Rov_Scam
1hr ago
I don't know what to tell you. For what it's worth the women I've dated through the app have all been in their 30s, so whether it's a demographic issue, or a geographic issue, or a generational thing is beyond me. But I find it hard to believe that things are so different that I'd never experienced any of them is beyond me. It's clear that either your profile isn't attracting women who are serious, or there's something off with your selection process. I can throw out suggestions about what the problem might be, but if you keep insisting that what I suggest isn't the problem, then there's nothing I can do to help you.
Rov_Scam
1hr ago
I don't like giving specific advice; I can only tell you what's worked for me. But one thing I would add is that I generally don't give unsolicited information about myself unless there's occasion to do so. If you want them to know you can cook, that's what the profile is for. I've only ever messaged to ask them something or respond to something they said, not to just provide information in the hope that it makes me more attractive. If they aren't giving you much to work with, that's on them.
Rov_Scam
2hr ago
a picture of whatever thing I'm doing that day, like cooking or walking my dog.
This doesn't seem like a great idea. What does it communicate about you to a person you are trying to get to know? That you eat? That you have a dog? What would your response be if someone sent you a text that said "I'm cooking dinner right now"?
especially when they reply to open-ended questions with yes/no/idunno, lol.
Honestly, if those were the only answers I was getting, I wouldn't have high hopes for the date to begin with. Not because they aren't interested, but because a person who responds like that to someone she isn't interested in probably isn't giving much more to someone she actually is interested in. If you're number five on her list and she agrees to go out with you, at least you get her undivided attention for a couple hours, and you have a chance to move up. If she's really that boring, then you probably lucky they cancelled on you.
I don't know what it is I'm supposed to say via text to a person I don't know that will keep their fickle interest for the two days between setting the date and the date happening
Nothing is always a good option. Maybe it's because I come from the old school, but I assume as a matter of course that plans are to be kept. Once the time and place is set, "Great, see you there" is all that's necessary until you're ready to send "I got a booth on the left wall". Unless she texts you before that, or you're going to be late, or there's some other compelling reason.
Rov_Scam
3hr ago
We went to live music at a bar
That just seems like a bad idea for a second date in general. You're still trying to get to know the person; the last thing you want is an event where you stand next to each other and have to scream to be heard, if you're even supposed to be talking at all during these things.
Rov_Scam
3hr ago
I hate to be this presumptuous, but I think I've figured out your problem. When you say "Leftist", do you mean actual political comments or simply self-identification as a liberal? If it's the former I can understand but if it's the latter then you're eliminating about 60% of women right off the bat. Galup studies show that 40% of women aged 18 to 29 self-identify as liberal, but when you break it down to specific issues they identify with liberals over age 30 closer to 80% of the time. I have reason to suspect that women on Hinge are more likely to be liberal, so I think my 60% estimate is in the ballpark. Pretty much all the profiles you describe as being in your wheelhouse are going to be from single women. I have seen very few conservative profiles, and the vast majority of them were generic and involved girls who were aiming for a performative kind of Fox News-style hotness. There were also some who were obvious rednecks, but few of these came across. The number of interesting profiles from conservative women was vanishingly small to the point that I honestly can't tell you if I ever even came across one. I have seen interesting profiles from moderates and apoliticals (people who simply don't list anything are more or less uninteresting by default), but again, these are a minority of profiles, and interesting women are more likely to be liberal.
If you're not dismissing these women right off the bat and are sending likes to them, that also explains the problem. Even if a woman doesn't performatively mention politics on her profile, it doesn't mean that they're not important, or even a dealbreaker. Since you're presumably not advertising yourself as liberal, and distinguishing yourself on these apps is of critical importance, why would any of these liberal women date you when there are plenty of liberal men out there? This is going to be a tough pill to swallow, but, depending on what you're actually doing, your politics are eliminating somewhere between 20% and 60% of potential matches. While it's good to be selective and not overmatch, this one criterion is correlated with the others such that the women who meet all your other criteria are more likely to be liberal.
The bigger problem, though, is that you're actively trying to screen out normies. I looked through your post history, and it appears that IRL you've surrounded yourself with a crowd that is more than a little offbeat. You describe certain character types as people that you come across regularly who, while I may have run into someone fitting the general description from time to time, it isn't often, and never anyone in my actual social circle. And I have a pretty diverse social circle. The criteria you set forth don't sound particularly bad in theory (none of those are things I personally look for), but I don't know how you're actually putting this into practice. My guess is that you're unconsciously selecting for weirdos, and weirdos act, well, weird. The thing about normies is that they act normal. 95% of normies don't flake out on dates, or ask about pronouns, or do any of the things I see you describe. I hate to give advice, but start going after the normies. Don't worry about sports, or generic travel references, or true crime podcasts. You may think these people are boring, but it turns out that they have basic social skills. It sounds like the problem isn't that you're overmatching but that you're being too selective, and at that in the direction of the flakiest cohort.
Three days active now. Zero matches.
I wouldn't worry. When I first used Hinge it took about a week to get anything, but after that I was consistently getting enough matches that I stopped looking for new ones. There's a weird feast or famine aspect to it, and while some would attribute that to the algorithm intentionally fucking with you, I think it's to be expected; it would be more suspicious if you were consistently getting the same amount of action. If I were going to theorize, I would suspect that people who have been using the free plan for a while and having success aren't likely to start paying any time soon, so they try to get new users paying early. And the best way to do that is to show them profiles they aren't likely to match with early so they get desperate and start paying, thinking that paying will get them better matches. And in a certain percentage of people, the paying does correlate with getting matches, except they were matches they were going to get anyway, had they waited. But that's just a conspiracy theory that I don't think is true. What is true is that if you make changes to your profile it will give you a little boost. Hang in there for another couple of weeks and see how things go before drawing any conclusions.
Rov_Scam
6hr ago
I used to look at CityData back in the early days, like 2007/2008, but the posts got samey pretty fast, basically "Where should I live?" and people suggesting the same city neighborhoods/suburbs. When the conservative boomers took over it became damn near unreadable. Nobody could post anything in the Pittsburgh forum without the thread quickly devolving into the most predictable conservative talking points; the city is a mismananged, crime-ridden hellhole and would be much better if Republicans whipped it into shape and turned it into whatever exurb they prefer, which is obviously so much better. Everything was a waste of money (even if it was a Federal grant that would have just gone to another city). It was like reading the local news page on Facebook, except it was the same few people who had to get their 2 cents in on everything. At that point I quit even occasionally checking it, only to come back a few years ago and find that at some point the mods made it clear that all politics must be contained in the politics thread, at which point the sub just died, as the only people who were posting at that point were doing so to make cheap political points.
Rov_Scam
23hr ago
For the UFO fans he says he'll keep looking into it but he doesn't have a lot of hope.
Phil Mogg is 78 and has heart problems that already put the kibosh on their last tour. It sucks that he said the band was pretty much done during an election year, but I don't think there's anything the administration can do about it.
Rov_Scam
1d ago
Indoors it just looks like it's overcast outside. Outdoors, it's almost unbearable, with your lungs burning with every breath.
Rov_Scam
1d ago
I once dated a girl who worked for the RAND corporation. She had a graduate degree in sociology or public policy or something equally useless-sounding. As best as I can recall, the job involved performing studies into topics that were so boring they weren't even worth asking about. Like the Regional Industrial Development Corporation commissioning a study to determine how employment outcomes in certain industries for people with 2-year technical degrees compared with other types of training. Based on her lifestyle, I'm assuming the pay was about average.
Rov_Scam
1d ago
I was reluctant to call you out by name specifically because I didn't want to make any untoward implications, so to the extent I may have done so, I apologize. With that out of the way, yes, I understand you're competing with hordes of other guys on these apps and your general desire to not waste your time pursuing women who aren't really that interested. I'm not going to criticize anyone's personal strategy if it works for them. My concern is more that the OP presented a specific problem and, from the 10,000 foot view at least, following your advice doesn't do anything to address the problem. The only one that does is telling him not to overmatch, which is fine on its face, but if the problem is with his selection criteria that's not going to help much. For example, if he's swiping primarily based on hotness, telling him to be more selective just means his match totals will go down and he'll have the pleasure of having hotter women flake on him.
So I'm dubious of everything you say after that because, if you are indeed only dating Type A women, then they probably would have shown up for the date regardless of what you did. As I mentioned in another comment, I never had a problem with cancellations, but I have no tricks to offer other than "assume people will show up to things they agreed to show up for". Beyond that, I understand that you aren't willing to waste your time with people who aren't showing a ton of interest, which is fine, but I don't know that it works as a universal rule. Maybe they aren't that interested. Maybe they aren't that interested now, but will be once the guy they're talking to the most stops talking to them. Maybe they've been having bad luck, are burned out, and just aren't checking for messages that often. I tend to give people the benefit of the doubt. I understand that the nature of these apps encourages bad behavior, and I'm willing to give people a little more leeway than I would IRL. The way I figure it, even if I think the chances are slim, while I wouldn't get my hopes up, cutting bait only takes them to zero. But then again, neither of us are complaining about any of this.
My "rules" only really work for online dating and are there to short circuit the sheer volume of matches and interest women get, to ensure you are able to keep interest romantically not platonically.
Here's the only point of serious contention I have. One of the benefits of online dating is that you don't have to worry about sending the wrong signals. It's not like some girl you meet at a party who ends up friendzoning you because you never showed any explicitly romantic interest; it's abundantly clear to both parties that the only reason you're even talking is because you're looking to date each other. If you're trying to differentiate yourself, suggestive flirting doesn't seem like the way to do it, since flirtatious guys are a dime a dozen. For a lot of them, it's pretty much their entire bag of tricks. I can't find any real data on it, but it's my understanding that the vast majority of guys either don't send messages with likes at all or don't send anything of substance. I have seen stats that suggest that the average message response time for guys is longer than for women. Some women showed little to no interest from the beginning, and I didn't expect much. But of the others, the ones that didn't end up with dates are ones where I wasn't entirely engaged, procrastinated sending messages, or wasn't very thoughtful with them, and they eventually stopped responding. I probably could have converted a decent chunk of these just by putting the work in.
Rov_Scam
1d ago
I already do most of that.
That explains a lot. With the obvious exception of this sentence, you should probably stop taking advice from strangers on the internet. If you follow a set of rules to attract women, the women you attract will be the ones who play by those rules.
Rov_Scam
1d ago
I'm not in Jesusland, but my experiences are similar to yours, so I don't think it's a regional thing. I think it's that there's two general groups which I'll call Type A and Type B. Type A people generally are who they say they are, are generally honest, and are trying to make meaningful connections. There is always going to be a certain amount of bad behavior and game playing, but it's minimal, understandable, and manageable. Looks are obviously important here, but personality, intelligence, and compatibility are more important factors in overall attractiveness. Aside from certain ingrained cultural norms like the guy proposing the first date, etc., men and women tend to act similarly. Type B people see relationships and dating primarily as an extension of some kind of seduction game. Hookups are common, cheating is common, suspicion is common, possessiveness is common. Physical attractiveness is an overriding factor. The men are aggressive and the women capricious.
Generally speaking, people date within their lane. If a Type A guy sees a Hinge profile of a Type B girl, there are subtle hints that direct him to the skip button, and if this system fails and he sends a like anyway, there's a backstop in that the subtle hints on his profile will prevent her from matching. If the mismatch goes any further, and a Type A guy ends up on a date with a Type B girl, it usually ends up in the "Funny Dates from Hell" story archives. The problem arises when Type A people inadvertently send Type B signals and invariably end up on a tragic series of dates with Type B people, causing them to become disillusioned with the process. With men it usually results in their friends remarking that they sure know how to pick 'em. With women it results in a series of loser boyfriends whom their male friends never accept into their circle and who snigger at him behind his back. With men it's easy to write this off, at least for a while, because there's an implication that the guy made a conscious decision to prioritize sex over anything else, though after a while people start to suspect that he might just have bad luck. Women get more sympathy, usually along the lines of "She's such a nice girl; it's a shame she always ends up with such bad boyfriends. If only I knew a nice guy to fix her up with."
I blame bad dating advice. By which I mean most dating advice. Romantic problems aren't exactly uncommon, so there's a vast universe of books, internet articles, Reddit posts by unqualified morons, and other stuff out there, in addition to what is reinforced by TV and movies, that purports to reduce romantic success to a series of easy-to-follow tips. While generalized advice isn't necessarily bad, once you start closely following the rules of the game, the only people who are going to follow along are those who know how to play. And Type A people don't play games. This may sound odd coming from my because I gave out Hinge advice a while back, but Hinge itself is an app and totally is a game and I can tell you how to filter for and attract Type A people. But I made it clear then that once she walks through the door and sits down, you're on your own. At that point you're no longer trying to outcompete some guy on an app but you have her undivided attention, and it's all on you.
Consider the below advice that the guy should send sexualized messages between setting the date and the day of, and to unmatch if a favorable response is not received. Now, I have neither sent such messages nor received any, but I have a lot of Type A female friends who have and say it's a turn-off. I have no desire to send such messages, and if I were to receive one I'd consider it a red flag. If I already had a date planned I wouldn't cancel it due to principle, but I wouldn't go into it with high expectations. Then again, I'm probably already filtering for women who wouldn't send unsolicited sexts to strangers. It's worth keeping in mind that women can follow similar rules if they want to. In fact, there was an entire movement around it in 1996 called The Rules, a thin book of dating advice by two women who would tout its supposed advantages on Oprah and other such shows.
Though the authors never stated it explicitly, The Rules were driven by a strong undercurrent that feminism had been a disaster for women's dating prospects and that what was needed was a good dose of old fashioned traditionalism.
The truth is that nobody is qualified to give advice on how to obtain a long-term relationship. If you're looking for a wife, would you take advice from a guy who's been married five times? If your goal is to simply find a wife, then this guy is evidently good at convincing women to marry him, but few would say that he's any good at relationships. A lot of people on this site would find that idea appealing. What they wouldn't find appealing was the actual rules themselves. They suggested that women should play hard to get, that men should always pay for everything, and that women should basically play all kinds of games designed make the guy practically beg for their attention and should be prepared to cut bait the minute he got a little out of line. In other words, they're basically the female equivalent of the rules @SSCReader gives below. The book was absolutely savaged by feminists, not only because of its retrograde nature but because it treated men like toddlers who are only interested in a toy that somebody else is playing with.
What both positions boil down to is basically fear. Yes, it's true that the person who is less invested has more power in a relationship, and it's also true that some people don't appreciate what they have until faced with the prospect of losing it. What these sets of rules do, though, is see these things as ends in themselves that are to be exploited. On the one hand you have a guy who is in constant fear that his girlfriend isn't that interested and is on the verge of leaving him. On the other hand you have a woman who is only acting the way she is because she is secretly terrified that her boyfriend will dump her if he finds out she actually likes him. Does this sound like the foundation of a healthy relationship? If rules like this have any value, it's that they prevent interaction between members of the opposite sex who are playing by similar sets. A Rules Girl will never have to worry about the SSCReaders of the world, and the SSCReaders will likewise never run into any Rules Girls. But that's as far as it goes. Intelligence isn't reverse stupidity, and landing the kind of person who has nothing better to do than sit by the phone waiting for your call isn't exactly triumph.
Rov_Scam
2d ago
I never really got the point of complaining about Hinge, or of these apps in general. There are probably improvements that could be made, and there's definitely a gamification aspect of it, but in the end all any app can really do is put you in a position to meet people you wouldn't otherwise meet, in a situation where it's clear that you're both single and looking. People compare it unfavorably to the old dating sites from 15 years ago where you'd get to build a profile with a lot of information and a ton of pictures and get to really dig deep to see if you wanted to talk to someone, but that had its downsides, too. I never used one of those sites, but a friend of mine who did said that the profile effectively became the person, and that it took several dates just to get to the point where you felt like you weren't dating the profile (and vice versa). Hinge profiles seem to provide the right amount of information to make a decision about whether you want to start talking to someone, but leave plenty of unexplored territory for conversation. If you're getting dates but aren't finding them enjoyable, my only thought is that you're not being selective enough.
Rov_Scam
2d ago
Sufjan Stevens was #35 on the reader list. Devendra wasn't on either list, an while I like his material, it's a pretty obvious imitation of Marc Bolan's Tyrannosaurus Rex. And while I understand how one could find Dylan's voice or overall media personality grating, I don't understand how someone praising Devendra Banhart and Sufjan Stevens could take issue with his merits as a songwriter, especially considering that the careers of those two don't exist without Dylan.
Rov_Scam
2d ago
I've done the long distance thing before and I'm disinclined to do it again, if it would even be an option. Eventually it gets to the point where a decision has to be made, and it's not a fun decision to make.
Rov_Scam
2d ago
The issue with Martin is that it's well known in the industry that he makes songwriting credits a condition of his production contract whether he actually writes the songs or not, so there's some question of how much of those songs he actually contributed to.
Rov_Scam
3d ago
it was still a chance to meet and talk with an interesting new person, not a bad way to spend a couple hours.
This is why if I'm talking to someone and the conversation has reached the point where I'd normally ask them out, I ask them out, even if I suspect that it's not going to work. I could think of worse ways to spend a couple hours than having drinks with an attractive woman, and I don't know that you can really learn too much without actually meeting someone, so even if I'm pessimistic I'll give them a chance in person. I should add that unless I'm really uninterested I will always try to keep the conversation going long enough to get to that point (which isn't that long), for the same reason; ie that it's always worth actually meeting someone. I don't know that anyone's time is really so precious that they can't spare it, and this comes from someone who typically doesn't leave the office before 7 pm. If I have legitimate commitments that make it difficult to schedule things I actually feel bad about it, though I'm not skipping something I've been looking forward to for a first date that isn't likely to go anywhere.
I can catalog exactly 4 times in my life that a Hinge date has cancelled on me. 2 of them were rescheduled right away and went off shortly thereafter. One went off a year later (long story), and one offered to immediately reschedule but I turned her down because I wasn't that interested. There was also one who agreed to a day but not a place before telling me she ended up deciding to move in a couple months and didn't want to waste my time. In retrospect I should have told her that since I already had the night open I was just going to go to this bar anyway and she could feel free to join me, because I think she might have taken me up on the offer.
Rov_Scam
3d ago
Bacharach and Spector were disqualified on account of being dead. And while Spector had a few hits, he didn't write a whole lot, mostly outsourcing that job to professional songwriters like Carole King.
Rov_Scam
3d ago
The readers' list's inclusion of Lin Manuel Miranda made me realize that the critics may have had a blind spot when it came to people who wrote primarily for the theater. As for Menken, right off the bat I can't count the incidental music he wrote because scoring is not songwriting, and if we include composition in general we have to figure out where people like Phillip Glass, Steve Reich, and Terry Riley fit into the list, and I don't think anyone intended to disturb that hornet's nest. Looking at the part of his career he is best known for, we have Little Shop of Horrors plus a half dozen Disney scores. Each of the Disney scores only includes 6 to 8 actual songs (compared with 12 to 18 for a full-fledged musical). One or two will be rerecorded as pop versions so they can be released to radio (at least after The Little Mermaid), one or two will be well-known for novelty value but won't get anywhere near the pop charts.
At this point his catalog is looking a little thin, but nothing is disqualifying yet. The problem comes when you look at who recorded those hits: Peabo Bryson, Celine Dion, Regina Belle, Vanessa Williams, Michael Bolton. All of those hit songs were Adult Contemporary pap that, had they not had any association with Disney movies, would have disappeared from the public consciousness as quickly as the rest of those artists' respective catalogs. This isn't to say he's a bad songwriter, but I wouldn't put him anywhere near the top 30, let alone call him the greatest living American songwriter.
Rov_Scam
4d ago
Considering that I went to great lengths to explain why relatively minor figures like Young Thug and Bad Bunny should be excluded, there's no way that I'd imply that he who was #1 on the reader list and is widely considered to be one of the greatest songwriters of all time merits dismissal without explanation. Of course he should be included. I'll add that of the 25,000 reader ballots that the Times received, in which readers could select up to ten songwriters, fully 1/3 of them contained Dylan, who finished in first place by nearly 2,000 votes.
Rov_Scam
5d ago
This is one of the rare instances where the edited version for television actually improves on the uncensored original. "Get out of my peaceful cab!" is infinitely funnier.
Representation and Stupid Lists
Over the weekend, Fivehour posted a brief missive that included his disappointment regarding the paucity of black songwriters at the top of the NYT recent list of the 100 greatest living American songwriters. It should be noted that there were actually two lists. The first was an unranked list of the top 30 that was compiled by critics. After that list generated the expected amount of controversy, the Times solicited list submissions from readers, which were then compiled into a ranked top 100. On the original list, 13 or 14 of the top 30 were black, depending on whether you count Mariah Carey. One thing I noticed about the critic's list is that it suffers from another kind of representation problem, the opposite of what Fivehour was talking about. In an apparent effort to avoid offending any constituency, the critics who made the selections cast as wide a net as possible. You can say what you want about the wisdom of the crowd and the biases of the NYT older, white, urban readership, but the reader list acts as somewhat of a correction. First, I'd like to go through each artist on the critic's list and evaluate their worthiness for inclusion.
The Original 30
Nile Rodgers: He was the guitarist and principle songwriter for the disco group Chic, and since disco's critical rehabilitation, he has enjoyed an elevated status. Part of this is because his own contributions to disco—Chic's music and the songs he wrote for other artists, including Sister Sledge and Diana Ross—are among the finest examples of the genre, a world away from stuff by The Village People, KC & the Sunshine Band, and Lipps, Inc. that contributed to disco's demise. A bigger part is that after disbanding Chic he spent the next several decades working with artists as diverse as David Bowie, Madonna, INXS, Beyonce, and Daft Punk, which maintained his profile in the industry at a time when most former disco musicians were in the "Where are they now?" file. While his musical bona fides are unquestioned, most of them are due to his work as a producer, not as a songwriter. Chic only had a few pop hits, not many more R&B hits, and theirs is not a catalog where critics are pointing to a lot of hidden gems. He didn't write a ton of hit songs for other artists, either. His career as a hit songwriter was pretty much over by 1983, and he seemed disinclined to contribute material for records he was producing. The notable exception is "Get Lucky", for which he received a songwriting credit, along with everyone else who was in the studio that day. His inclusion on this list is suspicious and ultimately not okay.
Lucinda Williams: If you've spent any amount of time listening to your local public Adult Album Alternative radio station, you've heard Lucinda Williams. She's a critical darling and avatar for the urban hipster's idea of what "Americana" should be: Country-ish songs about gravel roads. As a cult artist, she isn't going to be judged based on how many hits she wrote, only the overall quality of her output, which is high. I have no problem with this inclusion, though I admit that I'm a member of her target demographic.
Stevie Wonder: If you want to nitpick, you can argue that he had a lot of help before Motown gave him full control in the early 1970s, and that the quality of his work fell off a cliff after the mid-80s, but let's be real here—he was a teenager in his early years and his peak lasted about as long as one can reasonably expect. And what a peak it was. Wonder's greatest strength was that he wasn't afraid to stretch the boundaries of what was harmonically possible in R&B. Like the Beatles, though, he was able go off the reservation and still remain massively popular. This one is a no-brainer.
Jay-Z: No rapper I would pick will ever end up on one of these lists, but if you have to choose someone mainstream, Jay-Z is about as good as you're going to get.
Paul Simon: With Simon & Garfunkel, he was able to take what should have been massive epics and shoehorn them into three minute pop songs. Solo, he was able to branch out stylistically, eventually landing a hit album based in South African pop music at a time when most artists of his generation were vainly attempting to conform with 80s trends. Another no-brainer.
Taylor Swift: You would think that someone as famous as Swift who has been around as long as she has would have tons of songs that would be familiar to the general public whether they liked it or not. I will admit that I can identify a song as being by Taylor Swift upon hearing it, whether I've heard it before or not. Aside from Love Story and Shake It Off, though, I wouldn't be able to tell you the title, or even tell you whether I had heard it before. Her music is so bland that it simply goes in one ear and out the other without the brain taking note of anything. Internet music guru Rick Beato pointed out to Lex Fridman a few months ago that for an artist as popular as she is, she has never once been at the forefront of any musical development. Her modus operandi, instead, is to put her finger in the wind and capitalize on the sounds that others have already popularized. Her actual songwriting skills are rather limited, as they involve basic melodies and paint-by-numbers chord progressions. Beato also noted that only two academic books have been published on the topic of Swift, one about her lyrics and one about her marketing sense. There is nothing to date analyzing her actual musical contribution. One cannot imagine the same being true of Stevie Wonder. She should not be within a mile of this list, though by excluding her the critics would have caused a riot. After all, any reviewer giving one of her albums less than five stars or pointing out any flaws whatsoever risks their own personal safety, so I'll give the NYT a pass on this one.
Brian and Eddie Holland: 2/3 of the famed Holland/Dozier/Holland songwriting team, who were responsible for more Motown hits than you can shake a stick out, including most of the hits by The Supremes and Temptations. You can claim that they shouldn't be included due to the passing of Lamont Dozier, but his being dead doesn't diminish them as songwriters. They shaped the sound of a generation made an indelible mark on the music of generations to come. Easy inclusion.
Missy Elliott: I'm going to put this in the Jay-Z category where I admit that I don't know enough to make a decision on this, though if I were compelled to include a female R&B songwriter from that generation Alicia Keys would be my first thought.
Lionel Richie: This is an interesting one. From 1974 to 1981 he was the mastermind behind the Commodores, and his contributions thereto would be enough to include him on my personal list. From 1982 to 1987 he was a popular solo musician whose material hasn't aged well and was, for many years, the but of jokes. Beginning in the mid-2000s he reinvented himself as a generalized music celebrity who people know had a career at one point but which career nobody seems interested in revisiting. Critics almost certainly included him solely on his Commodores material, using his unrelated contemporary popularity as a defense against people saying "Who?" The result is that his inclusion is both deserved and undeserved at the same time.
Dolly Parton: I was in Gatlinburg on vacation a few years ago and a friend of mine, who was taking his kids to Dollywood the following day, said at cocktail hour that he couldn't understand her popularity because the only songs of hers he could think of were "Jolene", "I Will Always Love You", and "Islands in the Stream", which she only gets half credit for. I added "9 to 5" to the list, and can personally name several more songs, but not ones he, or anyone else, would be familiar with. That being said, her work is critically acclaimed, and she probably has a ton of country hits that my friend wouldn't know about, but so does Conway Twitty. This is a Lionel Richie situation on steroids, and since I'm only inclined to include one such performer on the list and I like him better, I'm dumping her from mine.
Young Thug: Evidence of the critics' compulsion to include modern artists, including ones whose contributions are actively detrimental to the genre. Hard pass.
Diane Warren: Another interesting selection. Warren is the kind of hook-for-hire songwriter who you call when you need a readymade hit for a famous artist who is incapable of writing their own material. While she may have written some of the biggest hits of the 80s and 90s, they were clearly designed to move units, and nobody would call them their favorite songs. I get that the critics wanted to include a behind-the-scenes songwriter who didn't perform, but I doubt anyone things that the proliferation of generic power ballads was a good thing. Pass.
Josh Osborne, Brandy Clark, Shane McAnally: Simultaneously the most and least baffling conclusion. Least baffling because the critics clearly felt compelled to include someone writing contemporary country music. Most baffling because this isn't an actuall songwriting team but three people who occasionally collaborate with each other and always collaborate with someone. Another example of ham-fisted representation for a popular genre that sucks. Dump all of them from the list.
Fiona Apple: She gained prominence in the late-90s for being better artistically than one would expect a teenage girl to be, and has been mildly overrated ever since. It's clearly a critical darling inclusion, but I'm not going to complain about it too much, since her songs are at least tolerable, if not quite as good as advertised.
Babyface: Apart from the question of whether we need representation for 90s R&B, at least this is the most obvious pick. Then again, as many hits as this guy wrote, few people remember them today. Bland R&B balladry tends to disappear down the toilet of history pretty quickly. Pass.
Stephen Merritt: Another critical darling. I have listened to all 69 of the love songs he is known for, and maybe a half dozen merit a second listen. He hasn't done anything since, and his work from before ranges from mediocre to awful, and everything he does is excessively twee. I'll never understand the critical appeal. Hard pass.
Romeo Santos: Latin music exists almost wholly apart from the mainstream, and the critics accordingly had to select a big name that nobody had ever heard of. I have no idea how deserving this guy is, but Reuben Blades more or less invented salsa music and isn't on the list. Now, Mr. Blades was born in Panama, but since he spent the bulk of his career as a New York musician I won't hold that against him.
Carole King: As a younger woman, she stayed behind the scenes and wrote a healthy number of 60s pop hits along with her lyricist then-husband, Gerry Goffin. As a somewhat older woman she had solo success in the burgeoning singer-songwriter movement of the 1970s. Easy inclusion.
Outkast: An odd choice but not one worth complaining about.
Mariah Carey: Her music was the soundtrack of my childhood. Particularly the shitty parts of my childhood, like standing in a store for three hours while my mother looked at clothes, or sitting in the back of a hot 1986 Pontiac between two car seats with no way to change the radio. She, too, would be relegated to "Where are they now?" file if a Christmas song that she wrote hadn't become popular 20 years after its original release. Like everything else Carey wrote that was even remotely good, it was ruined by being played to death. Hard pass.
Willie Nelson: Another multi-stage musician. In the 60s he wrote hits for other artists like Patsy Cline while his own career foundered. In the 70s he came into his own as a progenitor of outlaw country and made a name for himself with a series of critically acclaimed hit albums. In the 80s he capitalized on his success with a bunch of pop hits that were halfway decent if not great. In between all of this he expanded his boundaries by releasing albums that explored genres he had no business exploring. Easy inclusion.
Kendrick Lamar: For years, the top-rated album on online review site RateYourMusic was Radiohead's OK Computer, which made sense because it appealed to music snobs but was mainstream enough that the general public would have heard of it. It was such a perfect selection for #1 that it was surprising when To Pimp a Butterfly overtook it a few years back. I'm not the biggest fan of Lamar, but he's a much better selection for this list than Young Thug, and I'll voice my approval just to show I'm not entirely out of touch.
*Valerie Simpson: Another Motown songwriter, best known for her work with her late husband Nick Ashford. But aside from Ain't No Mountain High Enough and the other songs they wrote for the Marvin Gaye/Tami Terrell collaboration, their work is pretty thin. Does a single iconic song make up for an otherwise underwhelming career? Maybe.
Bob Dylan: I'm not even going to address this.
Lana Del Ray: She started off as a pop musician but came into her own as a legitimate singer-songwriter. If you want to include someone with pop credentials who can actually write music, she's a much better option than Taylor Swift. No problem with this selection.
The-Dream: The 2000s equivalent of Babyface, and a stand-in for Beyonce. The merit of his inclusion is likewise dependent on whether you think his material is any good. I don't, so I'll pass on this guy.
Jimmy Jam and Terry Lewis: They came to prominence in the mid-80s as Janet Jackson's producers and the architects of the sound that defined the era. Like Nile Rodgers, their primary contribution is more through production than songwriting. Besides Jackson and boy band New Edition, their credits are pretty thin. The sound also aged poorly and, unlike disco, hasn't had a contemporary revival. The 80s aesthetic that is popular nowadays relies more on synth-pop than what they were doing. Pass on these guys.
Bad Bunny: Maybe he merits inclusion due to his mainstreaming of Latin music. Maybe in ten years he'll be remembered as well as Marc Anthony. A little to early to start putting him on these kinds of lists, but if you need to include a contemporary Latin artist, I don't know who else you'd pick. Pass for me.
Bruce Springsteen: I always felt that Bruce was overrated and I find his working man schtick tiring. Even as a musician, the guy never worked a day in his life; his first album was a hit and in a few years he was the hottest thing going. If they wanted to include a heartland rocker, Bob Seger has him beat in the authenticity department, as he struggled for years before he finally broke through outside of Michigan, and his songwriting catalog can go toe to toe with Springsteen's. I'm in the minority with this, though, so I can't complain.
Smokey Robinson: Another architect of the Motown sound and an obvious choice.
In all, I can endorse about half of these selections. Now let's look at the people who made the top 30 of the reader's poll who weren't on the original list:
**5. Billy Joel: He's had more hits than you can shake a stick at, and has been continuously popular despite not releasing anything new since 1993. In the age of punk, though, his music was seen as lightweight, and he had a similar popular perception until relatively recently, when younger people started to admit that he was actually pretty good. The stigma was slow to disappear among rock critics, and it seems nobody wants to give him too many accolades. His exclusion from the list was criminal.
9. James Taylor; 11. Jackson Browne; 14. Randy Newman: In the 1970s, there was an entire singer-songwriter movement where musicians who would in a previous era would have stayed in the shadows and written material for more obvious pop stars were encouraged perform and record albums. The result is that there's an overabundance of these types, and any list that seeks to be representative has to include a few representative examples. Carole King and Paul Simon were the lucky ones here, as their careers predated the movement and were thus the most qualified on paper. Is Jackson Browne a better songwriter than Diane Warren? Would you rather listen to The Pretender or Aerosmith's 90s material? I don't even think this is a legitimate question. Especially with regards to Newman, who also wrote a lot of songs that are better known through cover versions.
12. Tom Waits: It says something that a guy who is effectively a cult musician and a critical darling made it this high on a reader's poll. That doesn't happen unless there's something transcendent about the quality of the work.
15. David Byrne: For as much as the list tried to be representative, the critics seem to have forgotten about the punk/new wave era entirely, possibly because it was largely a British phenomenon. But it's still odd, because these guys, and Talking Heads in particular, are usually critical darlings. I'd definitely include him.
16. Stevie Nicks: The compilers of the reader's poll admitted that this was a hard one to score, as some people just wrote "Fleetwood Mac", which had three principle songwriters, Nicks, Chritine McVie, and Lindsey Buckingham. Complicating matters further is the fact that McVie is British and thus ineligible. Buckingham was the more prominent songwriter (and never went through an addict phase), but isn't as famous. I have no problem including Nicks, but I understand why the critics would avoid this hornet's nest.
19. Jason Isbell, 20. Jeff Tweedy, 21. Brandi Carlisle: See Lucinda Williams and the NPR crowd's obsession with Americana musicians. If this is purely a question of songwriting quality without regard to popularity, then you can make the case for either of them, but since we already have Williams as the Americana stand-in, there was no reason to include them. If I'm only naming 30 people I'm not putting any on my list.
22. Donald Fagen: Steely Dan is one of my favorite bands, so I obviously would put him on the list. His songs are also unlike anything else in music, so you don't have the subgenre overrepresentation issue. The problem is that everyone thinks of Steely Dan and not of him as a songwriter.
23. Neil Diamond: See Billy Joel. Massively famous, massively talented, and massively uncool. The youngs might belt Sweet Caroline in bars to the point where it becomes irritating, but there's no contemporary appreciation for I Am, I Said, or Play Me. As an unapologetic Neil Diamond fan, I would include him on this list, but I'm sympathetic to the arguments against, namely that much of his material is crap, to a greater degree than Billy Joel.
24. John Fogerty: It seems like the critics must have just forgot that people in bands can also write songs. This guy was Americana before Americana even existed, and even if you want the list to be representative, he's more deserving than Lucinda Williams.
25. REM: Almost certainly this high in the reader poll because of their cult material from the 80s and not their hits from the 90s. Six months ago I would have passed on these guys, but I saw Paul Shannon perform their non-hits back in March and the concert was so good that I'm no longer sure. Then again, I'd place them ahead of anyone I crossed off the critic's list, with the possible exception of Nile Rodgers.
26. Patti Smith: She was both punk and singer-songwriter. She was also a poet. She's also massively overrated, with most of her "songs" consisting of her rambling on stage while people like Bob Quine wail on guitars in the background. And the song she's best known for (Because the Night) was written by Bruce Springsteen. Pass.
27. Don Henley: One line in one movie made an entire generation hate these guys, not that there was much to love about them before. That being said, see my above comments about people being in bands not getting nearly enough respect as songwriters. I don't know if he makes my top 30, though.
30. Jimmy Webb: See Valerie Simpson. The NYT must have the smartest, most astute readership in the world for him to rate so high. Webb wrote a few hits in the late 60s—MacArthur Park, Galveston, By the Time I Get to Phoenix, Up, Up and Away—before trying to make it as a singer-songwriter and not having much success. He might have done better had he continued to write for other people, though the market for outside songwriters in the 70s wasn't good, and wouldn't pick up until schlockmasters like Warren came to prominence in the 80s. I make the comparison to Simpson because although he didn't write that many hits, he also wrote Wichita Linemen, which, like Ain't No Mountain High Enough, is in contention for the greatest song ever written.
So let's tie it all together by looking at who got booted from the critic's top 30:
- Nile Rodgers, #78
- Jay-Z, #38
- Missy Elliott, not on readers' list
- Young Thug, not on readers' list
- Diane Warren, #34
- Josh Osborne, etc., not on readers' list
- Fiona Apple, #32
- Babyface, #97
- Stephen Merritt, not on readers' list
- Romeo Santos, not on readers' list
- Outkast, #62
- Mariah Carey, #41
- Valerie Simpson, #73
- Lana Del Ray, #37
- The-Dream, not on readers' list
- Jimmy Jam & Terry Lewis, not on readers' list
- Bad Bunny, #54
From the original critic's list, readers chose to boot 8 of 13 (or 9 of 14 if you include Carey) black musicians out of the top 30, and 4 of them out of the top 100 entirely. While crowd-sourced lists are usually suspect, this list was compiled in response to comments about the original list, and thus the responders read the original article, were familiar with the justifications, and ultimately disagreed. It's easy to look at Swift's high ranking and label the readership as ignorant, but they also elevated Jimmy Webb to #30, despite him not being mentioned on the original list, and he should certainly be in the conversation despite not being a household name and not representing the Americana that the NYT readership has a hard-on for.
The point I'm trying to make here is that we can take a group of experts and have them put together a list that's supposed to be representative, and end up with a list that everyone agrees is terrible. It's not even clear that they succeeded in the first sense, since there aren't any country songwriters who were primarily active between circa 1990 and 2010 (unless you count Taylor Swift at the tail end of this period). It would be one thing if there simply weren't anyone prominent enough to merit inclusion, but that ignores the existence of Dwight Yoakam, who was both popular and the kind of guy whom critics slobber over. The list also ignores R&B from between Motown and disco. Why not include Kenny Gamble and Leon Huff, who proctically invented the Philly Soul sound in the 70s and wrote for groups like The Intruders, The O'Jays, and the Stylistics? Is Fiona Apple really the best representative of alternative rock songwriting? Why is the list so thin on rock songwriters in general?
The reason is that you can't please anybody, and, despite my disagreements, the critics' list is as good as anything. Because attempts at being representative, as misguided as they often are, can be better than the alternative. What if the list were just a bunch of country songwriters, or a bunch of R&B songwriters, or pro songwriters that nobody had heard of? People would complain that the compilers were too myopic and were unqualified to compile such a list by virtue of their ignorance. In this sense, the NYT's format was sneakily good—release an unranked list of critics' selections, then invite the public to chime in. The got additional mileage when they evaluated the suggestions that the readers liked but that the critics had ignored. I honestly think that this format is better than putting out a critic's list that is overly curated to avoid controversy (like what VH1 used to do) or simply putting it out to the vote (which ends in Rolling Stone's best albums of the millennium list having Limp Bizkit at #2). The emphasis is less on the list itself than on the discussion, which is the way it should be, and I'm glad that this is the way they chose to do it now that it's technologically possible to have such a discussion.
Rov_Scam
6d ago
I don't understand the people who are claiming that McConnell is secretly dead, because hiding something like that wouldn't make sense. Bashear has no power to appoint a replacement, and one would think that the inconvenience of running an election for a guy to serve less than six months would be preferable for the seat being effectively vacant.
Then why did you ask for another date? I can understand not having many options and wanting to give someone a second chance, but it seems like you were setting yourself up for failure by intentionally sandbagging. If you don't want to talk go miniature golfing or do something else where pauses in conversation aren't uncomfortable.
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