Korgscrew
Group: Super Admins
Posts: 3511
Joined: Dec. 1999 |
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Posted: April 12 2005, 15:33 |
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With that, you see the point of these lists!
Nobody's ever going to completely agree with them, but people love talking about them because of that, and the magazines (or TV/Radio stations) that run them get great publicity out of that (we'd not normally get people posting links to Rolling Stone here, for example - they don't usually run anything to do with Mike).
It's mostly a fashion thing, I feel. There was a list of the 50 greatest (or perhaps it was the most influential) British albums of all time run in one of the sunday papers in the UK a few years back. No Mike in there, but they did have Robert Wyatt's Rock Bottom, which they managed to talk about without mentioning Mike at all, despite the fact he played on it! I felt that many of their choices were probably there in an effort to be trendily eclectic, and I think Mike was left out that time because they don't see him as trendy (if they did, they'd have at least mentioned him in the Robert Wyatt write up, I'd have thought).
Same with classical guitarists - they're not trendy. Sadly, they fall between two stools, as the classical music world doesn't look upon them with a great deal of reverence either. John Williams gets talked about a reasonable amount, but how many people have heard of David Russell, for example? I rate him as one of the finest guitar players of any style, but I'll bet you'll never see his name mentioned even in a guitar magazine.
I knew someone once who based a lot of his record buying decisions on the classic album polls. He had a whole collection of magazines with them in, and was slowly working his way through them, ticking them off as he went (or at least, that's what I suspected). I don't know what I thought of that really, other than that we obviously had rather different approaches to music buying.
I have to say, when I see these top whatever polls, I tend to just shake my head and tell myself they're just there to sell magazines, then I go off and listen to my favourite artists, rather than the ones which are fashionable to like.
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. I fully agree though that this is what makes a guitarist great, that is why I rank both Neil Young (Cortez the Killer, mmm...) and Pete Townshend as great players, and my love of Gilmour and Howe is also due to those factors, and not a matter of technique. That's also why I would rank Mike above all other guitarists: I can name any one of a dozen solos that contain more emotion than many guitarists manage in a lifetime. 
