Bryan Caplan raises the question, in a post that offers a very good description of my view on the arts and modernity.
My list is Bach, Handel, Purcell, Scarlatti, Rameau, in that order. What about Vivaldi? Corelli? They are next in line for me. Monteverdi comes in second if you count him as Baroque (I don’t). What are your picks?
And to pursue Bryan’s question, who are the five best punk rock bands? The Clash, The Sex Pistols, early XTC, Iggy Pop, and maybe The Ramones. Honorable mention goes to The Minutemen, Wire, MC5, Rancid, The Dead Kennedys, and The New York Dolls. X seems overrated to me, and Patti Smith and Sonic Youth and Velvet Underground I don’t quite count as punk, though I like their work and think it is important. For that matter I wonder if Eugene Chadbourne might count.
I don’t agree with Bryan that the fifth best punk rock group is better than the fifth best Baroque composer, but I will say this: Baroque style dominated European music for many decades, whereas most of the best punk was from an unrespected niche genre produced in about a five-year time window.
Wow. The “punk rock” fad has swept into academia.
It reminds of the “folk music” of the ’60s.
It was so “important” and then largely forgotten over subsequent decades.
The clock is ticking.
If you’re truly committed to the punk ethos, shouldn’t the best punk band be somebody nobody has ever heard of?
You guys totally slept on Black Flag and Butthole Surfers. I’ve seen most of those bands you mentioned and none of them were quite as good as these two. Dead Kennedys kicked ass live.
Also: Circle Jerks, Flipper, Minor Threat, Bad Brains, Charged GBH and Corrosion of Conformity.
My top 5: 1. Butthole Surfers 2. Black Flag 3. Dead Kennedys 4. The Clash 5. Ramones
But let’s face it, in 2008 punk rock is tired. Baroque has much more staying power.
So baroque music dominated European music for a few decades in an era when it took two months to cross the Atlantic? I think that says more about the pace of musical innovation than it does about the superiority of the Baroque style. And I’ll take a Dvorak cello concerto over Handel any day.
You forgot Buxtehude and Telemann. Purcell is Baroque with a British accent. Monteverdi is early Baroque (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baroque_music)
Aaaarrrgghh, people! The Buzzcocks. The only punk band that sang love songs.
The Boomtown Rats’ first two albums were also very good, before Geldof started taking himself too seriously. When I was a teenage punk rocker circa 79 I liked The Stranglers a lot, but their music turned out to be not as timeless as I thought. I heard some old PIL on the radio the other day and it struck me as having gotten better with time.
BGC is correct on The Jam, although his opinions of The Clash strike me as bizarre and delusional. Popularity was irrelevant (although The Clash had more than most), and musicianship was irrelevant (although The Clash had more than most.) And they didn’t really become leftist darlings until Sandinista, by which time they had lost (to self-importance) much of the vitality that made their first three albums so stunning. I can still listen to their version of “Police and Thieves” for hours on end with boredom, having done so for over a quarter century.
D’oh! That should read “without boredom”.
In my opinion, the Plasmatics should have got (at least!!!) an honorable mention. And I’m not so enthusiastic about the Sex Pistols — unless, of course, the ranking reflects a convex combination of personal tastes and commercial success, visibility etc., in which case the Sex Pistols, if only because the second factor, must definitely be among the top 5. Then The Clash had some great songs but it is hard for me to reconcile their involvement with politics with my (probably teenager) idea of what punk was about.
As for the Baroque ranking I more or less agree with it but for me Bach is obviously number 1 and he is very very far from number 2.
Given conventional categorizations, The Clash is head-and-shoulders above the rest. However, I question whether you can really call the “punk”. They were really a pastiche of many styles. Anyone else on that list, at least so far as I’ve heard, are one trick ponies.
I think this transcendence of genre is a key factor The Clash’s greatness. It’s an attribute shared by many of the greats. Beethoven defies categorization; chronologically he was on the cusp between Classical and Romantic, but is really a genre unto himself. Another example from the modern era is Led Zeppelin, known as hard rock for their more popular stuff, but there’s no escaping the blues, Indian, and even rockabilly influences in some of their stuff.
Also, Purcell is WAY too high on your list. There are some beautiful pieces, sure, but I just can’t imagine putting him above, say, Corelli — nothing profound enough, nowhere near the body of works it would require.
Your list of punk rock bands does not contain a single scandinavian or southern European band? Kaaos, Raw Power, Mob 47 should all be considered. Not to mention the lack of any of the more exciting anarcho bands Crass, Conflict, Flux of The Pink Indians, etc.. Consider, as well how punk was reshaped in Japan with bands like Disclose, G.I.S.M., and others.
It seems like the commentors on this thread are willing to fall prey to the same flaws on their lists as the one’s your initial list contains. The debate is being focused on which band was more important the musical landscape as a whole, rather than considering what bands were most important in redefining punk at what Cappo would call “crucial times.”
My Top 5: 1.) The Ramones 2.)Black Flag 3.) Crass 4.) Man Is The Bastard 5.) Kaaos
Hey, if time is no object, why not the Kinks, who outpunked most of the punks? And what about Neil Young, who was like, er, a folk-punk?
“maybe The Ramones”?? The Ramones is the essence, the bread and butter of punk rock. I encourage you to watch “End of the Century” a documentary about The Ramones in which Joe Strummer and Glen Matlock say more or less that without The Ramones there wouldn’t be punk rock let alone The Clash. I don’t know what your standards are but if a band creates a completely new sound and attracts a world-wide wave of followers, it deserves to be in any quality-based top 5 list.
Bartman said it. The Buzzcocks’ place on the list is indisputable. PIL – also Big Audio Dynamite – were doing some sophisticated things that now look ahead of their time. But they are to my mind post-punk (a category in which I would also put Joy Division)
Also agree with ChrisW – seeing Bach on a “baroque” list even jarred me a little because I would never think of him in genre terms. He’s above categorisation.
You’re all deluded. Ranking music SEEMS like an easy thing to do. But if you paid fuller attention to the inner workings of the various aesthetic experiences these artists have stirred in you, you’d find vanishingly thin ground for comparison. Bach is not “better” than Handel for the same kind of reason moonlight is not “more beautiful” than sunlight. And you KNOW it!
Good Charlotte and Blink 182 are tied for first place.
I have a hard time ranking composers. I’d probably go for Bach first, but there’s Vivaldi’s operas… and his quirky instrument combinations make his work pretty unique. That’s a quality for its own sake, I guess. How do you compare that?
Alas! The dilemma of art criticism, vulgar and refined, in a nutshell. De gustibus non est disputandum.
Bach, Corelli, Handel, Buxtehude, Couperin. By the way, it is nice to see that Bach is the hands down favorite.
Anyway, to answer the question at hand, the tendency to form a “canon” (in classical music or in pop music) years after the genre was at its peak causes us to believe that the best in a genre were truly extraordinary and that the rest were miles below in quality, whereas at the time audiences may have believed they were a lot closer together. Basically, I think the percentage difference in quality between my favorite Baroque composer and my fifth-favorite one would probably be about the same as the percentage difference between my first- and fifth-favorite punk bands (assuming I took the time to listen to many examples of each deep into their catalogues to assure my choices were reasonable).
The other obvious point is that as it gets easier and easier to write music (due to wider availability of music lessons, more accessible recording and distribution technology, more different genres available to choose from, and a record industry that didn’t exist in the Baroque and is much bigger now than it was in the 50s or 60s), the average quality of music ought to go down because less- and less- capable musicians are getting to make music. However, that doesn’t mean that the best musicians are going to get any worse.
Re: Is Monteverdi Baroque?
Easy answer: Not to begin with, but in mid career he (along with some other guys) invented Baroque.
I’m obviously one of the lame late posters who bring things down a notch, but I have a strong affinity for the stylings of Bach and Social Distortion (so they’d be first on my two lists). I only dabble in both genres, but I appreciate the mechanical intricacies of Bach (especially the Cello Suites), and White Light, White Heat, White Trash is the most glum and angry albums I own (that somehow manages to not come off too much like a soap opera). Then again, I’m not initiated. I think that punk, more than Baroque music is more reliant on a personal understanding of the social and musical zeitgeist, so I might never completely break into “real” punk music of the 70′s because I wasn’t there. Then again, I do like Iggy Pop.
Yep, must have Black Flag. I’d add (again) Bad Brains. Enjoyed the BH Surfers, not so much the Misfits. And then there was John Belushi’s favorite band, Fear. I listened to them at least as much as to the Ramones. And the Sex Pistols have to be on the list.
Don’t know if you can include Husker Du, I wasn’t a fan, but I know people who were. (I don’t think I have to be a fan to include someone in a list of greats). Minor Threat? Punk? I guess. But if so, then you might be inclined to include Suicidal Tendencies and Motorhead. And I don’t think we’re really talkin’ punk anymore. Speed metal, perhaps. You can’t tune and play and instrument and play punk.
Who cares about Baroque? There’s no staying power there.
Pachelbel anyone? Seems five just isn’t enough.
I would have to go with Vivaldi right after Handel and 86 Purcell.
Purcell (or works attributed to Purcell) and Pachelbel probably get the most performances at society weddings, possibly making their music compare to the Baroque canon something like the Big Mac compares to fine dining.
Too bad PDQ Bach didn’t make the list…
F.X.Thuri – the last living baroque composer
(He is living and writes lovely baroque music, I like his oboe concerto much more then the Vivaldi’s)
John Dowland
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S1ZiEGhap4Q
Julian Bream’s Bream Plays Dowland (Westminister, I think) in the 50s set me off to learn the lute.
Great for picking up babes, by the way.
Those of you mentioning Buxtehude as the one the Top 5 Baroque composers are surely erudite but that ranking is absolutely ridiculous. He’s a middle-level composer who happened to be admired by Bach. I also think Rameau doesn’t belong on that list.
The one missing name in this list-making is Schutz. With Lully and Monteverdi, the best 17th-century composer. Check out the Musikalische Exequien. Wonderful, moving work.
Gang of Four, if they still qualify as punk, deserves a mention for sure. While they might more strictly be considered “post-punk,” they incorporate funk in the same way that Clash incorporate reggae, so I’d argue that they’re fair game. I’d certainly put them above The Clash, who strike me primarily as a pop band (as ChrisW brought up).
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Beroque Top 5:
Händel
Bach
Gilles
Albinoni
Corelli
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My top 5 Baroque composers that listen to constantly, in order of affection:
1. Handel
2. Vivaldi
3. W. F. Bach
4. Lully
5. Telemann
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