I say we save the site with a new criteria

Explain how Hendrix and Sabbath display more aggression than The Who. Explain how Sabbath and Zeppelin are more epic than The Who. And define Magic.

If ya gotta ask you'll never know

C'mon Sampson!

The legendary Prince confirmed dead.

I think now she is.

Bruno, check this thread out: viewtopic.php?f=51&t=5985

Yes, I was already following.

Great job so far.

From a guy who was about 22 in early 1964.

I seem to remember that news stories about Beatlemania in England had
been reported in several places, including Time magazine, even before
the release of IWTHYH in America, thus building up expectations. I
don't know when Murray the K first jumped on board the Beatles express,
but he was soon claiming special access and calling himself "the fifth
Beatle."

It's hard to exaggerate how quickly and thoroughly the Beatles
conquered America. I was 15 when Elvis signed with RCA and exploded
into everyone's consciousness, but the Beatles explosion was magnitudes
larger, touched many more levels of society and culture, and had far
more enduring and potent effects.

Here's something I wrote when the topic came up in this group back in
2001. (Can it really be that long ago?) I had just started a year of
grad school when the Beatles landed and recalled this:

"as a measure of how pervasive Beatlemania was, the jukebox in the
Lion's Den student hangout at Columbia University was all jazz and Frank
Sinatra in December, 1963. By March it contained a dozen or more
Beatles songs and they were being played incessantly."

The critic Greil Marcus tells a similar story
----------------------------------------------------

On February 9th, 1964, I was in college in Cali­fornia, a rock and roll fan with creeping am­nesia. I remembered Chuck Berry but not the guitar solo in “Johnny B. Goode.” The excitement, the sense of being caught up in something much bigger than one’s own private taste, had disappeared from rock years before. There was still good stuff on the radio—there had been “Heat Wave” by a group called Martha and the Vandellas the summer before, “Be True to Your School” by the Beach Boys a few months after that, and even “On Broadway” by the Drifters—but in 1963 all of it seemed drowned out by Jimmy Gilmer’s “Sugar Shack,” the Number One song of the year and perhaps the worst excuse for itself rock and roll had yet produced. Rock and roll—the radio—felt dull and stupid, a dead end.

There had been an item in the paper that day about a British rock and roll group which was to appear on The Ed Sullivan Show that night: “The Beatles” (a photo too—were those wigs, or what?). I was curious—I didn’t know they had rock and roll in England—so I went down to a commons room where there was a TV set, expecting an argument from whoever was there about which channel to watch.

Four hundred people sat transfixed as the Beatles sang “I Want to Hold Your Hand,” and when the song was over the crowd exploded. People looked at the faces (and the hair) of John, Paul, George and Ringo and said Yes (and who could have predicted that a few extra inches of hair would suddenly seem so right, so necessary? Brian Epstein?); they heard the Beatles’ sound and said Yes to that too. What was going on? And where had all those people come from?

Back at the radio I caught “I Saw Her Standing There” and was instantly convinced it was the most exciting rock and roll I’d ever heard (with Paul’s one/two/three/fuck! opening—how in the world did they expect to get away with that?). Someone from down the hall appeared with a copy of the actual record—you could just go out and buy this stuff?—and announced with great fake solemnity that it was the first 45 he’d purchased since “All Shook Up.” Someone else—who played a 12-string guitar and as far as I knew listened to nothing but Odetta began to muse that “even as a generation had been brought together by the Five Satins’ ‘In the Still of the Nite,’ it could be that it would be brought together again—by the Beatles.” He really talked like that; what was more amazing, he talked like that when a few hours before he had never heard of the Beatles.

The next weeks went by in a blur. People began to grow their hair (one acquaintance argued with great vehemence that it was physically impossible for male hair—at least, normal male hair—to grow to Beatle length); some affected British (or, when they could pull it off, Liverpool) accents. A friend got his hands on a British Beatles album unavailable in the U.S. and made a considerable amount of money charging people for the chance to hear John Lennon sing “Money (That’s What I Want)”—at two bucks a shot. Excitement wasn’t in the air; it was the air.

A few days after that first performance on the Sullivan show I spent the evening with some friends in a cafe in my home­town. It was, or anyway had been, a folk club. This night one heard only Meet the Beatles. The music, snaking through the dark, suddenly spooky room, was instantly recognizable and like nothing we had ever heard. It was joyous, threatening, absurd, arrogant, determined, innocent and tough.

This is pretty hot. I bet it would pack the dance floor in the right club.

Cool stuff.

Brian, are you still in charge of this list? Or it's now in Sampson's hands? If you are I'd say Michael Jackson and Madonna probably belong over Who and Led Zeppelin. They have more commercial success, more cultural impact, placed within the same range in Sampson's most influential list (it goes like Zep > Madonna > MJ > Who), although admittedly that list includes performance and cultural influence into account. Then there's musical impact and I would say MJ / Madonna are as revered within dance pop as Zep and Who are revered within guitar-driven rock. Plus it would be good to have artist or two who picked after 1980 in top ten since it's 2017. What do you think?

Tim, the list is now in Sampson's hands, and what you suggested may very well happen. The Beach Boys, Ray Charles, and Aretha Franklin might end up ahead of the Who and Zep too. My view is that Madonna trails all of these artists in musical impact, but that she's so strong in the rest of the criteria that what you're calling for can probably be justified.

How goes it guys? Been a while....do any of the regulars still post here?