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

[braisedbywolves.livejournal.com]

Looking at it now my immediate reaction is that it's actually quite low on the stuff that's supposed to have been swept away by Punk Year 0: one Yes song, no Styx, no ELP, no King Crimson. To an extent the names that are there are excluded from the list by their survival - if the Rolling Stones continued to make records after 77, then they mustn't have been the target. Joe Strummer doesn't miss what he aims for!

[dubdobdee.livejournal.com]

bah i am WAY TOO BUSY this afternoon to respond to this: it is also wrongheaded but in a more subtle way that the lex is being

[braisedbywolves.livejournal.com]

Oh yeah I'm aware that this is just how punk is taught in schools (IE how it was taught behind the sheds a generation ago) rather than how it actually worked.

Also also I'm not saying that they were swept away, but they don't seem to be here in the first place*! I'd be curious to see a '75 - are we getting a '77 at some point, Tom?

An obvious hole in my argument = Pink Floyd.

[freakytigger.livejournal.com]

75 didn't exist - this was the first one he did.

I don't intend to do any more really, maybe the "all time" 1982 one to demonstrate how well punk 'worked' on the Peel audience.

[jeff-worrell.livejournal.com]

"supposed" is a key word in yr first sentence there (i.e. this is yr classic urban myth)

[dubdobdee.livejournal.com]

andrew this is a snapshot of the canon view of an OUTGROUP (peel's listeners) WITHIN AN OUTGROUP (uk mid-70s counterculture orthodoxy) WITHIN AN "OUT"GROUP ("pop" culture as a whole), where "pop" has a VERY contested meaning, somewhere between "what lots of young people like" and "gleams of an onrushing better world as envisioned and enabled by the young"

(fsvo the "young", also already a "contested" word!)

*SUBMERGES BACK INTO FRANTIC PRESSWEEK*