In a post from March this year, I looked at artists discarded from Rolling Stone’s 2020 revision of its 500 Greatest Albums of All Time list (originally published in 2003) to see how many of its discarded artists might have been motivated by the discarded artists belonging to genres associated with Republican-voting poor whites. I found that whilst not all of the discarded artists belonged to genres associated to varying degrees with Republican-voting poor whites, there were about a dozen of fifty-two discarded artists (slightly fewer than one-quarter) where this association may have been the decisive factor in their being omitted.
When I first looked at the updated songs list from about two months ago, I failed to compare with the earlier issue, although Rolling Stone did say that there had been large revisions vis-à-vis the 2012 and 2004 lists. However, recently I did look at the list and attempted to note, as I did previously with the albums, which artists had been entirely excluded this year who were present in 2004 and 2012.
Big Joe Turner |
Early blues artist |
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B.B. King |
Early black pop artist |
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The Penguins |
Early black pop artist |
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The Platters |
Early black pop artist |
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Carl Perkins |
Early white rocker |
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The Del-Vikings |
Early black pop artist |
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The Dells |
Early black pop artist |
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LaVern Baker |
Early soul artist |
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Jackie Wilson |
Early soul artist |
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Frankie Lymon and the Teenagers |
Early black pop artist |
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The Chantels |
Early black pop artist |
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Archie Bell and the Drells |
Early soul artist |
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The Coasters |
Early soul artist |
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Ritchie Valens |
Early Latino rocker |
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Jerry Butler and the Impressions |
Early soul artist |
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Bobby Darin |
Pop/rock |
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Gene Vincent and His Blue Caps |
Early white rocker |
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Bill Haley and His Comets |
Early white rocker |
It is possible that like Elvis Presley his assocation with Republican-voting poor whites has affected his repuation amongst Rolling Stone and big-city Millennial critics |
Dion (DiMucci) |
Early white rocker |
Same as for Bill Haley. Although his modern reputation is better (The Road I’m On was on David Keenan’s The Best Albums Ever...Honest), however, his history producing Christian albums and status as practicing Catholic may make Dion the more likely target |
Barrett Strong |
Early black pop artist |
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The Dixie Cups |
Early black pop artist |
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Chubby Checker |
Early black pop artist |
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Aaron Neville |
Early black pop artist |
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The Spencer Davis Group |
Pop/rock |
This deletion also encompasses Traffic and solo Steve Winwood, neither of whom had songs on the original Rolling Stone list |
Little Eva |
Early black pop artist |
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Solomon Burke |
Early soul artist |
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Percy Sledge |
Soul/R’n’b |
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The Young Rascals |
Pop/rock |
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The Lovin’ Spoonful |
Pop/rock |
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The Troggs |
Garage rock/protopunk |
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? and the Mysterians |
Garage rock/protopunk |
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Love |
College/hippie music |
Although they had some association with hard rock and protopunk, the fact that mainman Arthur Lee was black would make them an unlikely target for Rolling Stone and big-city Millennial critics |
Big Brother and the Holding Company |
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Janis Joplin |
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Eric Clapton |
Hard rock Pop/rock |
By genre a possible target for Rolling Stone and big-city Millennial critics, although less so for Clapton’s post-Cream work |
Cream |
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Deep Purple |
Hard rock |
By genre a likely target for Rolling Stone and big-city Millennial crictics |
Steppenwolf |
Hard rock Heartland rock |
By genre a likely target for Rolling Stone and big-city Millennial crictics |
Labelle |
Soul/R’n’b |
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The Carpenters |
Pop/rock |
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The Five Stairsteps |
Soul/R’n’b |
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Norman Greenbaum |
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By Christian faith a likely target for Rolling Stone and big-city Millennial critics |
Lynyrd Skynyrd |
Hard rock Heartland rock |
By genre a likely target for Rolling Stone and big-city Millennial crictics |
Jackson Browne |
Singer/songwriter |
A possible target as a standard white rocker, but political sentiments in 1980s make this less likely |
The Jam |
College/hippie music |
This classification is not applicable outside the United States — the Jam were very much as mass-audience band in Europe |
Foreigner |
Hard rock Pop/rock |
By genre a possible target for Rolling Stone and big-city Millennial critics, but too linked to soft rock to not exclude that they were excluded merely as an older pop band |
John Cougar Mellencamp |
Heartland rock |
By genre a possible target for Rolling Stone and big-city Millennial critics |
Salt-n-Pepa |
Rap |
A most surprising omission given that they were one of the first female rappers. |
The Verve |
College/hippie music |
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R. Kelly |
Soul/R’n’b |
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Franz Ferdinand |
College/hippie music |
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In contrast to the albums, the song discards include many artists who might be expected to be “politically correct” from a Rolling Stone perspective, inasmuch as twenty-four of the forty-nine omitted artists (related artists counted as one) were black. However, all but five of these black artists predate the flowering of soul, funk and ultimately rap music upon which large portions of modern Rolling Stone canons have been based.
Early black pop artists, who date from a time before blacks were able to be politically active — although one could also say that with the power of Europe’s progressive working classes political conditions in the 1950s were much more favorable to advancements by black Americans than conditions since Europe’s deindustrialisation in the 1970s and 1980s — were simply not supportive of the left-wing politics with which Rolling Stone has been associated since its formation. From this fact, one could argue that Rolling Stone’s song discards are actually not that much less, or even no less, political than their album discards. Before the 1966 elections, political activism in black music was largely confined to radical forms of jazz and was not even widespread there — an example from as early as 1960 being We Insist! Max Roach’s Freedom Now Suite by drummer and composer Max Roach. Even We Insist! is not nearly so radical as bands like Public Enemy and Rage Against the Machine would become in later generations. The 1950s and 1960s Civil Rights Movement was possible because the ruling classes in the US feared they would be subject to apartheid-type sanctions otherwise. Consequently, the movement was remarkably peaceful compared to virtually any other other social movement in modern history. However, Ward Churchill demonstrated in his 2006 On the Justice of Roosting Chickens: Reflections on the Consequences of U.S. Imperial Arrogance and Criminality that this peacefulness severely limited the long-term effectiveness of the Civil Rights movement and made it extremely easy for the US ruling class to reverse the improvements in life for black Americans once threats diminished — which Churchill and others show to have occurred for most black Americans since 1980.
For these reasons, it is by no means certain that the song discards of Rolling Stone are actually less political than their earlier album discards.