No, I just figured one Platters was enough and traded a borderline Aretha for a borderline Platters.

Did we add "Once In A Lifetime"? That could replace "Scar Tissue".

I'll repost here my post from the music polls thread, because I don't think everyone saw it:

May I ask how you determined the lasting popularity of "Scar Tissue"? It doesn't have much going for it in terms of acclaim or influence and it's initial popularity doesn't seem to be all that huge either so it's lasting popularity would have to be very significant.

I agree that GoL might do even worse by the criteria though.

I think the big thing GoL has going for it is influence. It's been sampled like crazy and I think it had a significant influence on dance/electronic stuff.

What about "Zombie"? I have no idea why that's on the chart. You said "lasting popularity" for that one, too, but I think we could name dozens of songs not on the list that have more lasting popularity than either "Zombie" or "Scar Tissue", if only because they've been around a lot longer. What am I missing?

My view of lasting popularity is that it's not just the length of time that something has been popular, but also the level of popularity, and if anything, more the latter than the former. To view it as just length of time something has been popular is to give an excessive advantage to older songs in compiling the list. We already allotted fewer positions on the list to the '90s than to decades prior to that. I don't think it would be appropriate to go even further in that direction.

"Zombie" and "Scar Tissue" both have a lot of views at youtube and a lot of scrobbles at lastfm. The staggeringly high number of views for "Zombie" at youtube is part of what makes me think that it should stay. "Zombie" is also the #12 song of the '90s on the APCchart (European popularity). If one of the 2 songs had to be dropped, I'd rather drop "Scar Tissue". But what about "Fell in Love with a Girl"?

Paul, I would agree that "Scar Tissue" has little influence, but does FiLwaG have significantly more? A lot of songs on the list don't have much influence. For initial popularity, ST went to #9 in the UD and spent 20 weeks in the top 40, and is the biggest song from an album that went 5X platinum, so it beats FiLwaG there. I'd say the latter beats it in critical acclaim only. And if they're about the same overall, RHCP are the more important artist, so as a tiebreaker, it's better for them to have 2 songs than for the White Stripes to have 2 songs.

I agree that neither song has much influence.

FiLwaG is top 400 all-time on acclaimedmusic. ST doesn't appear on any all-time or decade lists except Pollock's 7,500 songs list, it doesn't have much lasting acclaim, it is outside the top 3,000.

So, the question I'm asking myself now is whether ST would be top 400 all-time on a list ranking songs for their lasting popularity and whether FiLwaG would be outside the top 3,000 in such a ranking and I have a hard time believing that either assertion is true (though I may be wrong). So my point is that I think FiLwaG's acclaim is bigger than ST's lasting popularity if that makes any sense at all.

I'm not terribly sold on YouTube or last.fm as measures of lasting popularity, although the former is better because it reaches more people. Compare to something like "I'll Make Love To You" by Boyz II Men, which is the same era as "Zombie" and isn't on the chart. Yes, it has a lot fewer YT views, but it gets far broader radio airplay, and there are a lot more people listening to mainstream radio than looking at any given song on YouTube. And the Boyz song absolutely kills "Zombie" and "Scar Tissue" in original popularity.

Also last.fm only shows the plays over the last six months, which means that songs that saw a possibly short-lived revival in popularity during this time due to use in a commercial or a trailer will have an unjustifiable advantage there. Also, as has been noted many times before, the demographics of last.fm's user group are rather limited. It can be helpful for comparing the popularity of different songs by the same artist or at least from the same style but even there it has its shortcomings.

It certainly is the case that you can't just use the raw numbers of either, especially not lastfm, and consider that the last word. You have to take the biases of lastfm into account, and at youtube you have account for the possibility that a video may have gotten lot of views and was taken down. Those two sources do have the advantage that they aren't limited to popularity in the US, and with "Zombie"'s high APCchart ranking, I believe that it at least gets more airplay there than "I'll Make Love to You".

Paul does make a good argument about the disparity in acclaim between ST and FiLwaG, so Brett, if you think ST would be the better of the 2 to drop, I'll go along with that.

What's the APCchart?

This is an interesting point, but it raises an inconsistency. For most of the list, I think we're basing things almost exclusively on US success. I know I didn't check any of the songs I looked at to see how they fared outside of the US, although that might already be accounted for on the decade lists. We haven't included anything by someone like Cliff Richard or Robbie Williams who are huge stars worldwide but not big in the US.



Yeah, I don't have a strong feeling about it, but I certainly don't object.

Whatever you guys decide just send it in to Lew and post it here so I can update the copy of the list on page 90 of this thread.

The APCchart is a chart of airplay in Europe: http://www.apcchart.com. I do consider popularity outside the US for my songs lists, and I'm pretty sure Jeff B. does too. The difference between "Zombie" and songs by Cliff Richards and Robbie Williams is that the latter had very little success in the US. "Zombie" is big both in the US and elsewhere. It was by far the biggest song on an album that went 7x platinum.

We can drop "Scar Tissue". So do we move up every song that was behind it one position and put "Once in a Lifetime" at #500?

I would just insert it in "Scar Tissue's" spot.

BTW, It's Cliff Richard.....no s on the end.

Rock Lobster has hella more acclaim though. It was 147 on Rolling Stones top 500 songs. It's 31 on the Greatest New Wave DDD list and 109 on Greatest Rock songs of the 70s.