Hard Rock - Seriously, define it for me please

I was able to get to sleep and I watched this show on VH1 - the 100 greatest Hard Rock bands of all times. And I was shocked to see what they considered their top 20 because some of these bands I wouldn't really consider "Hard Rock"

75% of the people they interviewed for this show was from some hair band or thrasher band. So how the hell did they come up with this list.


20: Alice Cooper
19: The Clash
18: Ozzy Osbourne
17: The Ramones
16: Cream
15: Pink Floyd
14: Soundgarden
13: Queen
12: The Sex Pistols
11: Aerosmith
10: Kiss
9 : Guns N' Roses
8 : The Who
7 : Van Halen
6 : Nirvana
5 : Metallica
4 : AC/DC
3 : Jimi Hendrix
2 : Black Sabbath
1 : Led Zeppelin

My problem with this list is it seems so ill defined and there seems to be some really obvious names missing from the top 20 (I have not looked at the other 80). My most obvious one - where are the Rolling Stones or Bruce Springsteen and the E Street band. Plus, I love Queen but what the hell are they doing on that list, I hardly define them in the same category that would include AC/DC, Van Halen, Kiss & Mettalica. You can't tell me that Motley Crue doesn't break the top 20 even though Soundgarden does. And with all due respect to Punk Rock, I just feel that bands like The Sex Pistols, The Ramones and The Clash to be a completely different genre. And yes, U2 should have been in that top 20 too - or do they not rock hard enough. (BTW, I found the Rolling Stones - they were #67. You're telling me that Faith No More (a band which I saw open for the Stones) is actually better than the Stones?? FNM came in the 40s).

Also, as I perused through the list there seems to be an absense of southern rock. Did southern rock not rock hard enough. I mean Lynard Skynard was on there around 71, but I didn't see Neil Young on there anywhere along with a few other Southern Rock bands.

So who seriously, based on that list - what the hell defines Hard Rock.

http://www.vh1.com/shows/dyn/the_greatest/62184/episode_wildcard.jhtml?wildcard=/shows/dynamic/includes/wildcards/the_greatest/hardrock_list_full.jhtml&event_id=862711&start=1

airhead female teenyboppers who fixate on commercial crap.

Translation: any music anyone wants to call "rock" music, which by association in name only invokes "rock 'n roll" music pre-1970, but which by definition is manufactured post-1969.

:evilfrown:

But The Boss does not belong anywhere near this list. What they are defining as "Hard Rock" is more of the genre of Heavy Metal. SO the Rolling Stones don't fit. That is how you have the Ramones on there. Cause the 80's metal was punk rock as well.

or King Crimson for that matter. And if King Crimson & Queen are on the list - where is Yes.

And why about Southern Rock - Lynard Skynard (which actually, I'm not a big fan of) should have been much higher. Plus Neil Young should have been on that list too somewhere

They had their heavy metal moments. Big guitars, and the like. But remember the first time an award for Heavy Metal was given at the Grammy's was given to Jethro Tull. I have Queen's greatest hits out of England and it has some heavy stuff on it. Bohemian Rhapsody was not completely soft. There are others of their songs but I can not think of them, at the moment.

I think Lynyrd Skynyrd should have been higher, but I like their music. Hell Georgia Satellite should have been considered. Neil Young does not belong anywhere near this list. He is not hard enough for Hard Rock.

hard enough for hard rock but would have "hard rock moments" like Queen and King Crimson.

And btw, Neil Young not on that list but Janis Joplin made it to the top 100?? I hardly call her hard rock.

Plus I'm challenged by groups like Cream & Pink Floyd in the top 20 only because like Queen & KC, they don't really define what I think that show was trying to define. Seriously Black Sabboth and Pink Floyd catogorized together? My head is exploding!!

They still have their haze of all the drugs and alcohol from their touring days.

I wanted to watch that but something else came on.

Neil Young is considered a solo artist, crazy horse or no.

I think they aren't differentiating between hard rock and metal, or heavy metal, correctly.

I think that Paranoid by Black Sabbath is like hard rock but when you get into all that dark flashy bullshit that Ozzy did by himself it becomes heavy metal. But that's just me.

Hard Rock to me is when the music speaks for itself and there isn't all that dark pseudo-satanic marketing that overrides it. I hate that stuff most of the time, because I think it's stupid.

P.S. is Primus on there anywhere?

were defined as 'heavy metal' on a show I watched a while back.

This was like the top 100 bad metal songs or something, with like really sappy tunes some of the metal bands have made that were total flops, because they were so unmetal of them to make.

You couldn't really call Van Halen a metal band, or really even hard rock, during the "keyboard Eddie" phase, IMO.

anyway... :freak:

Canadian

EVER WILL BE.

AND MAYBE THE MENTORS, BUT PROBABALY JUST GWAR.

is that this is VH1, and anything they say is inherently chowderheaded.

More to the point, they expect this show to appeal to metalheads-- hence the emphasis on Metallica, Sabs, Ozzy etc-- but they also want to throw a bone to the punk and grunge demographics. It's really about striking a balance in a world of niche markting. So as to why Southern rock is conspicuous in its abssence, they probably did their market research and ascertained that their viewership doesn't include the stars 'n' bars demographic.

As to who rocks harder than who, your mileage may vary. I think, despite that "Roundabout" kicks ass in a way that "Court of the Crimson King" doesn't, people take Yes less seriously than King Crimson because of the high pitched harmony vocals. Moreover, King Crimson belongs to an era of bands (most of whom seem to have colors in their name, odd coincidence-- Deep Purple, Black Sabbath, Blue Oyster Cult, Vanilla Fudge) that were collectively responsible for taking previous hard rock (e.g. Cream and Zeppelin), amping it up another notch, and nullifying the blues influences to generate a truly white suburban "ethnic music"-- which is to say, heavy metal. I think this is the real reason Jethro Tull famously won that first Heavy Metal Grammy: not for whatever piece of shit they'd released that year (Catfish Rising, was it? Yucko!), but because contemporary metal would be unthinkable without Aqualung.

Queen definitely belongs, however. The secret to Queen was that they balanced out so many influences, but Brian May definitely had both feet in the hard rock/metal camp, as both guitarist and composer. Check out the Sheer Heart Attack album, and pretty much every song he wrote up until the Jazz album.

My opinion, and worth what you paid for it.

On edit: posts like this one are why I deserve a Nobel prize.

:D

Hmmmm. This list isn't very good.