If that were true, they wouldn't have been given Kennedy Center Honors, nor landed the Super Bowl gig. I don't understand this lack of perspective on the mass appeal of The Who. From Tommy in 1969 to Endless Wire in 2006, every album of new studio material from The Who has hit the top ten. Not many artists can say that. Certainly not the Beach Boys, who since Pet Sounds in 1966 have released many albums of new studio material that have missed the top ten. And, more than once, even missed the top 150. The Beach Boys period of consistent top ten success was brief. A mere four years. After that, they hit the top ten with a new album only once. 15 Big Ones went to #8 in 1976. That's it. And there aren't many artists that have the kind of mass popular appeal that fills football and baseball stadiums several times over. The Who even packed 103,000 people into JFK Stadium, a record for the largest non-festival audience in popular music history for over a quarter century. U2 finally broke it a couple years ago. Of course, over 240,000 people showed up to The Who's gigs in Giants Stadium over four nights, as well. This isn't some niche band, Bruce.

Regardless, popularity is one quarter of the criteria. You want to talk influence? Can the Beach Boys really be more influential than The Who? The Who are one of the keystone artists in hard rock, power pop and art rock influence. Hard rock is one of the most enduring genres in music. Far more so than Surf Rock, who's heyday was exceptionally brief. The Beach Boys have a lot of influence in studio production techniques, but The Who's influence in the live arena and in musicianship is at least as massive. How many legions of guitarists are directly inspired by Pete Townshend? How many legions of drummers are influenced by Keith Moon? How many legions of bass players are inspired by John "The Ox" Entwistle? We're talking massive numbers of people, here. Dennis Wilson's drums? Brian Wilson's bass playing? Carl Wilson's Chuck Berry guitar? Not in the same league. And then there's Roger Daltrey, one of the most influential of all hard rock vocalists.

As for Stevie Wonder, the same applies to him. He's released several new studio albums that failed to crack the top ten since his Talking Book breakthrough. The most groundbreaking thing he ever did was his synthesizer experimentation, and The Who even beat him to that, big time, with Who's Next.

Popularity might be closer than you think if you factor in concert success and maintaining popularity over time, both of which The Who do great in. I do think The Who take influence over the Beach Boys. I'm not sure what Stevie Wonder's cultural impact is beyond fame. And I think The Who are among the same elite in musical impact as Stevie Wonder and the Beach Boys are. There is no single Stevie Wonder song as revered as "My Generation". And The Who's live reputation is the elite of the elite.

To be honest, this whole "influence" category never interested me much. I never really thought about it until I started making lists here for Lew. To me,

ALL THAT MATTERS IS WHAT'S COMING OUT OF THE SPEAKERS

I really don't care who influenced an artist. If their music sounds good to me, that's all I care about. I also don't really care who an artist influenced. I don't see the fact that an artist influenced a lot of other artists as an automatic positive thing. For me, the influence of Jimi Hendrix, the Velvet Underground, and others was an awful thing.

Do we give positive points to Jose Canseco for being perhaps the most influential person in the advent of steroids becoming rampant in major league baseball?

I don't see why we just assume that all musical influence is a good thing.

That being said, the guiy on the site who does care a lot about influence, Sampson, has the Beach Boys ranked above the Who in that category:

1. Elvis Presley
2. The Beatles
3. James Brown
4. Bob Dylan
5. Chuck Berry
6. Run-D.M.C.
7. The Jimi Hendrix Experience
8. Ray Charles
9. Led Zeppelin
10. Fats Domino
11. Aretha Franklin
12. Clyde McPhatter
13. Little Richard
14. Madonna
15. Buddy Holly & The Crickets
16. Bill Haley & The Comets
17. Michael Jackson
18. The Beach Boys
19. Sam Cooke
20. The Who
21. Bo Diddley
22. Grandmaster Flash & The Furious Five
23. Black Sabbath
24. Johnny Otis
25. Public Enemy
26. Stevie Wonder

We don't. We just see it as a great thing. Sometimes it's "great" in the same sense that resulted in Time Magazine making Adolph Hitler Man of the Year.

Anyway, I'm not totally opposed to Stevie Wonder and The Beach Boys being ranked ahead of The Who on this list. They're both worthy artists. But I think it's really close and conceivable that The Who are the greater rock artist by the criteria. So, I'll make my arguments and see what you guys think. I think The Who's accomplishments in the live arena put them over the top, because their accomplishments in the studio put them very close to Wonder and the Beach Boys as it is.

Elton John shocking fact: He has released more new studio albums that missed the top ten than have made the top ten. True story. Fourteen made the top ten. Sixteen did not.

You ought to be kicking Led Zeppelin out long before The Who.

Meanwhile the Who have not even made the singles chart since 1982, while Elton has 32 hit singles since then, including 8 top tens and another 9 that made the top 20. He is listed as the #3 artist of all time on the singles chart (1955-now).

Hence the "shocking" part of my shocking fact.

As I said here in this same topic, Elton John is a little low, he deserve be in the top 20.

How so? Enormous popularity, but his influence and musical impact aren't top twenty worthy.

I think both can be part of the top 10 because they are giants in some criteria when compared with other elite artists.

I think he's top 20 in popularity and Cultural Impact. Maybe top 25 in musical impact.

Yeah, Elton's influence and musical impact are alarmingly low for someone that popular. Usually the elite level artist has roughly similar placements in three of the four areas. Like with aforementioned Beach Boys and Stevie Wonder, everything is pretty much on par with everything else. But while Elton easily matches their popularity his influence and musical impact, though decent, is so far behind theirs that it sticks out. You rarely see that big a disparity, so even with his popularity he can't make up for it to reach their level, since they not only do nearly as well in his strongest area, they kill him in the others.

I'll give you the answer you'll hate, because it's not a direct answer at all. I don't know. That's what the criteria is for. I can say in broad terms they have no weak area which is generally a sign of the immortal type artists who make up the upper echelon of rankings, but how many others are in that category, how much greater or lesser their achievements are in relation to others in each area, I have no idea. To do it right, not just Michael and Aretha should be studied intently, but another couple hundred artists need to be scrutinized in the same way, and until then you just don't know, it's only an educated guess, which often times is the worst kind, because it goes on what you think SHOULD happen without doing the requisite work for it. Once those preconceptions become accepted then it becomes really hard to break them, even with ample evidence to the contrary appearing throughout the criteria, which is why you can't start making guesses about placements, educated or not.

That's why when I said the list should be scrapped and started over, it wasn't a knock at all against Brian, who does a great job, or anyone else, but my problem is when you start with a list already in place, the analysis centers around the rough groupings of artists already ranked and trying to simply move them up or down a few spots based on that original placement, and that's just the wrong way to do it, because now we're saying something like "we're looking at 7-9 and here are the candidates" when in reality EVERY artist should be looked at equally, there should be no preconceptions about who is being considered for what area of the rankings. The 1-6 might be wrong but if they've already been established we kind of move on and then start looking at others and it won't work that way, no matter who's doing it. The best lists, I think, have a totally blank canvas and you just start with each of the criteria individually and try and figure out who does best in each, then move to the next criteria and the next, and the big picture starts to become clearer gradually. That's when candidates rise and fall in ways you never expected because you're not beholden to some preconceived notion of "who's great" and who seems to belong where and then trying to squeeze them in somehow, even if the criteria doesn't back it up.

I know doing it so methodically is not as much fun as arguing over things and trying to rank artists as you go along and come to some sort of conclusion before the work has been done, but if you want to actually get it right then doing it one criteria at a time then slowly pulling it all together only after all of the time and work has been put in is the only logical and defensible way to do it.

That's why I hate answering the questions like this - Do MJ and Aretha belong in the Top Ten? My answer would be perception based, the very thing I'm railing against, even though I've done a lot of work on the criteria for all artists for the decades lists and know it pretty well. But the only way to know for sure is to do a thorough job on every artist's entire career in the manner I described. It's long, tedious work and it becomes so much harder when people start arguing for their favorites, which clearly is the very thing that winds up killing so many lists of this type - taste based subjectivity. But nobody ever said doing it objectively was easy and unfortunately people always like things to be easy.