Why is six afraid of seven? Seven eight nine!

TEN!

I have spent the past several days trying to come up with my own personal list of top ten musical artists. This was inspired by the list compiled by 88.5 WXPN of the top 885 musical artists mentioned over in Gale's blog. I quite disagree with most of their top 20 or so, therefore I felt it was my responsibility to make the "right" list.

I am notoriously bad at coming up with top ten lists.

The first problem I ran into was "musical artists." How can one say that the Beatles are #1 when they have to consider the genius of the likes of Tchaikovsky and Vivaldi and others. So I am changing it to "Musical Recording Artists." The next problem I ran into was how many different eras of music that includes. How can one put the Rolling Stones at #3 and leave Glen Miller and Ella Fitzgerald out. What about the classic crooners like Bing and Deano? So I limited my own list to Musical Recording Artists from the 60s on, specifically anything considered "oldies/classic rock" and onward. There was one last stumbling block. My instinct is now and always will be to put Stephen Sondheim at the top of any list of this variety (he's my favorite), but but he just did flow with the rest of the list. I felt that this had to be limited to recorders of "popular" music only; in my mind, that is defined as anything you might hear on the radio if you actually wanted to listen to that kind of station. After I set up those guidelines, I was able to spend hours and hours agonizing over my list. Here's what I came up with:

1. Queen
2.David Bowie
3.Paul Simon
4. Billy Joel
5.Creedence Clearwater Revival
6.Aretha Franklin
7.System of a Down
8.Elton John
9.Cake
10.Alanis Morissette

There it is. I kind of had to force myself just to make some decisions and there is a good chance that my personal list will change drastically in the next few minutes, but it feels good to have a list written down. These kinds of things are important to me. A lot of classic rock in there, but I gotta have some System... sometimes I just love punk! Especially SoaD! They make me kind of giddy. If you're not familiar, check out "Chop Suey" (my personal favorite). And I like that I have it sandwiched between Aretha and Elton. That's pretty telling about my musical preferences.

I was going to be cool and have images of my favorite albums from each of these artists for illustration. The Blogger gods do not seem to like that idea, so I will leave it alone... for now.