Music: Name Your Top Six Bands from Great Britain

TNT87

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The Beatles
The Rolling Stones
Led Zeppelin
The Who
Pink Floyd
Black Sabbath
 

les Habs

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Tough call after the first few. In no particular order:

David Bowie
The Clash
The Smiths
Belle and Sebastian
Led Zeppelin
The Who
The Beatles
Radiohead
Joy Division

Oh well, I guess I did eight. First three are locks, after that some room to maneuver. Curious no one mentioned The Stone Roses as I would think over there they would make some lists.
 
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The Fall
The Dentists
The Kinks
The Smiths
Pink Floyd (I’m a new fan of theirs so maybe My Bloody Valentine will knock them off shortly)
 

Gordon Lightfoot

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Tough call after the first few. In no particular order:

David Bowie
The Clash
The Smiths
Belle and Sebastian
Led Zeppelin
The Who
The Beatles
Radiohead
Joy Division

Oh well, I guess I did eight. First three are locks, after that some room to maneuver. Curious no one mentioned The Stone Roses as I would think over there they would make some lists.

Man, the Stone Roses got a lot of mileage out of one great debut and a mediocre follow up line 5 years later.
 

Spring in Fialta

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Forgot about The Cure on my list. They take Radiohead's spot. I appear to be the first one to mention them too. I'm surprised.
 
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Shareefruck

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Also I go based on album consistency over career so not gonna rank a band as one of the best if they lack multiple good albums and a decent discography (eg: Joy Division or Talk Talk who only made 2 good albums at the end of their career).
Man, the Stone Roses got a lot of mileage out of one great debut and a mediocre follow up line 5 years later.
I hear this type of sentiment a lot and I completely disagree with it. The way I see it, all it takes to make a good/great band is one good/great album, IMO (a band is more or less as good or bad as their best album). What matters is what they did at their peak. How long it lasts is kind of just a bonus/tie-breaker.

If band A has ten good albums and band B has only one album that's a notch better than any of those ten, I'm taking band B every single time, personally.
 
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Nalens Oga

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^ That's misconstruing the point. You're assuming band B has 5 mediocre albums. We're talking about the best British bands of all time. There are plenty that have made 3-6 good/great albums that I'd take over The Stone Roses for doing one good album.
 

Shareefruck

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^ That's misconstruing the point. You're assuming band B has 5 mediocre albums. We're talking about the best British bands of all time. There are plenty that have made 3-6 good/great albums that I'd take over The Stone Roses for doing one good album.
That's only a fair point if you happen to think that every good album should be treated equally, though. Considering that it rarely plays out like that (you're almost always going to like one more than another), the QUANTITY of good albums usually ends up irrelevant. It just becomes a best on best comparison, for the most part.

Also, I did specifically use the qualifier "good", not "mediocre", so I'm not making that assumption at all.

To restate my example, if band A has ten good albums, and band B has one good album, whether or not band B is better only depends on whether or not that one good album beats the best individual album from the ten good ones. If I find them pretty equal (which isn't common), I'll take the guy with ten. That's how I see it.

That's just my opinion, though. Not saying you're wrong for doing it the other way.

For the record, as far as my actual preferences go, I don't think that that one Stone Roses album is strong enough to beat the best albums of other great artists (it's a good album, but I don't think it's spectacular/masterful or anything), but those one or two Joy Division/My Bloody Valentine/Talk Talk albums probably beat out the best album of most prolific artists, for my money. I'd be hard-pressed to find more than a couple of bands (really just The Beatles and Pink Floyd) who could say that they have numerous albums on that level.
 
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les Habs

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I hear this type of sentiment a lot and I completely disagree with it. The way I see it, all it takes to make a good/great band is one good/great album, IMO (a band is more or less as good or bad as their best album). What matters is what they did at their peak. How long it lasts is kind of just a bonus/tie-breaker.

If band A has ten good albums and band B has only one album that's a notch better than any of those ten, I'm taking band B every single time, personally.

I think a lot of these lists end up being about longevity. Nothing wrong with that and it's of course entirely personal and subjective, but as the lyric goes "it's better to burn out than it is to rust".

For the record I only mentioned The Stone Roses as I think that is the case for probably a fair amount of folks in the Manchester area.
 

Shareefruck

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For the record I only mentioned The Stone Roses as I think that is the case for probably a fair amount of folks in the Manchester area.
I did love that album at one point, but over time, it became more of an accessible/reliable/easy-to-listen-to gateway album rather than an actual all time great/masterpiece for me.
 

Gordon Lightfoot

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I hear this type of sentiment a lot and I completely disagree with it. The way I see it, all it takes to make a good/great band is one good/great album, IMO (a band is more or less as good or bad as their best album). What matters is what they did at their peak. How long it lasts is kind of just a bonus/tie-breaker.

If band A has ten good albums and band B has only one album that's a notch better than any of those ten, I'm taking band B every single time, personally.

I feel the same way for the most part. That’s why I have a band like the Olivia Tremor Control near the top of my all time favorite band list. They only had two albums but those albums are magical to me.

I just think it’s funny how the Stone Roses still get featured on magazine covers like Q and Mojo to this day. How many stories can be left to tell?
 

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Muse
Queen
Beatles
Pink Floyd
Oasis
Def Leppard

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Realgud

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That's pretty presumptuous. How can you make that determination if you don't know people's age? When you see nothing but 60s bands, do you just assume that the poster is 70 years old?

I think an overwhelming majority of the best music came between 1955 and 1980, and I'm 30 (so the best came well before I was born, IMO).

Baroque, classical and romantic music is objectively the most interesting and best music ever composed and will probably never be matched. How did the overwhelming majority of the best music came between 1955 and 1980?
 

Shareefruck

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Baroque, classical and romantic music is objectively the most interesting and best music ever composed and will probably never be matched. How did the overwhelming majority of the best music came between 1955 and 1980?
Admittedly I'm pretty ignorant of that period of music (I've tried it but not much of it has comparably clicked for me at this point), but I also, at this point in time, don't appreciate it enough to be able to honestly claim that it's, in my opinion, the best, nor do I think that this can necessarily be considered an objective fact (although I can acknowledge that it's almost certainly a lot closer than what I can currently recognize it as, with my limited knowledge).

I've also always had stronger feelings about the attitudes of Jazz compared to Classical, just kind of in principle. It's also tough for me to be able to acknowledge something like that because recorded performance is a bigger piece of the puzzle for me than compositional prowess, and I generally have a greater appreciation of minimalism than ambitious/epic technical complexity/intricacy. If I can fathom someone knowledgeable/not necessarily ignorant thinking that The Sex Pistols are better than Pink Floyd, then I can fathom someone knowledgeable/not necessarily ignorant thinking that other, less objectively involved/"impressive" genres could be better than Classical.

So for all of those reasons, that's the only opinion I can genuinely give on that subject for now, even though I'm sure it'll change a bit over a time.
 
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kihei

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It's not my favourite but I think the most beautiful music ever made is baroque music. As an atheist, I can't help but note the irony that when composers wrote music expressly to reflect the glory of God, they composed some of the most gorgeous music in history. Is it the best and/or greatest music ever? Though I think that might be the wrong question or, at least, an unhelpful one, it is hard for me to argue against the supremacy of the works produced in Europe during the 17th, 18th and 19th centuries.
 
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Realgud

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It's not my favourite but I think the most beautiful music ever made is baroque music. As an atheist, I can't help but note the irony that when composers wrote music expressly to reflect the glory of God, they composed some of the most gorgeous music in history. Is it the best and/or greatest music ever? Though I think that might be the wrong question or, at least, an unhelpful one, it is hard for me to argue against the supremacy of the works produced in Europe during the 17th, 18th and 19th centuries.

Best/greatest isn't the same as favorite imo. Personally, I love classical but I'll listen to metal most of the time because I can't enjoy classical if I am not fully invested into it (I don't want it to be in the background). Classical is the most challenging and rewarding music when you pay your full attention to it and listen to it many times but that's hard to do most of the time! :)
 
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frisco

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1) Queen
2) Bee Gees
3) Foreigner (half American)
4) Fleetwood Mac (half American)
5) Depeche Mode
6) Def Leppard

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Shareefruck

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Best/greatest isn't the same as favorite imo. Personally, I love classical but I'll listen to metal most of the time because I can't enjoy classical if I am not fully invested into it (I don't want it to be in the background). Classical is the most challenging and rewarding music when you pay your full attention to it and listen to it many times but that's hard to do most of the time! :)
Sorry about the insane rant, but whenever this subject comes up, I can't help myself.

This is probably an unpopular opinion, but personally, I've always rejected the notion that your favorite thing is necessarily the thing that you can pick up and enjoy at any point/most frequently/most easily (guilty pleasures that have an unwanted hold on you would qualify, if that were the case).

If you appreciate it more and have come to the conclusion that classical music is capable of giving you the most rich/satisfying/rewarding experience when you give it your full attention, I don't really see why it should be determined less of a favorite just because it's difficult to find yourself in the necessary head-space for it. If I were you and I felt the same way about the two genres, I would still consider Classical more of a favorite than Metal.

Even taken to the extreme of something that you appreciate more than anything else based on a first experience, but find impossible to revisit, I think that would still qualify as "favorite", personally.

Nobody seems to agree with me on this, but in my opinion, while best and favorite isn't TECHNICALLY the same thing, a person's opinion of it should be more or less interchangeable in practice because "favorite" is the thing you CARE most about, not the thing that you can go back to at any time/all the time, and "best" is the thing you APPRECIATE most (which usually stands to reason to also be the thing you care most about), not the thing that you can make the best dispassionate objective argument for about it's technical merits, IMO.

More accurately, "best" is probably the thing that objectively/hypothetically CAN be/deserves to be appreciated most, but I don't think that a person can determine that with certainty beyond the degree that they themselves have learned to appreciate it, IMO. Reaching beyond that has always felt like cheating/guesswork/being presumptuous, to me.

I suppose it's hypothetically possible to care about something else more than the thing that you actually/genuinely appreciate most, but my mind sure as hell doesn't work that way, nor can I really wrap my head around why it does for others.

For these reasons, I've never ever bought into the idea that "Oh, I totally agree that this is the best thing, but it's not my favorite" or "Oh, this is my personal favorite, but not my opinion of the best", personally. For me at least, if I found myself saying something like that, it could only be an insecure cop-out/self-deception of what I truly think, on my part. I can't separate the two.

I mean, the way I see it, the only reason I have subjective differences in preference from anyone else in the first place is because I disagree with them about what's true and have found certain elements that I do appreciate to be better or more important while finding other elements that I don't appreciate to be worse or less valuable. Doesn't mean my experience is necessarily right of course, but I'm as right as I can possibly know, IMO.
 
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