Here's the WNEW-FM top 1,027 rock songs of all time from 1987. Listener voted supposedly.

http://www.ilxor.com/ILX/ThreadSelected ... adid=79059

This was perhaps the top FM Rock station of all time. There's not one Bob Marley song on their top 1,027 songs of all time.

They do have "Don't Look Back" by Peter Tosh, but of course that record is a duet with Mick Jagger.

What's Going On at # 25 Bruce? That ranking alone tells me that this list is more than a tad fucked up. Pet Sounds # 77? Where's Songs In The Key Of Life? Time for the barf bag. If I were Marley, I wouldn't want to be on that bullshit list! I'm still not convinced either way on Marley and Reggae. It's a REAL close call.

there is also no Little Richard, The Drifters, Impressions, James Brown, Sam Cooke... i could go on and on.

Here's my ballot for this round

1. Muddy Waters
2. Carl Perkins
3. Pink Floyd
4. Roy Orbison
5. Jackie Wilson
6. Grateful Dead
7. Drifters
8. Lead Belly
9. Hank Williams
10. David Bowie

Considered for this ballot: Bob Marley, Woody Guthrie, Pete Seeger, The Byrds, Johnny Cash, Parliament-Funkadelic, The Kinks, Queen, The Yardbirds, Grandmaster Flash & The Furious Five, Howlin' Wolf

Looks like they violated their own rule here. "No live albums?" (It's also a *very* quirky list.) The idea that Harry Belafonte is a rock artist is ludicrous, even if I don't add "...but Bob Marley isn't."

I agree with you on this point.
I never thought reggae was part of rock, mainly because reggae never appealed to me aside from the crossover records that were hits here.
Some of these arguments make a lot of sense, though. There's no "bright line" that divides them.

Which shows that on the biggest rock station probably in history, people had a different idea of what rock is than we do here. I knew lots of people who insisted that James Brown was not rock.

Here in DDD, Rock is extremely widespread, but I do not see any problem with that. I think these lists of Rock stations is based more on Hard Rock, and not in sub-genre - r&b, soul, pop, etc ... - as we do here.

The WNEW-FM list was not made up of mainly hard rock. There was tons of softer things on there.

But there is Fats Domino, Chuck Berry, Buddy Holly, the Temptations, Eddie Cochran, Elvis, Jerry Lee Lewis, Jackie Wilson, Sam & Dave, Gary US Bonds, Bill Haley, Gene Vincent, Supremes, Booket T & The MG's, Aretha Franklin and Otis Redding.........BUT NO BOB MARLEY.

Yeah, I figured the list. But even so, r&b and other genres are placed as the background. Not that this is wrong, is just the style of radio and its listeners.

Reggae was not seen as part of rock, at least not then. I was 30 years old in 1987, and nobody then was claiming that reggae was part of rock. That's a revisionist thing. Some people liked reggae, and some rock artists were influenced by reggae, but that did not make reggae part of rock anymore than Ravi Shankar was part of rock because he influenced the Beatles.

so? its a radio station with a format and a target demographic. that's all. the fact that they had Jerry Lee Lewis but no Little Richard should tell you what you need to know about its demographic.

in indy, the most popular rock radio station plays basically only hard rock, southern rock and stadium rock, and only basically between the late 60s to the late 70s. i suppose i should use that as evidence that Elvis is not rock too, right?

that station, by the late 80s, according to the wonderful research tool i have here called the internet, was an album rock station anyway. its job was to promote classic rock. not soul, r&b, 50s singles, pop, reggae, etc. why should we pay ANY attention to it?

But like pave said, there's also no James Brown, Little Richard, Drifters, Gladys Knight, Sam Cooke, so I don't know what the lack of Bob Marley proves.