This great forum of ours has hosted a number of fun tournaments in the past, but this time I'm excited to announce an entirely new kind of tournament, both unique in theme and scope. I think music is unique amongst the arts in that it instantly can transplant you back in time to when you first heard a given song (even just a few first notes of it) and I think in a lot of ways music (and not movies or books) often define a generation or a specific time period. So we are setting out to determine the best song (track, piece of music, what have you) of the last 70 years. This means we all get to experience lots of amazing tunes throughout, and we need lots of participants to make this worthwhile.
There are lots of various music lists published online:
The 100 greatest jazz recordings; Top 7,000 Beatles songs; The 1,001 songs with the word "You" in the title you must hear before you die... But everything is subjective. We can go through Billboard charts and pick the top songs, put them in a list, and be done with it, but that's no fun. Everyone knows those Madonna songs or those songs by The Police. But what about the lesser-known stuff that's often overlooked but is often mind-blowing?
Because everything is subjective, there, of course, cannot be a single authoritative best or top list of anything. But as a musical omnivore, I strongly believe good music knows no genre or time or length or place. So this will be an attempt to have our wonderful membership nominate and vote for what they feel is the best music from a given time period, regardless of genre. When considering seconding these upcoming nominations or voting for them when the time comes, I implore everyone to judge the song solely on its musical and artistic merits. It's perfectly okay to dislike a certain genre of music (jazz, heavy metal, gangsta rap, etc.), but we want to be as inclusive as possible and cover as much of the musical spectrum as we can, and I think we can all agree that if a nomination is being made, the person nominating it feels this piece of music - for them - truly represents an iconic sound, a unique performance, or simply something that takes them back and exemplifies that particular period when the song was released.
All this means is that any and all nominees are welcome, but space is limited. Even though this should be a rather epic tournament (or rather, series of tournaments), we can only have so many nominees before things get really out of control. So, here's what we're going to do:
To determine once and for all the greatest piece of music of the last 70 years (not all-time, just from 1945 to 2014), we will need to run 14 separate tournaments, each covering a time period of five years. This will allow us in the end to get to our finalists for these five-year periods, which will then get to face one another in a battle royale for the top spot. The first period of the 1940s (1945-1949), due to its age, will require 56 nominees. All other periods will be at 112 nominees. Altogether we will be nominating and voting on 1,512 tracks!
So here is the general layout we'll follow:
- Period 1: 1945-1949
- Period 2: 1950-1954
- Period 3: 1955-1959
- Period 4: 1960-1964
- Period 5: 1965-1969
- Period 6: 1970-1974
- Period 7: 1975-1979
- Period 8: 1980-1984
- Period 9: 1985-1989
- Period 10: 1990-1994
- Period 11: 1995-1999
- Period 12: 2000-2004
- Period 13: 2005-2009
- Period 14: 2010-2014
Why the 1945 to 2014, you may ask? Well, 70 years seemed like a good round number. We will get to go over all music created post-WWII. And separating our picks into five-year periods is a good idea to pit songs against each other that are closer to the same zeitgeist, since I feel that music (but most everything else, really) changes in five-year periods when it comes to decades. So when we talk about '80s music or '80s movies, there's quite a difference between the early '80s and the mid-to-late '80s.
Anyway, I apologize for this lengthy introduction. I'm just very excited that we are about to get this thing moving. When the actual voting will begin is not entirely clear, but it will all depend on the success of the nomination process, which begins on Saturday,
December 5, 2015. Please use the time until then to think about what you may want to nominate. Nomination threads will be going up in chronological order, several at a time, starting with the first three periods (1945-1959). Some of the greatest all-time classic early rock 'n roll and pop songs came out during this time, as well as some of the best jazz tunes, so this will be an exciting beginning to what I'm hoping will be a very fun, popular, and
definitive tournament.
Participation is very much encouraged and extremely welcomed, but please do follow these guidelines for this nomination process (subject to adjustment):
- You can nominate one track per post, and you can nominate another track after three other members have made their nominations.
- You can second one track per post, and you can second another track after three other tracks have been seconded.
Nominations will need to be seconded in order to make it onto the final list. To make a nomination, please use the following format:
ARTIST - TITLE (YEAR). A nomination should also be supported by a
video, illustrating the song being nominated (though not necessarily the song's official video, especially if it contains a lengthy pre-song scene). Most tracks can be found on YouTube, and that's preferred, but other video hosting services can be used, which can be embedded with your nomination. If you can't find your pick, send me a PM and I will try to locate it for you. However, please do not simply post a link or embed the video so it appears on the page. Since there will be lots of nominations per page and lots of videos, this will be too much to handle for most computers, slowing down the page tremendously. So to make your nomination, please hide the embedded video using the
SPOIL tags (using this spoiler option:
) Don't forget to remove the
s in
https when embedding YouTube links.
All you need to do is first click the "Insert Video" icon:
. Paste your YouTube link, remove the s in https and click OK. The link should stay selected, so click the black SPOIL button, enter your ARTIST - TITLE (YEAR) into the field which appears, click OK, and you're done.
To illustrate, a sample nomination should look like this (and this track is not eligible, since it's from 2015):
P.S.: Feel free to post any questions, suggestions, whatever. Let me know if something doesn't make sense. None of this is set in stone, so if there's a better way, we can change stuff. Once nominations actually start there will be an overall overview thread and a few other dedicated staff members will be helping me with keeping track of everything during that fun but complicated process. Can't wait!
Announcement: The Great Music Tournament of 2016
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