) and I think they couldn’t stick to a consistent set of rules for determining who gets included on the list and where they were ranked, because some of the choices seem to favor talent and influence and others favor sheer popularity and current trends. In addition, some truly big names were left off of the list proper while others were ranked as highly as one might expect.”

As for limiting the timeframe in order to avoid including Aretha Franklin; Aretha had been recording in the 90s and 00s, and at least according to the ratings on allmusic.com, she was getting some decent critical reviews, compared to Cher, whose albums over the past 2 decades had gotten fair to poor reviews. If Cher got on the list, why *not *Aretha? This is one of the things I wonder about the list; did Cher get on the list just because more people remember Cher strutting around half-naked on a battleship in a video?

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Possibly may be. You don’t look well, are you feeling OK?

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I used to be a Ke$ha hater, but I forced myself to listen to her music and learn something more about her; I have more respect for her now and I can enjoy her music. I do think she’s talented but I think at this time she’s still too new to the music scene to warrant inclusion on a list of the greatest women in music in the last 20 years. Does she have staying power? If I would have tried to predict Madonna’s place on the list after seeing just a couple of her early videos, I might have figured she’d fade out quickly. Too soon to tell, I think. I feel the same way about some other choices on the list, too; it’s not necessarily to knock their talents, it’s just me thinking that in order to make room for her, someone got bumped off the list that I feel should have been included.

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There aren’t 100 anythings in the last 20 years, let alone female musicians of some degree of fame, to populate a list like this. So, you get arbitrary rules and inclusions to hit the 100 mark.

You know they just went to wikipedia for a list of women in rock by year, and picked 100 that they figured people would have heard of.

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Here’s a link to the list. I don’t have the inclination to check out all the dates, but I question some of these inclusions, too. I think Eonwe has blown their cover as to their method. :slight_smile:

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That list reads like “100 random female names in music” shaken into some very, very loose semblance of order.

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Seriously! I mean, I know I do not keep up on the modern ragtime you young folks enjoy, but I’ll be damned if I can think of 100 really important women in music over the past *50 *years.

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But we both agree that Demi Lovato should be on that list.

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Of course, I always get annoyed when I watch those “100 Hollywood Tragedies!” shows and *nowhere *are Olive Thomas or Bobbie Harron or Florence La Badie mentioned.

Then again, I am nuttier than a Stuckey’s Log.

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Any list of the 100 Greatest Women in Music of the Last 20 Years that somehow manages to not include Kate Bush is too stupid to even consider.

I mean, Sarah MacLachlan, Tori Amos, Regina Spektor, Feist, Dido, Natalie Merchant, Florence + The Machine, Bjork and others all owe a huge debt to Kate. When Annie Lennox won the Best Female Singer BPI Award in 1986, she said that she thought Kate would win it “…because she’s phenomenal and I really admire her.” And it is not as if Kate has retired. Her 2004 double album Aerial got nearly unanimous rave reviews.

If this sounds like sour grapes, think how much more interesting this list would be if they polled musicians.

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Quite true. And if I had a nickel for every time I’ve heard some pop diva doing a Liz Frazier impersonation, I could buy a nickel-counting machine.

In the case of this list, “Greatest” seems to refer to revenue production.

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Sara McLachlin at #53, with the likes of Lil’ Kim, Aaliyah, The Dixie Chicks, Salt n Pepa and FERGIE (:confused:) all ahead of her?

Yeah right.

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I think you are all reading too much into a basic cable music clip show. It may as well have been called “100 Female Performers Who Are Likely To Have Enough Fans Among Our Target Demographic To Keep Them Tuned In Until The Next Commercial Break.” And I seriously doubt anybody at VH1 was really pretending otherwise.

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What now? Like who?