Billboard magazine released its 50 Greatest Rock Bands. The list tells us more about the listers than the listed.
The all-female Sleater-Kinney, the all-Mexican Café Tacvba, and the all-black Earth, Wind, and Fire numbered among Billboard’s peculiar “inclusive” inclusions. Even members of Sleater-Kinney, Café Tacvba, and Earth, Wind, and Fire never considered themselves as playing in one of the greatest rock bands ever.
If only Dave Davies had transitioned … then maybe Billboard might have regarded them as highly as Mana, Parliament/Funkadelic, and Heart.
Did Earth, Wind, and Fire even imagine themselves as playing rock music? The genre, after all, does not appear as one of the eight that Wikipedia associates with the undeniably great band.
Billboard omits Tom Petty & the Heartbreakers, Bruce Springsteen & the E Street Band, and other not-quite-solo, not-quite-band acts. Then it breaks this seeming rule for Sly & the Family Stone, a group certainly deserving of accolades. But if such a rule excludes Bob Seger & the Silver Bullet Band, then it should exclude Sly & the Family Stone, too, no?
The Left strains to compile any “greatest” list as it acts as a slur against equality fixations. So, this imposition of race and sex considerations upon ostensibly merit-based rankings mitigates pangs of conscience.
The inherent-subjectivity-of-rankings defense does not really apply here since the gatekeepers do not actually tell us their 50 favorite bands. They tell us what they believe an imaginary enforcer named King Diversity would order them to include on such a list. This makes the compilers of the list not subjective but instead more like royal subjects beholden to the whims of King Diversity.
The Police? New Order? The Smiths? Too white, too male. Rush? Too white, way too male (at least the audience). Lynyrd Skynyrd? Too male, way too white (at least the audience).
But Paramore boasts a female singer, and Mana sings in Spanish. So, they made the cut — and all those better bands did not.
With all affirmative action comes a negative reaction. In this case, bands that looked good to King Diversity nudged out bands that sounded good to everyone else.
The most egregious omission, at least to Terry and Julie, Fu Manchu, Moriarty, and Dracula, that guy on your block who lives for rock, any dedicated follower of fashion, and Rudolph Valentino who looks very much alive, is Klearly the Kinks.
The Kinks last put out an LP more than three decades ago. If not recording since early in the presidency of Bill Clinton helpfully Saran-wraps them during prime years for posterity, it also ensures that the public overlooks them hidden in the back of the freezer all these decades later.
The Kinks released so many songs to remember. This is especially true for conservatives. Probably the band, even when they released “Young Conservatives,” did not care about electoral politics. But in a much broader sense, conservatism, in a traditionalist sense, played a role in their lyrics.
Dave Davies’s “Living on a Thin Line,” in contrast to Ray Davies’s optimistic “Down All the Days (Till 1992),” laments: “There’s no England now.” In “20th Century Man,” Ray Davies highlights the lowlights of the bureaucratic state: “Got no privacy got no liberty/’Cause the twentieth century people/Took it all away from me.” One declares “The Village Green Preservation Society” the most conservative rock song of all time until a listen to “God’s Children.”
Pioneers of the power cord and the concept album, The Kinks’s sound, like The Who’s and The Beatles’s, ventured into unexpected places. They introduced the world to hard rock in 1964 through “You Really Got Me,” released the disco-ish “(Wish I Could Fly Like) Superman,” in 1979, and hit #6 in 1983 with a big-band song in “Come Dancing.” Unlike so many other bands, The Kinks never became a Kinks cover band.
“Celluloid Heroes” paid homage to motion pictures. Then motion pictures paid homage to The Kinks. The Sopranos put an exclamation point on its main character through “I’m Not Like Everybody Else.” “A Well Respected Man” perfectly accented Bleeker’s scheduled, daily routine the moment before impending fatherhood upends it in Juno. What is a Wes Anderson movie without The Kinks? Their art lent itself to other great art.
Lyrically, what beats “Waterloo Sunset”? Musically, what beats “Better Things”?
One guesses that more than four decades away from the American top 40, and not any dalliance with conservatism, shoved The Kinks off the Billboard list. If only Dave Davies had transitioned, or Pete Quaife had been replaced with a Mexican, then maybe Billboard might have regarded them as highly as Mana, Parliament/Funkadelic, and Heart.
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