Rethinking the Canon

Never one for vacuous literary indulgence into popular culture from publications like Star and People, I prefer to shamelessly invest my time into not so popular culture. Yes I will unashamedly admit that I regularly read NME, and excitedly follow NME's impressive array of unimportant updates on the watered down subversion of British "middle ground" music culture. For example, a few months ago NME linked me to a very important video featuring the La's Lee Mavers and the ever news worthy Pete Doherty jamming together. And by jamming I mean conspicuously noodling around with guitars in the dark basking in probably deserved importance but bloated relevance. Lee also blows into a harmonica and Pete's son screams into the camera a few times. Honestly magical for me.

http://www.nme.com/news/pete-doherty/39141

Today, however, as I was doing my daily look over of nme.com a particular article stirred me from my blissful mental autopilot and offended even MY faux and admittedly relativist hipster sensibilities.

NME reports that "Oasis' Noel Gallagher reveals his Top 10 bands".

While the topic of the article itself is questionable, I doubt too many personally care what Noel Gallagher considers to be the top 10 bands, the particular content on Noel Gallaghers list is what caused me to turn off my Captain Beefheart and think.(YEESH!)

Noel Gallagher reveals that this particular list is limited by a few criteria.

a) No solo artists allowed.
b) No female artists allowed.
c) No collectives allowed

Of course using such limiting definitions to define what the greatest bands of all time were Noel was able to justify his predictable and 60's/70's nostalgic centric list.

1: The Beatles
2: The Rolling Stones
3: The Who
4: Sex Pistols
5: The Kinks
6: The La's
7: Pink Floyd
8: The Bee Gees
9: The Specials
10: (Peter Green's) Fleetwood Mac

Beyond the obvious problems that I would have with this personal list, it was the criteria that Noel used to define the greatest bands that made me begin to question the usefulness of a cannon in music. From Rolling Stones' top 500, to Greil Marcus' "Stranded: Rock and Roll for a Desert Island" contemporary music literature and journalism artistically expresses a need to create a cannon for rock and roll, much like traditional literature now has as a result of centrally formed curriculum standards. Even journalists like Jim Derogatis, who claim to be firm in their opposition of canonization attempts fall prey to the tedious task of chronicling "required reading" for rock. What is "Turn On Your Mind : Four Decades of Great Psychedelic Rock" by DERO but an attempt to canonize a particular type of music. While Derogatis doesn't fally prey to the same level of rampant rose colored reflection that most rock journalists do in their writing and canonization attempts, it's clear that even the subversive DERO can stumble. I mean lets be honest, he's no Lester Bangs.

The reason why Gallagher's list is so silly is that his rigid definition of a band has never and never will define what is so interestingly undefinable about rock music. This is the problem with attempting to hammer out a cannon for rock music. It means so many different things for so many different people any attempt to define it's history with any authority comes across pompous and silly.

And I'm still baffled why Gallagher doesn't want to include women in his list....

A better approach would be to simply share the bands of today and yesterday that you enjoy with the people that you're close to. Together the collective experience, memory, and research of our generation will create a much greater and reflexive footprint of the music that we all love.