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Notes -
Representation and Stupid Lists
Over the weekend, Fivehour posted a brief missive that included his disappointment regarding the paucity of black songwriters at the top of the NYT recent list of the 100 greatest living American songwriters. It should be noted that there were actually two lists. The first was an unranked list of the top 30 that was compiled by critics. After that list generated the expected amount of controversy, the Times solicited list submissions from readers, which were then compiled into a ranked top 100. On the original list, 13 or 14 of the top 30 were black, depending on whether you count Mariah Carey. One thing I noticed about the critic's list is that it suffers from another kind of representation problem, the opposite of what Fivehour was talking about. In an apparent effort to avoid offending any constituency, the critics who made the selections cast as wide a net as possible. You can say what you want about the wisdom of the crowd and the biases of the NYT older, white, urban readership, but the reader list acts as somewhat of a correction. First, I'd like to go through each artist on the critic's list and evaluate their worthiness for inclusion.
The Original 30
Nile Rodgers: He was the guitarist and principle songwriter for the disco group Chic, and since disco's critical rehabilitation, he has enjoyed an elevated status. Part of this is because his own contributions to disco—Chic's music and the songs he wrote for other artists, including Sister Sledge and Diana Ross—are among the finest examples of the genre, a world away from stuff by The Village People, KC & the Sunshine Band, and Lipps, Inc. that contributed to disco's demise. A bigger part is that after disbanding Chic he spent the next several decades working with artists as diverse as David Bowie, Madonna, INXS, Beyonce, and Daft Punk, which maintained his profile in the industry at a time when most former disco musicians were in the "Where are they now?" file. While his musical bona fides are unquestioned, most of them are due to his work as a producer, not as a songwriter. Chic only had a few pop hits, not many more R&B hits, and theirs is not a catalog where critics are pointing to a lot of hidden gems. He didn't write a ton of hit songs for other artists, either. His career as a hit songwriter was pretty much over by 1983, and he seemed disinclined to contribute material for records he was producing. The notable exception is "Get Lucky", for which he received a songwriting credit, along with everyone else who was in the studio that day. His inclusion on this list is suspicious and ultimately not okay.
Lucinda Williams: If you've spent any amount of time listening to your local public Adult Album Alternative radio station, you've heard Lucinda Williams. She's a critical darling and avatar for the urban hipster's idea of what "Americana" should be: Country-ish songs about gravel roads. As a cult artist, she isn't going to be judged based on how many hits she wrote, only the overall quality of her output, which is high. I have no problem with this inclusion, though I admit that I'm a member of her target demographic.
Stevie Wonder: If you want to nitpick, you can argue that he had a lot of help before Motown gave him full control in the early 1970s, and that the quality of his work fell off a cliff after the mid-80s, but let's be real here—he was a teenager in his early years and his peak lasted about as long as one can reasonably expect. And what a peak it was. Wonder's greatest strength was that he wasn't afraid to stretch the boundaries of what was harmonically possible in R&B. Like the Beatles, though, he was able go off the reservation and still remain massively popular. This one is a no-brainer.
Jay-Z: No rapper I would pick will ever end up on one of these lists, but if you have to choose someone mainstream, Jay-Z is about as good as you're going to get.
Paul Simon: With Simon & Garfunkel, he was able to take what should have been massive epics and shoehorn them into three minute pop songs. Solo, he was able to branch out stylistically, eventually landing a hit album based in South African pop music at a time when most artists of his generation were vainly attempting to conform with 80s trends. Another no-brainer.
Taylor Swift: You would think that someone as famous as Swift who has been around as long as she has would have tons of songs that would be familiar to the general public whether they liked it or not. I will admit that I can identify a song as being by Taylor Swift upon hearing it, whether I've heard it before or not. Aside from Love Story and Shake It Off, though, I wouldn't be able to tell you the title, or even tell you whether I had heard it before. Her music is so bland that it simply goes in one ear and out the other without the brain taking note of anything. Internet music guru Rick Beato pointed out to Lex Fridman a few months ago that for an artist as popular as she is, she has never once been at the forefront of any musical development. Her modus operandi, instead, is to put her finger in the wind and capitalize on the sounds that others have already popularized. Her actual songwriting skills are rather limited, as they involve basic melodies and paint-by-numbers chord progressions. Beato also noted that only two academic books have been published on the topic of Swift, one about her lyrics and one about her marketing sense. There is nothing to date analyzing her actual musical contribution. One cannot imagine the same being true of Stevie Wonder. She should not be within a mile of this list, though by excluding her the critics would have caused a riot. After all, any reviewer giving one of her albums less than five stars or pointing out any flaws whatsoever risks their own personal safety, so I'll give the NYT a pass on this one.
Brian and Eddie Holland: 2/3 of the famed Holland/Dozier/Holland songwriting team, who were responsible for more Motown hits than you can shake a stick out, including most of the hits by The Supremes and Temptations. You can claim that they shouldn't be included due to the passing of Lamont Dozier, but his being dead doesn't diminish them as songwriters. They shaped the sound of a generation made an indelible mark on the music of generations to come. Easy inclusion.
Missy Elliott: I'm going to put this in the Jay-Z category where I admit that I don't know enough to make a decision on this, though if I were compelled to include a female R&B songwriter from that generation Alicia Keys would be my first thought.
Lionel Richie: This is an interesting one. From 1974 to 1981 he was the mastermind behind the Commodores, and his contributions thereto would be enough to include him on my personal list. From 1982 to 1987 he was a popular solo musician whose material hasn't aged well and was, for many years, the but of jokes. Beginning in the mid-2000s he reinvented himself as a generalized music celebrity who people know had a career at one point but which career nobody seems interested in revisiting. Critics almost certainly included him solely on his Commodores material, using his unrelated contemporary popularity as a defense against people saying "Who?" The result is that his inclusion is both deserved and undeserved at the same time.
Dolly Parton: I was in Gatlinburg on vacation a few years ago and a friend of mine, who was taking his kids to Dollywood the following day, said at cocktail hour that he couldn't understand her popularity because the only songs of hers he could think of were "Jolene", "I Will Always Love You", and "Islands in the Stream", which she only gets half credit for. I added "9 to 5" to the list, and can personally name several more songs, but not ones he, or anyone else, would be familiar with. That being said, her work is critically acclaimed, and she probably has a ton of country hits that my friend wouldn't know about, but so does Conway Twitty. This is a Lionel Richie situation on steroids, and since I'm only inclined to include one such performer on the list and I like him better, I'm dumping her from mine.
Young Thug: Evidence of the critics' compulsion to include modern artists, including ones whose contributions are actively detrimental to the genre. Hard pass.
Diane Warren: Another interesting selection. Warren is the kind of hook-for-hire songwriter who you call when you need a readymade hit for a famous artist who is incapable of writing their own material. While she may have written some of the biggest hits of the 80s and 90s, they were clearly designed to move units, and nobody would call them their favorite songs. I get that the critics wanted to include a behind-the-scenes songwriter who didn't perform, but I doubt anyone things that the proliferation of generic power ballads was a good thing. Pass.
Josh Osborne, Brandy Clark, Shane McAnally: Simultaneously the most and least baffling conclusion. Least baffling because the critics clearly felt compelled to include someone writing contemporary country music. Most baffling because this isn't an actuall songwriting team but three people who occasionally collaborate with each other and always collaborate with someone. Another example of ham-fisted representation for a popular genre that sucks. Dump all of them from the list.
Fiona Apple: She gained prominence in the late-90s for being better artistically than one would expect a teenage girl to be, and has been mildly overrated ever since. It's clearly a critical darling inclusion, but I'm not going to complain about it too much, since her songs are at least tolerable, if not quite as good as advertised.
Babyface: Apart from the question of whether we need representation for 90s R&B, at least this is the most obvious pick. Then again, as many hits as this guy wrote, few people remember them today. Bland R&B balladry tends to disappear down the toilet of history pretty quickly. Pass.
Stephen Merritt: Another critical darling. I have listened to all 69 of the love songs he is known for, and maybe a half dozen merit a second listen. He hasn't done anything since, and his work from before ranges from mediocre to awful, and everything he does is excessively twee. I'll never understand the critical appeal. Hard pass.
Romeo Santos: Latin music exists almost wholly apart from the mainstream, and the critics accordingly had to select a big name that nobody had ever heard of. I have no idea how deserving this guy is, but Reuben Blades more or less invented salsa music and isn't on the list. Now, Mr. Blades was born in Panama, but since he spent the bulk of his career as a New York musician I won't hold that against him.
Carole King: As a younger woman, she stayed behind the scenes and wrote a healthy number of 60s pop hits along with her lyricist then-husband, Gerry Goffin. As a somewhat older woman she had solo success in the burgeoning singer-songwriter movement of the 1970s. Easy inclusion.
Outkast: An odd choice but not one worth complaining about.
Mariah Carey: Her music was the soundtrack of my childhood. Particularly the shitty parts of my childhood, like standing in a store for three hours while my mother looked at clothes, or sitting in the back of a hot 1986 Pontiac between two car seats with no way to change the radio. She, too, would be relegated to "Where are they now?" file if a Christmas song that she wrote hadn't become popular 20 years after its original release. Like everything else Carey wrote that was even remotely good, it was ruined by being played to death. Hard pass.
Willie Nelson: Another multi-stage musician. In the 60s he wrote hits for other artists like Patsy Cline while his own career foundered. In the 70s he came into his own as a progenitor of outlaw country and made a name for himself with a series of critically acclaimed hit albums. In the 80s he capitalized on his success with a bunch of pop hits that were halfway decent if not great. In between all of this he expanded his boundaries by releasing albums that explored genres he had no business exploring. Easy inclusion.
Kendrick Lamar: For years, the top-rated album on online review site RateYourMusic was Radiohead's OK Computer, which made sense because it appealed to music snobs but was mainstream enough that the general public would have heard of it. It was such a perfect selection for #1 that it was surprising when To Pimp a Butterfly overtook it a few years back. I'm not the biggest fan of Lamar, but he's a much better selection for this list than Young Thug, and I'll voice my approval just to show I'm not entirely out of touch.
*Valerie Simpson: Another Motown songwriter, best known for her work with her late husband Nick Ashford. But aside from Ain't No Mountain High Enough and the other songs they wrote for the Marvin Gaye/Tami Terrell collaboration, their work is pretty thin. Does a single iconic song make up for an otherwise underwhelming career? Maybe.
Bob Dylan: I'm not even going to address this.
Lana Del Ray: She started off as a pop musician but came into her own as a legitimate singer-songwriter. If you want to include someone with pop credentials who can actually write music, she's a much better option than Taylor Swift. No problem with this selection.
The-Dream: The 2000s equivalent of Babyface, and a stand-in for Beyonce. The merit of his inclusion is likewise dependent on whether you think his material is any good. I don't, so I'll pass on this guy.
Jimmy Jam and Terry Lewis: They came to prominence in the mid-80s as Janet Jackson's producers and the architects of the sound that defined the era. Like Nile Rodgers, their primary contribution is more through production than songwriting. Besides Jackson and boy band New Edition, their credits are pretty thin. The sound also aged poorly and, unlike disco, hasn't had a contemporary revival. The 80s aesthetic that is popular nowadays relies more on synth-pop than what they were doing. Pass on these guys.
Bad Bunny: Maybe he merits inclusion due to his mainstreaming of Latin music. Maybe in ten years he'll be remembered as well as Marc Anthony. A little to early to start putting him on these kinds of lists, but if you need to include a contemporary Latin artist, I don't know who else you'd pick. Pass for me.
Bruce Springsteen: I always felt that Bruce was overrated and I find his working man schtick tiring. Even as a musician, the guy never worked a day in his life; his first album was a hit and in a few years he was the hottest thing going. If they wanted to include a heartland rocker, Bob Seger has him beat in the authenticity department, as he struggled for years before he finally broke through outside of Michigan, and his songwriting catalog can go toe to toe with Springsteen's. I'm in the minority with this, though, so I can't complain.
Smokey Robinson: Another architect of the Motown sound and an obvious choice.
In all, I can endorse about half of these selections. Now let's look at the people who made the top 30 of the reader's poll who weren't on the original list:
**5. Billy Joel: He's had more hits than you can shake a stick at, and has been continuously popular despite not releasing anything new since 1993. In the age of punk, though, his music was seen as lightweight, and he had a similar popular perception until relatively recently, when younger people started to admit that he was actually pretty good. The stigma was slow to disappear among rock critics, and it seems nobody wants to give him too many accolades. His exclusion from the list was criminal.
9. James Taylor; 11. Jackson Browne; 14. Randy Newman: In the 1970s, there was an entire singer-songwriter movement where musicians who would in a previous era would have stayed in the shadows and written material for more obvious pop stars were encouraged perform and record albums. The result is that there's an overabundance of these types, and any list that seeks to be representative has to include a few representative examples. Carole King and Paul Simon were the lucky ones here, as their careers predated the movement and were thus the most qualified on paper. Is Jackson Browne a better songwriter than Diane Warren? Would you rather listen to The Pretender or Aerosmith's 90s material? I don't even think this is a legitimate question. Especially with regards to Newman, who also wrote a lot of songs that are better known through cover versions.
12. Tom Waits: It says something that a guy who is effectively a cult musician and a critical darling made it this high on a reader's poll. That doesn't happen unless there's something transcendent about the quality of the work.
15. David Byrne: For as much as the list tried to be representative, the critics seem to have forgotten about the punk/new wave era entirely, possibly because it was largely a British phenomenon. But it's still odd, because these guys, and Talking Heads in particular, are usually critical darlings. I'd definitely include him.
16. Stevie Nicks: The compilers of the reader's poll admitted that this was a hard one to score, as some people just wrote "Fleetwood Mac", which had three principle songwriters, Nicks, Chritine McVie, and Lindsey Buckingham. Complicating matters further is the fact that McVie is British and thus ineligible. Buckingham was the more prominent songwriter (and never went through an addict phase), but isn't as famous. I have no problem including Nicks, but I understand why the critics would avoid this hornet's nest.
19. Jason Isbell, 20. Jeff Tweedy, 21. Brandi Carlisle: See Lucinda Williams and the NPR crowd's obsession with Americana musicians. If this is purely a question of songwriting quality without regard to popularity, then you can make the case for either of them, but since we already have Williams as the Americana stand-in, there was no reason to include them. If I'm only naming 30 people I'm not putting any on my list.
22. Donald Fagen: Steely Dan is one of my favorite bands, so I obviously would put him on the list. His songs are also unlike anything else in music, so you don't have the subgenre overrepresentation issue. The problem is that everyone thinks of Steely Dan and not of him as a songwriter.
23. Neil Diamond: See Billy Joel. Massively famous, massively talented, and massively uncool. The youngs might belt Sweet Caroline in bars to the point where it becomes irritating, but there's no contemporary appreciation for I Am, I Said, or Play Me. As an unapologetic Neil Diamond fan, I would include him on this list, but I'm sympathetic to the arguments against, namely that much of his material is crap, to a greater degree than Billy Joel.
24. John Fogerty: It seems like the critics must have just forgot that people in bands can also write songs. This guy was Americana before Americana even existed, and even if you want the list to be representative, he's more deserving than Lucinda Williams.
25. REM: Almost certainly this high in the reader poll because of their cult material from the 80s and not their hits from the 90s. Six months ago I would have passed on these guys, but I saw Paul Shannon perform their non-hits back in March and the concert was so good that I'm no longer sure. Then again, I'd place them ahead of anyone I crossed off the critic's list, with the possible exception of Nile Rodgers.
26. Patti Smith: She was both punk and singer-songwriter. She was also a poet. She's also massively overrated, with most of her "songs" consisting of her rambling on stage while people like Bob Quine wail on guitars in the background. And the song she's best known for (Because the Night) was written by Bruce Springsteen. Pass.
27. Don Henley: One line in one movie made an entire generation hate these guys, not that there was much to love about them before. That being said, see my above comments about people being in bands not getting nearly enough respect as songwriters. I don't know if he makes my top 30, though.
30. Jimmy Webb: See Valerie Simpson. The NYT must have the smartest, most astute readership in the world for him to rate so high. Webb wrote a few hits in the late 60s—MacArthur Park, Galveston, By the Time I Get to Phoenix, Up, Up and Away—before trying to make it as a singer-songwriter and not having much success. He might have done better had he continued to write for other people, though the market for outside songwriters in the 70s wasn't good, and wouldn't pick up until schlockmasters like Warren came to prominence in the 80s. I make the comparison to Simpson because although he didn't write that many hits, he also wrote Wichita Linemen, which, like Ain't No Mountain High Enough, is in contention for the greatest song ever written.
So let's tie it all together by looking at who got booted from the critic's top 30:
From the original critic's list, readers chose to boot 8 of 13 (or 9 of 14 if you include Carey) black musicians out of the top 30, and 4 of them out of the top 100 entirely. While crowd-sourced lists are usually suspect, this list was compiled in response to comments about the original list, and thus the responders read the original article, were familiar with the justifications, and ultimately disagreed. It's easy to look at Swift's high ranking and label the readership as ignorant, but they also elevated Jimmy Webb to #30, despite him not being mentioned on the original list, and he should certainly be in the conversation despite not being a household name and not representing the Americana that the NYT readership has a hard-on for.
The point I'm trying to make here is that we can take a group of experts and have them put together a list that's supposed to be representative, and end up with a list that everyone agrees is terrible. It's not even clear that they succeeded in the first sense, since there aren't any country songwriters who were primarily active between circa 1990 and 2010 (unless you count Taylor Swift at the tail end of this period). It would be one thing if there simply weren't anyone prominent enough to merit inclusion, but that ignores the existence of Dwight Yoakam, who was both popular and the kind of guy whom critics slobber over. The list also ignores R&B from between Motown and disco. Why not include Kenny Gamble and Leon Huff, who proctically invented the Philly Soul sound in the 70s and wrote for groups like The Intruders, The O'Jays, and the Stylistics? Is Fiona Apple really the best representative of alternative rock songwriting? Why is the list so thin on rock songwriters in general?
The reason is that you can't please anybody, and, despite my disagreements, the critics' list is as good as anything. Because attempts at being representative, as misguided as they often are, can be better than the alternative. What if the list were just a bunch of country songwriters, or a bunch of R&B songwriters, or pro songwriters that nobody had heard of? People would complain that the compilers were too myopic and were unqualified to compile such a list by virtue of their ignorance. In this sense, the NYT's format was sneakily good—release an unranked list of critics' selections, then invite the public to chime in. The got additional mileage when they evaluated the suggestions that the readers liked but that the critics had ignored. I honestly think that this format is better than putting out a critic's list that is overly curated to avoid controversy (like what VH1 used to do) or simply putting it out to the vote (which ends in Rolling Stone's best albums of the millennium list having Limp Bizkit at #2). The emphasis is less on the list itself than on the discussion, which is the way it should be, and I'm glad that this is the way they chose to do it now that it's technologically possible to have such a discussion.
Mmm hmm. Outta my fucking cab!
This is one of the rare instances where the edited version for television actually improves on the uncensored original. "Get out of my peaceful cab!" is infinitely funnier.
Preach! Do you know what happens when you find a stranger in the Alps, Larry? Do you?!?
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