Before The Flood

[freakytigger.livejournal.com]

This is a poll about John Peel's Festive Fifty, 1976. Just tick all the songs you like from the list of 50 (counting down from #50 to #1, as it happens). I've put it up because i) I'm curious about the results, ii) I'm probably writing a pitchfork column about the F50.

[Poll #1137239]

And some more general questions I'd like to think about - they're quite big questions though:

- What does rock do better now? What does it do worse?
- How does the stuff that won respect and adoration on this poll differ from the stuff that critics and fans enjoy now (a VERY broad formulation, I know)?
- Where's the modern equivalent of the audience suggested here - Pazz and Jop? the Pitchfork Readers Poll?
- What were Poco and can we eat them?

Comments

[freakytigger.livejournal.com]

There is - Jefferson Airplane isn't a dude, the song was written and sung by Grace Slick.

[cis.livejournal.com]

also the mainstream and the non-mainstream were closer anyway?

yes; also, I think, that sort of process of consensus by which the not-so-much-mainstream-as-acclaimed becomes the version of the mainstream that the future gets shown? (i don't know if this is quite the nostalgia industry - people make a lot of money out of going 'wow in the eighties we liked a lot of rubbish, that was a great thing about it', but at the same time I suspect that people looking back at the eighties might assume that, i dunno, Talking Heads were more popular than they really were.)

[freakytigger.livejournal.com]

Well this is what I'm interested in when I ask "what's changed" and "who were the audience anyway". Cos of course 'punk' has historically been presented as a reaction against a lot of this stuff. And also of course there were big big strands of thinking about pop music COMPLETELY unrepresented by the picks of Peel's listenership, many of which surfaced and became more mainstream afterwards. And Peel's listenership changed a lot (or did it?)

(Also, loads of this is very good, even if the overall picture it presents is a joke.)

[alexmacpherson.livejournal.com]

cf: LCD Soundsystem in 20 years time

[(Anonymous)]

NB I still ticked it! I might even go back and tick 'Strawberry Fields', which maybe I don't hate as much as I thought I did on first reading the poll.

[cis.livejournal.com]

that was me obv.

[alexmacpherson.livejournal.com]

I feel bad for knowing as many as I do (nine).

[atommickbrane.livejournal.com]

As far as I'm concerned, White Rabbit can remain white. White past my iPod. IF YOU KNOW WHAT I MEAN. Bastarding White Rabbit bastard student parties bastard stupid hand dance bastard GOTHS.

Also is Grinderswitch the forerunner to Grinderman??

[atommickbrane.livejournal.com]

I suspect I am not the only person who is only giving the beatles a chance on the "Ticket To Wine" ticker.

[freakytigger.livejournal.com]

Grinderswitch was the jaunty pop blues tune Peel used as a theme tune, it would chime out at the end of his programmes and send you comfortably off to Home Truths dreamland. I like the fact that lots of his listeners voted for the theme tune, I hope Saltarello would do as well in an FT poll!

[katstevens.livejournal.com]

Hadn't they already done this to death? 'Tomorrow Never Knows' does the whole thing in a much less terrifying and scrappy way. 'A Day In The Life' sounds to me like they're trying to get away with half a song and some arsing about. Drugz are bad for your work ethic, kids!

[martinv.livejournal.com]

The Richard Thompson track should also have been listed as Richard and Linda Thompson shurely?

It is surprising how lacking in women this list is though, surprising especially from Peel, knowing him mainly from his later years. This is pre-punk Peel though, I guess, which was probably the turning point...

[koganbot]

Also was released eleven years earlier (did you mean to say "Hurricane"?).

[koganbot]

It's one of Marley's worst.

"White Rabbit" is proto-Courtney, however.

[cis.livejournal.com]

pretty much, yeah!

Songs I am RLY sick of now

[katstevens.livejournal.com]

- Layla
- All Right Now
- Stairway To Heaven
- Hey Jude
- Maggie May
- No Woman No Cry

I never need to hear these songs again.

[alexmacpherson.livejournal.com]

Yes: what continually frustrates me is how people like Peel get to do the representing, the canonising; so eventually the pop music unrepresented here gets sidelined, at least in terms of how/how much people talk about them. As the great Julie B said in an article I have permanently on bookmark (http://www.guardian.co.uk/weekend/story/0,,321755,00.html):

I've always loathed John Peel. It started in the Sixties when I was a child, still staggering under the first blow of benediction by black music. All day long on Radio 1 - most of all, on Tony Blackburn's show - you could hear great creamy earfuls of it: Motown by the mile, Philly by the furlong. But at night Radio 1 became a white desert. It became 'intelligent'. That is, it became male, hippy and smelly - it became John Peel.

HEAR FUCKING HEAR.

[braisedbywolves.livejournal.com]

Haha isn't Sergeant Pepper's the album which provoked newspaper stories about "Have the Beatles finally lost it?" because they'd been in the studio for all of 9 months? But yeah good point.

[koganbot]

I only ticked those I knew that I knew for sure what they were; a surprising amount I didn't know. (Like, which Allmans track is "Jessica"?)

Of the ones I was sure I knew, I only didn't tick "Riders On The Storm" and "No Woman No Cry," though presumably the reason I don't remember if I know some of the others is that they were by bands I didn't like enough.

Poco had Richie Furay, ex of the Buffalo Springfield, and Jim Messina, later to join Loggins and Messina.

[braisedbywolves.livejournal.com]

No, I just have no solid timeline for when these songs appeared. My main path into Dylan was three tapes containing Bringing it All Back Home/Blonde On Blonde/Highway 61 Revisited/Blood On The Tracks/Oh Mercy which I played to death with some sense* that the last one was later than the others but not much apart from that. So in 1976, the Peel consensus was that Desolation Row was actually the one for the ages? That's kind of awesome.

* the sense obviously being hearing, though I wouldn't be surprised if I could smell the many cigarettes Bob had worked his way through in the intervening.

[cis.livejournal.com]

TOMORROW NEVER KNOWS IS A BLIGHT ON THE FACE OF MUSIC

[freakytigger.livejournal.com]

What are your favourite Philly tracks Lex?

An understanding that there are different audiences to her has never been a Burchill strength.

One crucial point though is that Peel DIDN'T get to do the canonising or the deciding - the F50 was a listeners poll and he moaned about its contents regularly (did you see the quote I put up from him last week?). He was as much victim as beneficiary of canonising forces - turned into the sainted Godfather Of Indie when there's no evidence he wanted that at all. The canonising process is a lot more subtle and tough to work out than that.

[freakytigger.livejournal.com]

Looking at the other consensus picks the fact that it's a very long song can surely not be discounted!

[alexmacpherson.livejournal.com]

my frustration when I look back at the established canon is nothing compared to how frustrated I am when I can feel exactly the same thing happening around me, now; and it's the same process, too. White educated dudes get to pick the music which white educated dudes are 'meant' to like, ignore or snark at vast swathes of popular culture on the way, and...somehow get to dictate the shape of how future generations listen to music? It's so wrong.

The highway is your girlfriend as you go by quick

[koganbot]

Lex, I keep linking it for you, and I don't think you ever listen, but you need to hear "Roadrunner":

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TDJShMk-r88*

They correctly give the album date as 1976, but the recording was 1971 (and the song is a self-conscious rip of the Velvet Underground's "Sister Ray," which was 1968).