Rolling Stone’s song discards – less political than the albums?

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
B.B. King	Early black pop artist
The Penguins	Early black pop artist
The Platters	Early black pop artist
Carl Perkins	Early white rocker
The Del-Vikings	Early black pop artist
The Dells	Early black pop artist
LaVern Baker	Early soul artist
Jackie Wilson	Early soul artist
Frankie Lymon and the Teenagers	Early black pop artist
The Chantels	Early black pop artist
Archie Bell and the Drells	Early soul artist
The Coasters	Early soul artist
Ritchie Valens	Early Latino rocker
Jerry Butler and the Impressions	Early soul artist
Bobby Darin	Pop/rock
Gene Vincent and His Blue Caps	Early white rocker
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
The Dixie Cups	Early black pop artist
Chubby Checker	Early black pop artist
Aaron Neville	Early black pop artist
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
Solomon Burke	Early soul artist
Percy Sledge	Soul/R’n’b
The Young Rascals	Pop/rock
The Lovin’ Spoonful	Pop/rock
The Troggs	Garage rock/protopunk
? and the Mysterians	Garage rock/protopunk
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
Janis Joplin
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
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
The Carpenters	Pop/rock
The Five Stairsteps	Soul/R’n’b
Norman Greenbaum		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
R. Kelly	Soul/R’n’b
Franz Ferdinand	College/hippie music

 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.