Fifty Greatest Bassist (and other Trash Pop Culture Rankings)

How making list of art helps dumb Americans down

The other day on my social media time line a Rolling Stone magazine list of the fifty greatest bass players popped up. It had some many of the rights names in the top five, like Motown’s James Jamerson and Weather Report’s Jaco Pastorius. Yet overall the list was defined more by who wasn’t there than who was. When I posted a link on my Facebook page my music head friends ripped apart, pointing out missing greats and questionable ranking. The next day I was was surfing the net and came across a film site who were promoting the ten best films of Tom Cruise and the five worse.

Both the bassist and the Cruise lists speak to a large issue in the business of writing about culture: we’ve turned what now passes for cultural criticism into March Madness. It’s all seeding and bereft of context. Instead of serious writing about the history of the bass or a deep dive into Cruise’s career, superficial listings of musicians, actors, directors, MCs, producers and genres is how culture is discussed. Film, and even more so music criticism, were always the bastard children of the newspaper entertainment page, where glossy profiles and celebrity gossip were always the preference of editor and advertisers. With the death of daily newspapers serious critics were always among the first to go in the unending budgets.

There are many fine sites and blogs that you tap into serious cultural writing. My favorite film site is Cinephilia & Beyond, run out of eastern Europe, which has looked intensely at work by Michael Mann, Stanley Kubrick, Andre Tarkovsky and others. But these niche sites aside the ranking version of pop culture criticism abounds. Is there anything more worthless than every Beatles or Jay-Z song ranked? Clearly the writers involved have put in the time listening. I commend them for being so obsessive. But there’s no value in ranking “Hey Jude” versus “I Wanna Hold Your Hand” or “On to the Next One” versus “Song Cry.” Where a critic does service to the listener is by combing through the threads of a body of work in a way that isn’t arbitrary or reductive, that doesn’t box the work of any artists in or shape it to fit a click bait format.

There is also a racial and cultural dimension to this ranking obsession. At a place like Rolling Stone it is an attempt to create a canon for younger listeners that centers ‘60s and ‘70s rock as some higher level art to the detriment of jazz and R&B. How else is jazz/rock virtuoso Stanley Clarke and Stax Records rhythm ace Duck Dunn listed behind Grateful Dead’s Phil Lesh at number 11? Dunn is white, but in the Booker T & the MGs played in a deeply soulful way and is part of a tradition of “in the pocket” playing steeped in the black church and the blues. I guess the argument to be made is that these lists will introduce younger listeners to players they might not know otherwise. Even if I give that thought the benefit of the doubt I find the actual analysis in Rolling Stone and other ranking sites often so threadbare in thought and absent nuance, its hard to cheer lead for these pieces as educational.

The general consensus that people only want short, bite sized pieces of writing about pop culture reflects the general dumbing down of the American brain. Our inability to think critically about any and everything is how the overall has culture become so seduced by rumors, lies and misinformation. Good criticism is about thinking through a subject, a problem, a piece of music or a film, and then thinking through your responses to it. It is in that process that ability to reason is refined. By connecting your emotional response to your critical mind you understand whatever you are confronted with in a holistic way. Ranking art leads to the kind of simple minded judgments that is tearing America apart. That may be a lot of blame to put on a ranking of the fifty greatest bass players, but all of these interactions shape (really misshape) are ability to think. Or, as that great scholar of bass playing George Clinton once said, “Think. It ain’t illegal yet.”