Rock legends are a part of rock and roll, but when you get down to it, no one person can rock alone. You need a band. So with this list, we celebrate not the individual stars but the groups we love best out of rock's history, the ones who decided the music was more important than any individual member. (Although we will definitely be hearing from individual members during these writeups.)
Here in Seattle, there's a practice at more socially conscious gatherings to perform a land acknowledgement before getting down to business. We recognize that whatever we're about to do is being done on Duwamish land, and give conscious recognition to the tribe's history and present, which continues to this day.
In that spirit, a little land acknowledgement of my own for this thread. Though the list we're about to proceed with is very white, rock and roll is a Black art form at its core. Rather than anyone who submitted lists, I blame myself for the omission. Black rock bands aren't unheard of--we had nominations for Living Colour (#67), Parliament (#93), and Fishbone (#207), to name a few--but they've largely been forgotten or ignored in white mainstream media. More widely known are individual Black musicians, which the constraints on this list didn't allow for. Much more than the absence of the King or the Boss, I regret the absence of trailblazers and innovators like Little Richard, James Brown, and everyone else namechecked in Mos Def's "Rock N Roll," the song that initially opened my eyes to all of this. As the man said (in a punk sneer backed by crunchy guitars, in case you missed the point):
Elvis Presley ain't got no soul
Bo Diddley is rock and roll
You may dig on the Rolling Stones
But everything they did, they stole
Everything that comes after this is stolen. My favorites and yours too. Let's acknowledge that and remember where we came from.
#47 (tie): T. Rex
#47 (tie): The Aquabats
#47 (tie): The National
#47 (tie): The Postal Service
#45 (tie): Can
#47 (tie): The Aquabats
#47 (tie): The National
#47 (tie): The Postal Service
#45 (tie): Can
HONORABLE MENTION: The Originators
Here in Seattle, there's a practice at more socially conscious gatherings to perform a land acknowledgement before getting down to business. We recognize that whatever we're about to do is being done on Duwamish land, and give conscious recognition to the tribe's history and present, which continues to this day.
In that spirit, a little land acknowledgement of my own for this thread. Though the list we're about to proceed with is very white, rock and roll is a Black art form at its core. Rather than anyone who submitted lists, I blame myself for the omission. Black rock bands aren't unheard of--we had nominations for Living Colour (#67), Parliament (#93), and Fishbone (#207), to name a few--but they've largely been forgotten or ignored in white mainstream media. More widely known are individual Black musicians, which the constraints on this list didn't allow for. Much more than the absence of the King or the Boss, I regret the absence of trailblazers and innovators like Little Richard, James Brown, and everyone else namechecked in Mos Def's "Rock N Roll," the song that initially opened my eyes to all of this. As the man said (in a punk sneer backed by crunchy guitars, in case you missed the point):
Elvis Presley ain't got no soul
Bo Diddley is rock and roll
You may dig on the Rolling Stones
But everything they did, they stole
Everything that comes after this is stolen. My favorites and yours too. Let's acknowledge that and remember where we came from.
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