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With Poets getting the most votes, it is eliminated and we're down to the final two.
Eliminated Round 1
The Rules
Membership
Save the Planet
Eliminated Round 2
Fireworks
Chagrin Falls
Thompson Girl
Eliminated Round 3
Something On
Vapour Trails
Eliminated Round 4
Bobcaygeon
Eliminated Round 5
Poets
Vote for the song you believe to be the weakest on Phantom Power and after 48 hours, we will remove the song that has the most votes and declare out Champion.
The poll will end Tuesday at 12:34pm Eastern.
Happy voting!
Shane
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The darkest timeline has proven to be true!
ct
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I will take small consolation in Emperor winning after the elimination of Poets. Still recovering after that disappointment.
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Upon closing of the Phantom Power votes, I think things are going to get fairly interesting from here on out. MAW and all other releases going forward, I think we'll end up seeing a lot more diversity/opinions on what is considered the weakest than what we have seen to date.
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potsie - it's roughly analogous to NOIS losing to 'Another Mindight.' :lol:
I suspect that this wildly counter-intuitive result to be explained by a combination of folks voting against 'overplayed' songs, and a related tendency among a certain type of hard-core fan to make a *point* of favouring deep cuts over the obvious choices. There were some close calls in the earlier polls, so I suppose it was inevitable that we'd get a bizarre Black Swan result sooner or later.
Fortunately in the rest of the known universe, 'Poets' will continue to get vastly more love than 'Escape,' as is its due. :wink:
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That's actually a line I cordially dislike 8) I don't agree that we shouldn't discuss and dialogue about our beliefs, with an eye to explaining and better understanding them, and possibly even revising them based on that discussion. In fact it seems very unlike the way Gord Downie actually comported himself - he seems to have been genuinely interested in exploring, discussing, learning, and potentially changing in light of that.
As for the idea that every preference is as good as every other preference, I don't really agree with that either. It's true to some extent, but the notion that surfing porn all day is "just as worthwhile" as immersing oneself in Shakespeare, or that a porn video is "just as good" as Macbeth, is a ridiculously reductive view. I'm sure that many people on this site would prefer to read "Coke Machine Glow" than T.S. Eliot's The Waste Land, but there's no way that Gord's "poetry" can hold a candle to that masterwork - and, again, it's a preposterous leveling that wants to insist that it can. The Waste Land is richer on every level.
As far as these polls go, I've raised this before, but it's still worth asking *why* we prefer the songs we do. Are people selecting certain deep cuts for the reasons I suggest above, i.e., the classic tracks are 'overplayed,' or else the desire of some hard-core fans to distinguish themselves from the masses by favouring more obscure cuts? Neither would represent a fair basis of evaluation IMHO. A third factor is the old "association" game - e.g., if I got laid for the first time while Taylor Swift was playing, I may have powerfully positive associations with Taylor Swift. And that's fair enough, but it doesn't make her a better artist than Gord Downie and the Hip, an ideally (IMHO) we'd try to separate these arbitrary associations from our assessment of a song, as a song.
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I've said this in previous polls on this album, but I initially didn't connect with Poets at all. For the first few years after the PP release, I tended to skip Poets, and I was disappointed it was chosen as the lead single and as one of the songs they played for the Queen at the jubilee. I'm not sure I could really say why, it just wasn't a melody I cared for and lyrics that I couldn't really relate to or apply to something going on in my life (I didn't really want to hear what poets are doing, but I didn't really feel strongly about not wanting to hear about what they were up to either...)
After seeing it live a few times, my view on Poets started to change. Started to love how the audience would breathe life in it, including the little extra live additions ("Bring out your dead!") that usually went with it. It went from being in the bottom 3 on the album for me to where now it's probably around #4 or so. The point here is that I didn't vote against it because it is 'overplayed'. If anything, it's ubiquity at concerts helped me to hear it differently from my initial impressions and move it up my list. In the previous albums here, it's not the deep cuts that I have in my top two songs, but Phantom Power is just different that way for me.
In the end, it's really as simple as Andrew said above. Some of us just would rather listen to Escape and Emperor over Poets, and for me, it's been that way since I first got the album.
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I like your discussion of "Escape," that's good stuff.
On the other stuff, I note that you attribute all attempts to discern better and worse artistic creation as "ego," yet scorn the notion that privileging obscure cuts might also be a form of "ego." Funny how ego is everywhere and nowhere. And as far as the definition of "good" goes, you yourself have a definition - i.e., one that axiomatically reduces any distinctions between artistic work by reducing it all to unfathomable and completely arbitrary personal preferences. In other words, you define "good" in such a way as to make qualitative distinctions impossible. The consequences of this don't make sense; e.g., like many people here, I play some guitar on the side, but I'm a chunka-chunka-chunka primitive rhythm guitar player who is basically incompetent. If I decide that I am "as good" a guitarist as Rob B., or as "good" a singer as Gord D. - let alone Pavarotti - that don't make it so, and no one with the slightest taste or judgement would think it so. (Similarly, my drunken philosophizing does not make me as powerful a philosopher as Nietzsche or Plato, and the "poems" I wrote as a teen don't make me as good as TS Eliot, any more than Gord D's "poetry" can hold a candle to an Eliot, or Yeats, or Larkin, etc.).
Your example of classical orchestral musicians disliking Dylan is interesting, and again, that opens up more useful avenue of discussion. (Interestingly one of my best friends is a classical viola player, and he loves Dylan, but that's a side note). You are absolutely right that it would be ridiculous to assess Dylan by the standards of classical music. He works within a completely different idiom; but that just means he has to be evaluated by different criteria. But that doesn't mean his work can't be *evaluated.* And of course, this 'evaluation' doesn't unfold according to mathematical criteria, but rather is a world of aesthetic judgement. I suspect your basic assumption is that unless something can be quantified (e.g., Bill Gates has more money than me) it cannot be subjected to meaningful assessments.
