100 Favorite Bands/Artists - Intro

100 FAVORITE BANDS/ARTISTS

I almost made it through this entire year before realizing that I had nothing music related lined up to blog about.  This would have been a first since this blog's inception.  I have always managed to include something every year to not only fit the "nerd lists" part of its title, but also to break up its main purpose as my horror film journal.  Luckily, the idea for this list came to me in October so here we are, right in the nick of time.

Ranking my hundred favorite bands and recording artists is honestly not a list topic that I ever gave much thought to before now.  It has proven to be one of the most difficult lists I have yet made because it is quite the challenge to hold up not only a single band or artist's work just against itself, (since how many of them never put out a couple of weak albums, especially if we are talking a career spanning several decades?), but then to rank them against each other has brought so many elements into play.  How high do you count a band that only has one or two truly great records?  Where do you stack-up an artist who only put out a small handful of stuff compared to ones that have been active since the 1960s?  What if, on the whole, most of a band's career has been crap yet their old stuff was really great?

You rang?

This was a fun undertaking for just these demanding reasons.  I was also amazed that my first, preliminary jotting down of names before counting them tallied at a whopping one-hundred and ninety-eight.  This was after being selective.  I easily could have tagged another two bands onto that number and simply did a top two-hundred but nah, the standard one-hundred template generally suits me better.  It also forced me to more heavily consider who made the final cut.  So this being said, naturally a lot of guys and gals got the axe so for anyone who wants to point out to me that I am missing so and so and what a sacrilege it is, trust me, I wholeheartedly understand.

I did set myself up with basically one rule; an entry has to have made more than one album and more than one album I like.  So this basically got The Sex Pistols out of the running.  Yet jazz, country, folk, funk, R&B, hip-hop, they all readily compete with hard rock and pop music here, which is where my personal tastes and roots have long lied.  The musicians who make up the top four spots of this list have been predetermined since I was about thirteen years old, but from the fifth spot down, it is anyone's game.  So read on and again, do not forget to tell me who I forgot.