![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
Songs from North of the 49th Parallel
Jan. 28th, 2009 10:31 amInteresting contest/survey thingy that CBC's Radio 2 ran. Here's the results of the 49 songs that their listeners determined were the best and most representative of Canada's music scene.
49 Songs from North of the 49th Parallel
This list saddens me for a few reasons.
1) As has been pointed out in the comments on CBC's site, why is this Obama's playlist? Why does Obama need to be educated about his neighbour to the North? He hasn't shown that he is ignorant of our existence or our longstanding relationship like his predecessor did. Why can't we make a list just for us?
2) Why is everything on this list so damn old????? I'm not saying there's anything inherently wrong with older tunes, and I do believe we should respect our musical heritage, but I believe certain decades are well over-represented at the expense of others. As far as I can tell, there is only ONE song on that list from the current decade. Is our current music scene so bereft of talent that only ONE song from the last decade is worth highlighting??!!??? And yes, I am aware that the demographic of the radio station in question probably played a large part in why most of the songs selected were released before I was born.
3) I don't think on a list that short that an artist should be recognized more than once. Six artists make the list for two songs. That's six fewer artists that could have been recognized. One artist makes the list 3 times if you consider that KD Lang's Halleluja is really just a cover of another Leonard Cohen tune (he made the list twice already). It's a great cover, but I still feels that it reflects Leonard's talents a bit more than KD's. As an editor, I would have said each artist can only be represented by the song that gets the most votes, other songs by that same artist that would have made the top 49 get disqualified in favour of displaying more diversity. And I don't think that would have been unfair at all because I'm reasonably sure the results were twiddled a bit anyway. If there wasn't some vote manipulation the french songs wouldn't have likely made the list. I'm saying that because it's not like there are that many fewer good french songs, but with only 24% of the population, there are a lot fewer french voters to support them. So if people were voting on 100 good english songs and 100 good french songs, the vote split would have resulted in no (or very few) french songs making the cut on a straight vote count, and in the list that was published, 20% of the songs were french. Seems fishy to me.
What do you think of the list?
What would your personal list look like?
If you were to make a list, would you include artists that "deserve recognition" even if it's not something you'd put on your ipod or would you just highlight the artists that you actually like to listen to?
Would you make an attempt to recognize a wide range of release dates?
Would you include an artist more than once if you felt they had more than one great song?
49 Songs from North of the 49th Parallel
This list saddens me for a few reasons.
1) As has been pointed out in the comments on CBC's site, why is this Obama's playlist? Why does Obama need to be educated about his neighbour to the North? He hasn't shown that he is ignorant of our existence or our longstanding relationship like his predecessor did. Why can't we make a list just for us?
2) Why is everything on this list so damn old????? I'm not saying there's anything inherently wrong with older tunes, and I do believe we should respect our musical heritage, but I believe certain decades are well over-represented at the expense of others. As far as I can tell, there is only ONE song on that list from the current decade. Is our current music scene so bereft of talent that only ONE song from the last decade is worth highlighting??!!??? And yes, I am aware that the demographic of the radio station in question probably played a large part in why most of the songs selected were released before I was born.
3) I don't think on a list that short that an artist should be recognized more than once. Six artists make the list for two songs. That's six fewer artists that could have been recognized. One artist makes the list 3 times if you consider that KD Lang's Halleluja is really just a cover of another Leonard Cohen tune (he made the list twice already). It's a great cover, but I still feels that it reflects Leonard's talents a bit more than KD's. As an editor, I would have said each artist can only be represented by the song that gets the most votes, other songs by that same artist that would have made the top 49 get disqualified in favour of displaying more diversity. And I don't think that would have been unfair at all because I'm reasonably sure the results were twiddled a bit anyway. If there wasn't some vote manipulation the french songs wouldn't have likely made the list. I'm saying that because it's not like there are that many fewer good french songs, but with only 24% of the population, there are a lot fewer french voters to support them. So if people were voting on 100 good english songs and 100 good french songs, the vote split would have resulted in no (or very few) french songs making the cut on a straight vote count, and in the list that was published, 20% of the songs were french. Seems fishy to me.
What do you think of the list?
What would your personal list look like?
If you were to make a list, would you include artists that "deserve recognition" even if it's not something you'd put on your ipod or would you just highlight the artists that you actually like to listen to?
Would you make an attempt to recognize a wide range of release dates?
Would you include an artist more than once if you felt they had more than one great song?
