The internet is not a good
place to argue with people--did you know that? Bookmark this page so you don’t
forget.
Spent the better part of
two days arguing over something on a message board earlier this week. The argument
was tangential to what was being discussed initially, a question posed by me
after seeing the new David Bowie documentary: along with Bowie, who were the
most chameleon-like pop stars ever?
The question was a little
vague, though I tried to clarify with three other names that I thought fit what
I was thinking about: Madonna, Dylan, and Neil Young. I mentioned a couple of
other possibilities I was less sure about: Beyoncé and Taylor Swift. It was
meant to be a combination of the way these people presented themselves to the
world, and also--the two usually went hand-in-hand—stylistic changes in their
music.
The thread puttered along
for a few days--understandably; it’s hard to come up with anyone who fits the
idea as well as Bowie--at which point someone suggested the Isley Brothers. As
I wrote in an online inventory of my albums many years ago, I’m not the biggest
Isley Brothers fan, but I do have five different compilations of their work,
covering three distinct phases of their career (and in the running “mixworthy”
section of said inventory, I included “Shout” and “Twist and Shout”--and
probably should have included “This Old Heart of Mine” too). So, while I was
aware of their stylistic changes musically, I said that I didn’t think they
were famous enough to qualify; I hadn’t mentioned this yet, but I realized
right then that a certain level of fame was always implied as to who might fit.
Bowie, Madonna, Dylan, Neil Young, Beyoncé, Taylor Swift: they’re all, in my
mind, very famous, and when they change musical direction or reemerge looking
completely different than they did a year ago, people talk about that. They
make news (or made, as the case may be; the first four are either dead or old and
not very chameleon-like anymore).
Within half an hour,
someone jumped in with an addendum (italicized) to my response: “I like the
Isley Brothers fine, but they wouldn't rise to that level of fame among white
people.” Somehow, an assessment of general fame--I used the term “pop
audience,” which to me encompasses people who listen to popular music of all
kinds; to me, it includes everybody--was turned into a racial issue. If we
section off this part of the pop audience, it's being explained to me, the
Isley Brothers are famous--and by not realizing that, I’m probably a blinkered
white guy (or worse) who doesn’t know anything about the Isley Brothers. (The
poster of this comment was white.)
Chiming in, another poster
(also white) half went after the first poster for making the distinction between
white and black listeners (the Isleys, he pointed out, had played a Pitchfork
Festival, with billing proximate to Stereolab--his comment included an internet
acronym that lost me, so I misunderstood his point; more on internet-speak
later), and half went after me for suggesting that Neil Young and Lou Reed
(another possibility I’d mentioned, although I dismissed him for settling into
“regular-guy Lou” sometime around 1980) are more famous than the Isley
Brothers. And at that point, that’s what the thread became about: are the Isley
Brothers as famous as Neil Young and Lou Reed?
To me, the answer is
obvious: no. I’m not saying the Isley Brothers aren’t famous, but (as I pointed
out in another comment) fame is relative, and it can’t be measured one way (the
first poster threw in a list of how many Top 40 hits they’d had,
including--this seemed very important to those who disagreed with me--a #1 song
of Beyoncé's they’d just collaborated on). I tried to analogize: yes, they’d
had a lot of Top 40 hits, but so did Brenda Lee in her day: did that make her
more famous than the Ronettes, Janis Joplin, or Jimi Hendrix, all of whom had
far fewer? Hits and commercial success are a component of fame, but does that
mean that whoever directs the next Marvel film will automatically be more
famous than Jean-Luc Godard, whose films--all of them combined--were probably
seen by fewer people than will see that next Marvel film on its opening
weekend? (I’m just guessing there, but you get the point.) I turned the
question back on the message board where all this was taking place, pointing
out that while there are multiple threads on the board devoted to Neil Young
and Lou Reed, with hundreds upon hundreds of posts, the Isley Brothers have
eight threads totalling fewer than 200 posts (with seven of them combining for
probably 50 posts). Only one response there: that discussion on this message
board is not a good barometer of fame. (To me, how much people talk about
someone is one of the best barometers of fame there is.) I also mentioned how
often Neil Young and the Velvet Underground have been covere by other
artists--I’ve got hundreds of covers on my hard-drive--and that I thought that
mattered, too.
The last point was
dismissed--confirmation bias--the first two weren’t really addressed. A couple
of people (I think I was arguing with about eight at this point) made what I
thought were good counter-arguments, and I said so: one, that I’d overlooked
sampling (I assume that the Isley Brothers, especially their ‘70s work, have
been sampled a lot), and two, that Hendrix got his start playing backup with
the Isleys. The second poster I mentioned--the Stereolab/Pitchfork guy--chipped
in with a couple of ridiculous posts: one, a caricature of the Velvet
Underground that I think was supposed to be funny, either as cutting ridicule
or in the spirit of “this is so ridiculous it’s funny,” but if anything reminded
me of Greg Gutfeld, that cretin who’s all over Fox, and two, an equation of
Neil Young and Lou Reed with Robyn Hitchcock in the fame department. Onward and
downward.
Which brings me to
internet jargon--I don’t think there’s anything I despise more these days. By
jargon, I mean all internet acronyms, stylistic tics, ways of phrasing things,
and the widespread assumption that everyone knows what you mean when you engage
in this kind of silliness. A couple of examples:
A phrase turned into
single-word sentences: Dumbest. Idea. Ever. There were all sorts of useful
methods already around for emphasizing your words; I can’t see that this one
has added anything.
The Facebook post that
begins with “So”: “So I just wrote this thing,” or “So I just won the Nobel
Prize for physics”--the “so,” I think, is to let you know that geez, this big
thing I’m telling you about really isn’t that big a deal to me, but I’m telling
you anyway, because I’m incapable of not telling you, because it’s a really, really,
really big deal.”
And so on--there are many
that drive me around the bend. I don’t get the appeal at all. It’s like you’ve been
reading everything people are saying on the internet, and you suddenly notice
that everybody’s saying this one thing, and you decide...what? “I want to use
that; I want to sound exactly like everybody else.”
I bring all this up
because, with the argument winding down, someone jumped on the thread--it
always takes courage to join a pile-on--and, in a very theatrical display of
incredulity, threw one of these phrases at me: “_________ (my display name on
this message board)...I can’t.” Which is usually, I believe, rendered as “I
can’t even.”
The point there is that my
side of the argument--that Neil Young and Lou Reed are more famous than the Isley
Brothers--is so wrong, so hopelessly beyond the pale, that this person can’t
even find the words to express how egregiously wrong I am.
And--nudge-nudge--race is again insinuated: the person wondered if I listened
to much R&B, hip-hop, or funk.
Okay. I knew this person
enough to respond in a FB message, and I did; no need to share that here. I wasn’t
happy with the question.
The thread had basically
(and understandably) scared off everyone by this point, including me, so after a
few more posts, it’s been dormant for a couple of days, where it will hopefully
remain forever. Not wanting to reopen the issue, I’ll post a couple of
follow-up thoughts here.
1) Not sure why--it’s not
like I consider his word gospel or anything, though I do trust him on the subject
of the Isley Brothers more than some of the people I’d been arguing with--I
thought I’d look up what Robert Christgau has written on them, by which I mean
reviews of their albums in his Consumer Guide. As least in the online version,
he’s reviewed 18 albums of theirs, including compilations and a box set; that
would seem to indicate sufficient familiarity with their music, and, by
extension, their relative place in the grand scheme of things. Sixteen of the
albums get grades from C+ to a B+, one (the latest, a collaboration with Carlos
Santana) gets the star treatment (which approximately translates as a B, I
think), and the box set gets an A-: “an honorable job on a significant band
whose catalog cries out for landscaping.” Great rating, words of praise. He
also writes this, though, in the same entry: “But folks, this is only the Isley
Brothers. They gave us ‘Twist and Shout’ and ‘It's Your Thing’ and, um, ‘That
Lady,’ they hired Jimi Hendrix young and learned a few things, they formed
their own label and held on like heroes. They have a great single disc in them.
But who's up for canonization next? Frankie Beverly and Maze?”
I’d say that’s pretty much
what I’d been saying all along, except Christgau’s sometimes harsher--“only the
Isley Brothers.” Even if I’d still been posting in the thread, though, I don’t
think I would have brought up Christgau. He’s a lightning rod on this message
board, and any mention of him would have immediately been dismissed out of
hand.
2) Something I just
thought to check today (not that I’m still thinking about the whole
episode--not me): how many books have been written about these three artists?
With Neil Young and Lou Reed (as solo artists only, not including books on some
famous bands they’ve been in), I found at least 10 each. Neil: Jimmy McDonough’s
Shakey, Sam Inglis’s Harvest, Johnny Rogan’s Zero to Sixty,
John Einarson’s (and others’) Don’t Be Denied, Kevin Chong’s Neil
Young Nation, Daniel Durchholz and Gary Graff’s Long May You Run, Harvey
Kubernik’s Heart of Gold, Sharry Wilson’s The Sugar Mountain Years,
Nigel Williamson’s Stories Behind the Songs 1966-1992, Sylvie Simmons’ Reflections
in a Broken Glass, The Rolling Stone Files (various), Carole
Dufrechou’s Neil Young. That’s 12--the last one, the earliest, I used to
own back in high school, but somehow I lost it along the way (still can’t
remember when or how). Same with Lou Reed, give or take a book or two.
I can’t find a single book
on the Isley Brothers. I have to believe that there was at least one written at
some point, and that it went out of print (such books still tend to turn up on
sites like AbeBooks--e.g., the Carole Dufrechou book), but I didn’t turn up
anything. They do get indexed in Nelson George’s The Death of Rhythm and
Blues seven times, which in fairness is only one fewer mention than Smokey
Robinson. In my mind, Smokey Robinson is much more famous than the Isley
Brothers--and on par with Neil Young and Lou Reed--so that’s another piece of
evidence worth considering.
Anyway, is the number of
books written about someone a meaningful measure of fame? Does that count for anything?
3) Another board-centric
way to approach the question. This message board is often the site of artist polls:
people send in ballots on their favourite songs, the results are compiled and
counted down. I’ve run one poll myself--surprise, Neil Young--co-ran a Yo La
Tengo poll with someone else, and looked after the vote tabulation for a Motown
singles poll. (I’ve also run a few film polls.) To try to bring some semblance
of order to the whole process, there’s a thread where people throw out ideas,
and a running list of who’s next in line is maintained. Three threads,
actually--the first got so long, a second and then a third thread were started.
As I say, there’s been a
Neil Young poll. There’s been an all-encompassing Velvet Underground poll that combined
the VU with solo work. There’s been a David Bowie poll, a Madonna poll, and a
Dylan poll. Some other obvious ones: the Beatles, Prince, Led Zeppelin, the
Beach Boys, an all-encompassing Jacksons poll that combined group and solo
work, the Who. There’ve been over 100 of them the past decade, and if you were
to look at the whole list, it’s not like everyone is that famous--far from it.
There’ve been a number of polls where my first thought was “Really? You’re
going to run a poll on them?”
There hasn’t been an Isley
Brothers poll, though “Shout” did place #38 on a ‘50s poll from a few years ago.
I don’t have my own ballot from that poll--it was run on a Google Form--so I’m
wondering if I voted for it myself. (Probably not--much of my 50-song ballot
was devoted to doo-wop.) No Isleys poll is not, in and of itself, especially
significant: I could name a lot of important and famous artists where there’s never
been a poll. The thing that caught my eye when I looked at the three
housekeeping threads, though, is that--if the “find” command is to be
trusted--not a single person has even suggested the Isley Brothers as a poll
possibility. The three threads combine for around 5,500 posts. Not one mention.
I’m sure, had I made this point, this also would have been brushed aside, but
seeing as this is the very message board where this argument is taking place,
doesn’t this at least suggest some kind of disconnect?
4) I said that the charge
of confirmation bias towards me--that the mere fact that I’d been collecting covers
of Neil Young and the Velvet Underground (Beatles, too) already ensured that
I’d consider Neil Young and Lou Reed more famous--was valid. I’ll bring up
another common bias, regularly brought up in all kinds of contexts when it
comes to baseball: recency bias. This Beyoncé/Isley Brothers record on the
charts right now came up a few times, almost like its success was a function of
the Isleys' enduring fame rather than Beyoncé’s.
5) Is the latest version
of Rolling Stone's Top 500 worth anything? I wouldn't mention it in the
thread, no, although clearly this is not the same Top 500 as their 2004 or even
2010 list (the top three spots and six of the top ten are held down by black
artists). On the 2021 list, the Isley Brothers placed one song,
"Shout" at #268; Neil Young had three ("Heart of Gold" at
#259, "After the Gold Rush" at #322, and "Powderfinger at #450),
Lou Reed also three ("I'm Waiting for the Man" at #81, "Walk on
the Wild Side" at #180, and "Sweet Jane" at #294). Again, to be
fair, of those seven songs, the two most specious for me are "Heart of
Gold" and "Walk on the Wild Side."
6) In my mind, the fame of
the Isley Brothers has been exceeded by that of their two most famous songs. Play
“Shout” for 1,000 random people--music fans, non-music fans, a mix--and my
guess is that more people will identify it as “the Animal House song”
than as an Isley Brothers song. And if you were to do the same with “Twist and
Shout,” I’m pretty sure it would be identified as a Beatles song far more often
than an Isley Brothers song. That’s not their fault, and such things can be
infuriating, I know--I wince at the reality that certain cover versions have
become more famous than the originals. (There’s one in particular that gets
under my skin, but I’m drawing a blank right now--obviously I'm not talking
about the Beatles’ great “Twist and Shout” cover.) It is a reality, though.
Not sure if anyone I’d
been arguing with will ever see this. In any event, I’ll say it again: the
Isley Brothers, who were elected to the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1992
(Young and Reed are each in there twice--we can discount that, too), are not as
famous as Neil Young or Lou Reed. To me, they’re not all that close to being as
famous.
