Thursday, September 17, 2015

Empty complaining about something we should never have expected to be any good anyway

CHICK WEBB, ladies and gentlemen. Apparently
a white, 19th century coke-slag magnate.
If you want to get your blood pressure up— not least because the site is so poorly coded it may crash your browser— go look at this list of the “greatest drummers ever” on a site called Ranker, which Rolling Stone linked to.

High points include:

  • The greatest drummers ever were overwhelmingly white Metal drummers, apparently.
  • With a few mediocre British rock drummers of the 70s thrown in for good measure.
  • Genres associated with the drummers: Keith Moon > “skiffle”, Dave Grohl > “doom metal”, Stewart Copeland > “New Wave”, Phil Collins > “blue-eyed soul”, Alex Van Halen  > “jazz fusion”, Vinnie Colaiuta > “Thrash Metal, Progressive Metal”, Charlie Watts > “Reggae”, Dennis Chambers > “Chicano rock” and on and on.
  • First appearance of a non-white drummer: #25, Billy Cobham
  • Elvin Jones and Tony Williams make #62 and 68, with approximately as many negative votes as positive ones. After them, everyone who legitimately belongs on a list like this gets more negatives than positives. Jack Dejohnette manages to hang in the top 100 with 496 positive votes and 582 negatives.
  • In the comments, people are extremely pissed off at the injustice of Joey Jordison— one of the drummers from 90s Metal band Slipknot— not only NOT GETTING NUMBAR 1, but not being included AT ALL, WHAT! Infamy!

So, yeah. Obviously, as we all expected going in, the list is useful to us not so much for its stated purpose, but for the much narrower purpose of comprehending the median of idiocy of people on the Internet who are interested enough to vote on it. It is rather interesting that even generally Internet-popular musicians like Benny Greb and Thomas Lang don't fare that well, either...

1 comment:

ggill1970 said...

ridiculous but expected from a raw numbers / rock survey standpoint. they seem to have a database issue too w/ pics & labels. look at Dennis Chambers; the pic is some guy w/ long hair playing guitar. when i dived into Chick Webb's description, it correctly linked to his Wiki page tho. "coke-slag magnate." LOL! no...YOU rock.