ILM POLLS THE 20TH CENTURY'S BEST TRACKS ››› YOUR RESULTS THREAD ‹‹‹

feel real alienated by this mad Kraftwerk love. Three songs?? Autobahn?

good to great songs by Prince, The Smiths, My Bloody Valentine and New Order but nothing to match that Mott-VU-Biggie-Dylan-Nirvana-Cameo-Creedence-Toots run.

quite an anticlimactic finish for me actually

With you there. Three Kraftwerk songs is excessive. My own list would feature exactly zero.

YMO >>>>>>>>>>> Kraftwerk

xp
mine did include exactly that much

forgot too mention that the Zep track is also,obviously, good

it might also be the closest blues relative to feature on the list. really hope that's not the case

I really hope something by Louis Armstrong places.

― falkor johnson (askance johnson), Tuesday, November 30, 2010 10:43 PM (1 minute ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

no chance as there were about 10 noms

am personally finding this list relatively boring but then I was always going to :D

'rumble' upthread was pure blues ffs

also much better than led zep haha

i voted for one of them cos to ignore him would be daft but it would have been better if there had been just one nomination

fwiw, I think the 99-76 segment of the list is the least diverse/interesting part of the results. Fun to be had tomorrow!

I love Kraftwerk but only voted for Autobahn. Personally, I think every artist that gets three in the top 125 is overrepresented.

it might also be the closest blues relative to feature on the list. really hope that's not the case

There's Voodoo Child too obv.

well I am pretty stoked then JF! :)

this happens every time, really - there's a slightly mundane, overtly conventional-canonical stretch and then shit starts kicking off

Ah, glad you said that Johnny, as I found 99-76 fairly boring myself.

Do agree that three tracks in a top 125 is too much, but would rather have three Kraftwerk songs than three Beatles ones.

Only ones I voted for in the last batch was Toots and Iggy.

there will be way more than three beatles songs...

'rumble' upthread was pure blues ffs
― rmad and dangerous (acoleuthic), Tuesday, November 30, 2010 10:50 PM

Love "Rumble" as I stated earlier. But if it remains the closest thing to both blues and rock and roll to make it I'll die a little inside.

And yes, I can see Johnny Cash is there which is giving me dark ideas about country too.

Ignore the elitist ramblin'. Democracy is to blame

I'm beginning to suspect that there's a lot of songs I assumed would make it that won't and that I'm going to be pissed. Oh well, only time will tell!

I was only alive for 11 years in this century and had just about got to know my sisters copies of life after death and 12 play. After another 10 years I have made it a lot further but fuck off have I had enough time to go through the 78s from the 20s

you don't have time for music?

looks like a great list to me so far. only grumble i have is directed at ILX's sometimes constricted penchant for stylish/atmospheric guitar & electronic pop from the mid 70s through early 90s (especially when it can be said to have influenced certain contemporary indie & dance genres), but that tendency has only been pronounced in the last few entries. and i went for a few of those sounds myself, so it's hard to get too worked up about it.

I have a theory that lots of people had a bunch of early 20th century stuff in their long lists but a lot of it eventually got cut in favor of music they have more emotional connections to (ie, stuff that they experienced first hand when it was released). I have maintained from before the voting began that this poll would be dominated by the 70s and 80s.

Personally, only a small handful of stuff before the 60s made it into my final ballot and I don't think they were very "consensus" votes at that.

possible. I didn't experience any of these tracks when they were recorded so I constructed and hoped for a more balanced list.

xpost:

i get that, but i think it has more to do with youth and inexperience than distance from the material. i mean, i'm older than most ILXors, i think, and i still only put like 10 pre-50s songs on my ballot. otoh, there's lots of 50s-60s stuff on there, and that's well before my time. to be honest, i didn't start paying serious attention to music until the late 70s.

thing is, when i was in my 20s, i'm sure my ballot would have been geared much more strongly towards the music of that moment, my moment, along with its then-recent precedents. for one thing, i just didn't know much (pre-internet era, remember, when broad expertise came at a premium). for another, my passions, biases and convictions about the arts, for all their youthful ignorance, burned very brightly. i think this is true for many young people, especially those who care strongly about music. they may not know everything, but they know what they care about, and they're quite willing to throw down for it.

as i've gotten older, i've realized that a great deal of my favorite music actually predates my own life, sometimes by quite a long time, and it's not bound by any particular style or tradition. in concert with this, i've become much less committed to the aesthetic ideologies and genre affiliations that once so clearly defined my tastes. certain nostalgic predilections do express themselves, but i try not to let them run rampant.

FFS no more Kraftwerk, please!!

Kraftwerk, Group Of The Century

^I actually agree with this, sort of.

@Johnny Fever - I just sent you an email, not sure whether you check that address so I'm posting a heads-up here.

"...i still only put like 10 pre-50s songs on my ballot"

at most (quoting myself there). do wish i'd saved it, if only to square my story with reality.

i can actually think of another kraftwerk track that's begging to make the top 75. i think about four tracks is the right kind of representation for such a strong act with so much high quality material.

But at the expense of other artists missing out completely?

@contenderizer: I can send you your ballot if you want.

charlie h is right. there probably aren't more than 25 groups or artists who've made worthwhile music in the 20th century anyway.

ffs. and YES, i would love you to all kinds of horrible death if you'd send me my ballot, seandalai! thanks.

20th century is my favorite century for music :(

12th century for me

@contenderizer: I sent it to your ILX webmail thing.

I love plainchant xp

Ye Cure's best track iirc

Thanks, seandalai.

Okay y'all, there was a slight tabulation mistake that would shift some results around slightly, but not change what's in and what's out of the top 125 at all. So you shouldn't be seeing "Search and Destroy" yet, as it's actually #73. I hope you can live with this grievous error, ILM. seandalai and me are incredibly sorry!! ;)

'Search & Destroy' got shafted by errors in the metal poll too - something like no.11 when it should've been top 5

All my fault.

xp - ha!

Ye Cure's best track iirc

ha!

so is the reshuffling of "search and destroy" the only signficant change to what we've already seen? did a bunch more kraftwerk songs get in or something?

That's it.

i can think of a few bands who i would be happy to see feature quite heavily - talking heads is definitely one along with kraftwerk, and from what i can tell there's going to be plenty more talking heads featured in this poll. i'm much more interested in seeing the best songs represented from the truly great artists of the century than scratching my head at arbitrary one-offs from second-tier types.

xps The Curé

Full disclosure: Cortez the Killer was 110 instead of 108, Linus and Lucy was 92 instead of joint 91, Ceremony was joint with When the Levee Breaks instead of just ahead of it.

prediction for #1: sumthing beetles

hey, thanks for sending me my ballot, seandalai. looking it over, i'm mortified to note that only about a third of my votes are pre-1970, and only 8 are pre-1950. the remainder, the vast majority are from the last three decades of the 20th century, flatly contradicting any claim that i've moved beyond the shallow passions of my youth. i suppose if i'd given myself less than half an our to work out my ballot on the last day of voting, i might have pushed myself out of that comfort zone, but i dunno. the earlier, abandoned version of my ballot wasn't much more catholic, and i spend several days pecking at it.