Default Set

So I've been asking all my friends and family to give me their Top 10 list of music acts they love. These are like deserted island picks. Not who my friends listen to the most often right now or over all time or who they've seen play live the most. Just their favorites. 

I got this idea from Lucy O'Brien and her book She Bop. She did the same query in the 1990s but with men only and found that none of them had women included in their lists. Only one of her respondents, an African American man, included two women on his list. O'Brien suggested this was vaguely cultural. 

First off, people complained that coming up with ten was hard. Then after a time, they complained that keeping the list to ten was hard. Talking it over with them, there are these "bubbling under" lists that developed, their "almost top 10s" that were interesting in themselves. As if to say, "I like these artists or bands, just not top-10 like them." 

Okay so my brother does marketing surveys and I have to add this disclaimer: my sample was miserably small. It's not "statistically significant." But I'm going to pretend it is. 

I'm not going to divulge everyone lists (except mine) but I have a few things to say about these small-sample results.

Also, the effort made us all think about why we like what we like and why certain acts make the top slots and why others didn't quite make it. 

First of all, the results weren't great for inclusion. Only four people had five or more women in their lists (and one of those was me but I knew the rules so I shouldn't count). The other three people did happen to be gay (two men and one woman) but that wasn't assured. Other friends (who also happened to be gay) did not include women, either gay artists or pop divas as you might predictably be imagining. It wasn't any more probable. And likely this is because music preference is unrelated to sexual preference. Women weren't more likely to score high either. Two of the women scored one and zero and in this case, genre was the culprit: heavy metal. There are great female artists in all categories now, except maybe for that one. I'm asking some follow-up questions on that.

So gay men don't necessarily pick divas. Women didn't auto-default to women and men didn't auto-default to having no women. The majority, a mix of both men and women regardless of sexual preference, had a range of 3-4. Which is an improvement surely from the 1990s. But still kind of low.

Another interesting thing was that doing any list-making like this is just a snapshot in time. People did tend to want to make tweaks hours and days later. This is a moving target. But from my family and close friends I could see that childhood favorites do matter. They tend to stick around.

One rule was that if you liked an artist who traveled through multiple entities (like the Beatles, Wings and Paul McCartney), you had to list them separately. So I lost two spots this way to Cher. Because I was originally a fan of Sonny & Cher and my fandom still exists there for somewhat sentimental, kitschy and tenacious reasons.

So here was my list. And since this is the second post in Music Blog, it's a good time to publish it.  

There was no requirement that the lists be ranked, but some people chose to do that. I did not rank mine, although I will say the top 4 are artists are perennially the top 4 and never change. And the bottom 6 tend to change in and out. I also noted where acts were swapped in and out and what the bubbling-under names look like.

1. Cher
2. Barry Manilow
3. John Waite
4. Sonny & Cher
5. Ben Folds
6. Roberta Flack
7. Sara Barielles (I completely forgot about her until I saw her on my brother Randy's list. Willie got the boot in this slot.)
8. Paloma Faith
9. Patti Labelle
10. Amy Grant  

I got 6/10. Curiously, I have zero band entities in my list. Only me and one other person had zero bands.

This was bubbling under list: Joni Mitchell, Patty Griffin, Billy Joel, Dolly Parton, Tom Jones, Willie Nelson

There's a lot for me to unpack here but let's start with generalities. Some people I just love the whole package (Dolly Parton), some I will always look forward to seeing live (Tom Jones, Willie Nelson), some I have an attachment more to their songwriting (Joni Mitchell, Patty Griffin). Some were people I used to be into but have kind of dropped out off (Billy Joel, but more on him in a minute). 

There are some people I don't like everything they do but I will always be interested in every new thing they do (Ben Folds, Palmoma Faith). Some stun me when I see them perform (Ben Folds, Patti Labelle). Some are relatively new exploratory favorites (Roberta Flack). Some have childhood attachments (Sonny & Cher, Barry Manilow). And some are just oddball choices. Like I am interested in Amy Grant but I don't self-identify as Christian. But I have found a dearth of other artists who so consistently sing around morality and basic humanity and I continue to be interested in what she is saying around that.

Then I had to consider why Billy Joel fell off the list and if I could in any way rationalize what everyone had in common who was still on the list. I love to categorize things but I don't think music taste is really all that reasonable. Which is why nobody is ever convincing anyone else of much despite all the fisticuffs. I am never going to love what my brothers listen to and they are I'm sure at this very moment sneering at my insistence on still being a Cher and Barry Manilow fan.  

Then there's my top three who have nothing in common. Well, except they all have inimitable voices and have shilled at some point for Dr. Pepper. It's a very odd triple. And for my one-genre friends I can only say you can like things that are different but exceptionally excellent.  

The spectacular voice thing is key to the Billy Joel problem. He as done a lot with the voice he has and it's a very professional voice. Nothing to disparage. But it's not some God-given extraordinary instrument. That said, I have started listening to the Billy Joel channel on Sirius again and I have to say I could easily watch a whole show of Billy Joel just impersonating his favorite people and telling us why he likes them. 

So what I tend to like I think has to do with this quality of extraordinary-ness in a voice that the artist has then done something interesting with. Billy Joel does interesting things but he's lacking the special-ness of voice.

On the other hand, you can also have an amazing voice and have not done anything (I find) particularly interesting with it. 

Celine Dion is a good example...for me personally...keep your hackles down! Once in a while I will come across a Celine Dion performance I love but as a whole I'm not a fan of the material and production. Coming home from a road trip last week, her song "It's All Coming Back to Me" came up on streaming and I stayed to listen to it. I had forgotten how all-over-the-place Jim Steinman songs could be and what a hot mess this one was. 

It all came back... 

(Why are there all these divas in videos lovingly gazing at broken pictures in frames? Above at 1:31 and see this one at 3:03.) 

There have been probably literally hundreds of Cher impersonators at this point who have tried their very best to capture all of Cher's vocal tics and her deep, rich timbre but nary a one has captured the quality of that unique voice. A friend of mine once called it a set of possibly alien vocal chords. She has a smokey, syrupy sound with the ability for big, belting volume. Some have noted its androgynous, masculine quality. 

And the particular voice coming out of a svelte woman in a sequined gown and huge Bob Mackie headdress? Well, that is a contrast that is very interesting to me. Combine that with story songs like "Gypsies, Tramps and Thieves" and it's a delight.

And I even like the package of musicians she puts together and the blase distance with which she emotes. Then there are Sonny's unique songs and all the TV performances. So there's plenty of material there to be accomplished by this incomparable voice.   

Barry Manilow, an artist I have spent a lot of time in my life defending without regret, is another interesting example for completely different reasons. I only feel he did interesting material during a set period between 1973 and the late 1980s. Back then he was pushing his voice and working harder with it. He was sweating it out in songs like "Weekend in New England" for example.

Right when he went into the closet, so to speak, he embarked on his whole big Showman shtick, one that I found less interesting because we lost all those sweaty feats of vocal control. 

But I still hold pretty firm on the following points: 

You might not like Barry Manilow's "cheesy" easy listening fare (I do and will always defend cheese) but I suspect what triggers most of the disparaging of him has to do with his effeminacy (and later his sexuality and I will, likewise, always defend both effeminacy and LGBTQ+). 

Add to that the fact that he is an awkward and uncomfortable performer. Which is like a blasphemy in the face of performing rule #1: you must look comfortable in your own skin up there. 

I think there's too much noise around the basic noise here. Strip away all of that shit and what you have is a very beautiful, smooth and warm voice. He has been compared, very accurately I think, to the voice of Karen Carpenter (herself maligned for many years around irrelevant ideas regarding hip material) for having all the same qualities.

John Waite's voice is also entirely of its own kind. And if Cher and Manilow can be inconsistent in output, there is no such thing as a bad John Waite record. He is also, interestingly, the only hard rock voice on my list. Not a category I dislike but not one I collect either. 

But his is an extraordinary voice, like the others. It's often described as having a raspy edge. But there's some warmth in there too, albeit in a different register.

I see words like power and force also used to describe his voice and those words are very unsatisfying. I don't like the word power here with all its connotations of overpower. Cher gets assigned this word too because she's, well, loud. Snuff Garrett famously said her voice could "cut through a cement orchestra." But power and warmth are often pitted against each other. Is something less powerful for warmth? Is coldness a strength? No.

Besides, Cher can go quiet. John Waite can pull back on the bluesy wail. What are the words for this? And Barry Manilow can Big Boom! (Oy vay.) Power is a stupid word. And here is where it gets touchy because (and I think my one-genre rock-music fans will back me up here), you can't have Barry Manilow and John Waite in the same sentence without words like effeminacy and virility coming into it. And frankly...I'm so fucking sick of it. Because all that cultural flotsam has what's gotten us here where we are today, to this shitbox Manosphere nightmare. And No. Thank. You. 

And here's another thing: these three singers, starting with an extraordinary base instrument, have all added little flourishes to it (consciously or unconsciously). Cher has the Elvis thing. Barry has occasional blips of Brooklyn Yiddish (at least in some of those songs from the first decade). John Waite has vocal punctuations of rock-star posing.

Anyway, there are plenty of mysteries in everyone's lists, too. For example, I love R&B but there are only two R&B artists on my list and none of them men (or even groups). I'm having a lot of fun right now with my indie music feed but no one bubbled up there. I should have added Cloud Cult but didn't. 

Shoulda woulda coulda. 

Anyway, I encourage you to investigate your own top ten and its compositions.  

The Dr. Pepper Playlist 

I'll close with a Dr. Pepper Playlist. I don't even like Dr. Pepper (or Mr. Pibb or any soda product with an honorific in its moniker) just on principle. It obviously takes itself too seriously. 

;-)

John Waite and The Babys shillin':

 

Barry Manilow singing in a commercial for a jingle he wrote...

 ...and then later shillin' something punny.

 

Cher consistently promotes Dr. Pepper (without charge) in her daily life and show banter. Some fans took it upon themselves to put together a tribute of such moments: