Not under popularity, but because he wrote those songs at he same time that he was a performer, maybe he should under musical impact. I'd be interested in Sampson's take on that.

I was figuring it was like this:

Popularity: Mariah > Janet > Whitney, but not a whole lot of difference between the 3.

Influence: Janet > Whitney > Mariah.

Musical impact: Janet > Mariah > Whitney. Janet's music as a whole is revered. Mariah and Whitney are revered as vocalists, Mariah more than Whitney I think.

Cultural impact: Janet = Whitney > Mariah.

If all of this is true, Janet definitely beats Whitney overall, and Janet almost certainly also beats Mariah, since Mariah takes popularity only, and by a small margin. To me, Mariah's advantage in popularity and musical impact look a little bigger than Whitney's advantage in influence and cultural impact.

However, since Whitney isn't currently in the top 100, at this stage the artists that Whitney should be compared to are the other leading candidates outside the top 100: the early rock artists, Kanye, GnR, McCartney, Pickett, etc.

You say the most important thing is the criteria, and seem to think your own criteria are basically flawless, but you named them as symmetrically as possible instead of as accurately and descriptively as possible.

I've never seen sampson, but somehow here's how I picture him:

Nah.... Refer to the avatar at left and pay close attention to the eye roll.

Great post, Mumei.

I would agree, except in terms of Influence, where Janet is far more influential than was stated above. She popularized New Jack Swing, which was the merger of hip-hop beats to melodic R&B, something that dominated female rock in the 90's. To give credit to Mariah for bringing some hip-hop (particularly Old Dirty Bastard) into the more pop-realm misses the point that the two styles themselves had already merged successfully with Janet. Yes, it was done differently (Janet less with guests and more with the underlying beats to her own music), and I'll admit the ODB guest rap on Fantasy on Mariah's part was very bold for someone viewed as mainstream pop and risked alienating a good chunk of her audience (though it was calculated to move her into more urban playlists), but but keep in mind ODB didn't appear on the hit single version, only on the remix (which did get significant airplay on its own). But she was beaten to the punch in by the fact that New Jack Swing had already opened up the possibilities of bringing hip-hop sensibilities into that area, which means you can't give Carey more than minor secondary influence, not comparable to Janet's more pervasive influence. So Janet wins influence I think pretty clearly as well as Cultural Impact. I think the Commercial and Musical Impact categories were pretty well stated, though Janet also got cudos for her landmark videos in the industry.

Overall though it's good to see people talking about these three for a change, hitting an unexpected trifecta that rarely get mentioned at DDD - female acts, more pop-skewing rock and late century artists. What's next? Someone talking about music on an all-time greatest list that is actually CURRENT?! I don't think DDD could take that.

I would have to simply cop to some ignorance about Janet's influence in that regard. That said, I think that "merging hip-hop beats to melodic R&B" and "using guest rappers on songs", while they might be related, are not the same thing. You can't really call it a minor influence when that remix was instrumental in making the "add a rapper to a remix" / "add a guest rapper to a single" (Or add two: See Madonna's latest foray) formula the standard for pop music. You might be able to say that Janet's influence in popularizing the NJS movement influenced Mariah to do that - and Mariah dabbled with NJS in remixes as early as 1991:

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y9rABjfmiqQ[/youtube]

But I still think that you'd underrate Mariah in that respect if you simply ascribed whatever influence her remix had onto Janet simply because Janet did something related earlier. Unless you want to apply that stuff to musical impact rather than influence? I have a tendency to conflate the two. You might still be right that the merging of hip-hop beats to melodic R&B and the popularization of NJS were more important or influential, but I think that it's underselling things to say that Mariah's influence there is a minor, secondary influence.

Really? This coming from the same person who, over the years, has systematically attempted to include every possible advantage into already established criteria that would help a single band that you worship? Sorry, not buying it.

If you are suggesting that you'd be just as vociferous about somehow including concert ticket sales if the Who drew as many fans as the Grass Roots then you're a liar.

Every single quote you dredge up is to improve the Who's standing. Every single reference you use benefits the Who. Now you're saying you're fair and objective? No way. You killed your own credibility regarding the Who long ago. I even told you that you were doing it and that it'd be to your advantage if you stopped talking about them entirely, but you can't help yourself. Anytime you sense their status being threatened you lash out.

But as for the context of things. That is the single most important thing in ranking ANYTHING. If you were to rank baseball players by sheer career statistics and NOT take into account the era they played in, as well as the ballpark conditions, opposition, etc. you'd have a faulty list. If you ranked Greatest Presidents and had the relatively calm two-terms of Dwight Eisenhower ranked higher than Abraham Lincoln, who presided over a Civil War, because you couldn't care less about the context in which the two men did their jobs, you'd be an idiot. Of course context matters. It matters more than anything else because 1948 and 2012 are not the same.

Overall in terms of context, race plays only one part in it, amidst a myriad of other, equally important, aspects that have to be taken into consideration. Independent record labels in America in the 60's did not waste money releasing records in Great Britain because they didn't have enough cash (or reliable collection methods overseas) to be able to afford it. A record can't very well become a hit if it's unavailable in a country. That's a business reality, not racial. Certain popular white styles of rock do not get played on radio often because there's no format for them. That's not racial either, but it absolutely has to be taken into account, otherwise you're ignoring the reality of the situation. The Kinks were banned from America for a few years, yet were popular in the U.S. before that as well as after it. To not take that into consideration would be insane. But so too would claiming that concert ticket sales are, in of themselves, reliable measures of the supreme popularity of all artists equally, even though there are decades of professionally compiled studies showing that it unquestionably benefit only certain eras, styles and demographics.

Every artist can only deal with the circumstances of their time. Singles-era artists had different commercial benchmarks than album-era artists, one nighters on the chitlin circuit is a different reality than corporate driven world tours, exposure on TV or the movies in 1954 is not the same as exposure in 1984 when MTV ruled. Everything changes and to ignore those changes is to re-write history to suit only a specific perspective. That's why you need to put everything in context. It determines simply how well every artist did in relation to their own time and stylistic expectations, whether they fell short of the accepted standards, met those standards or far surpassed them. After all, the ultimate goal is to be as accurate as possible and for the rankings to be truly reflective of what someone actually did, not someone's interpretation of what they did based on faulty logic and historical ignorance.

I did that so it'd fit in the heading of the pages in a concise way, as the old pages didn't exactly have huge flowing descriptions of each criteria when I started on the site. I also figured keeping it short would help people remember the basics of what was being judged better than lengthy breakdowns that people couldn't refer to quickly, but I wound up writing far more about each criteria over time as a result so it didn't help. Since people know what they each mean it's not as big of a problem as it's being made to seem.

Well, primary influence is for true innovation, and Mariah wasn't the first by any means to do that, so as a result it has to be secondary by nature, the way we define it here. But I think it's somewhat more minor by comparision to Janet because the New Jack Swing style is essentially what allowed the hip-hop underpinnings to become pervasive in mainstream music, which anyone listening to current rock over the past two decades can see is an immense change in the overall style of rock. It's not coincidence that the term "New Jack Swing" came and went so fast, even though it continued being the foundation for so much since then, simply because it got so widespread so fast that there was no need to call it anything anymore, other than just mainstream music. That's what broke the door itself down and so Mariah, in what she did, which admittedly was somewhat different, walked through that door. But again, she wasn't the first to use geust rappers, so it diminishes it to a large degree, even though her use of ODB was one of the more renown early examples of it.

So in this regard Janet has to be given a huge amount of Influence credit because she fueled that entire sea change in mainstream music with her late 80's work. What Mariah did later on was add elements of hip-hop to her already established style. I think it's like the difference between designing the house and laying a new carpet inside.

I don't really agree with that definition of influence - that it is for true innovation and for the first to do X is the one that is influential. Those people aren't necessarily very influential themselves; it takes someone with a lot more visibility and popularity to bring it to wider knowledge, and that person who is responsible for popularizing a particular change does more to influence music in their era. You can't be influenced by something if you never hear it, after all. She wasn't the first, but she was the one who made it de rigueur in pop music. What is that, if not influence? I think that declaring it minor or secondary by fiat is to mislead about how influential it actually was.

But Sampson, we can't ever really be sure who did something first.