CLASSIC ROCK TRACKS POLL voting thread -- deadline July 15 -- VOTING CLOSED

haha "spirit of radio"

Just want to make sure that everybody is voting for "Spirit In the Sky." That is all.

― voodoo chili, Sunday, July 6, 2014 10:29 PM (Yesterday) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^

^^^ Not much of a classic rock radio listener, but I'm pretty sure my local doesn't play this anymore, if they ever did.

such a weird song. one of the coolest, sleaziest-sounding riffs ZZ Top never wrote, and then homeboy starts singing about having a friend in Jesus.

Yes. The song itself was simple, when you’re writing a song you keep it simple of course. It wasn’t like a Christian song of praise it was just a simple song. I had to use Christianity because I had to use something. But more important it wasn’t the Jesus part, it was the spirit in the sky. Funny enough… I wanted to die with my boots on.

^Never knew this!

Haha, was just listening to the Norman Greenbaum album! Unfortunately it has no other death-worshiping drone-rock anthems, but it does have some pleasant singer-songwriter odes to the good country life in a James Taylor/down-south horns mode - "Jubilee," "Junior Cadilac." Actually it's all pretty listenable. "Spirit in the Sky" is top ten classic rock: "Draggin' The Line" gone horribly wrong, optimistic on paper but an Altamont bad trip on record.

death-worshiping drone-rock anthems
i never thought of it that way, but sure! spirit in the sky was right up there with sultans of swing for radio songs i loved as a kid, like ages 4-6
it really is funny realizing how classic rock radio molded my brain at an early age
it's kind of embarrassing tbh!

it really is funny realizing how classic rock radio molded my brain at an early age

otm. revisiting all this music has turned out to be deeply spiritual to me in a way I didn't expect.

Total death-worship. Jesus gets name-checked but when I diiie is clearly the real attraction here.

Death is pure love iirc

By extension: Death is like Oxygen.

You get too much, you get too high. Not enough and you're gonna live.

http://i1.ytimg.com/vi/qteq21CvDRE/hqdefault.jpg

http://fivethirtyeight.com/features/why-classic-rock-isnt-what-it-used-to-be/

Beginning to think ILX is the rest of the internet's lab rat.

Fuck "R.E.M. is now classic rock."

Will be interesting to see how our countdown lines up with those top tracks.

“We start from a set of artists and use a lot of complicated math to extrapolate the rest of the universe if those artists are the the center of it,” McDonald said. In order to define a genre, first McDonald has to find out the relationships among different artists. To do that, he relies on a mountain of data that The Echo Nest collects from users and elsewhere. “We have listening histories and machines that go read the web,” he said. “We read charts, we read reviews, we read blog posts, we read news articles, Wikipedia entries, pretty much anything we’re legally allowed to read.”

reading between the lines: your ILX poll votes matter!

:D

lool u know that's an ILX poster being quoted, right?

Whoops, didn't notice that. Hi Glenn!

Oh ha, totally didn't make that connection either!

I should have nom'd Zep's take on "Traveling Riverside Blues", since for years the only place you could hear it was during "deep cuts" on classic rock radio

was thinking about that as I consider cutting all Zep except "Hey Hey What Can I Do" for similar reasons

otm, the thing is I really cannot imagine a classic rock station of any merit not playing "When the Levee Breaks" - but yeah, if it had to be only one, "Hey Hey What Can I Do" would kinda be the right one.

also how tf did Fairport Convention's "Genesis Hall" make this but T. Rex's "20th Century Boy" get cut

i was more likely to leave in a song i haven't heard on the radio if the same band didn't also already have other songs that were clearly far more popular.

Have never heard any T-Rex on CR besides "Bang a Gong" but my status as an expert on this kind of thing has more or less been torn to tatters.

I've heard "20th Century Boy" occasionally.

"20th Century Boy" entered the US consciousness when it was in a Mitsubishi commercial 12-15 years ago.

tbh I've never managed to get it straight vs. "21st Century Digital Boy," which I heard probably once, at age 12 or 13, in a parked car at Atlanta's Toco Hills shopping center. Not on Classic Rock Radio.

xxxpost yes! "hey hey what can I do" is the most Classic Rock Radio zep

Fuck "R.E.M. is now classic rock."

agreed, but "The One I Love" is still classic rock canon.

https://espnfivethirtyeight.files.wordpress.com/2014/07/classicrock_grx_final1.png

Glad to see Seattle gets all Yessed out.

I left in hey hey what can I do and one other zeppelin song that I consist to be particularly crr.

I'm pleased to note that I've already received 14 ballots and we're less than 50% through the voting period. I've responded to every e-mail I've gotten, so let me know if you sent one and haven't heard back from me.

I used to hear "Jeepster" a lot, almost as much as "Bang a Gong." Never heard "20th Century Boy" publicly aired except for that car ad.

green grass and high tides is such a (literal) jam

^^^ this needs to be repeated frequently.

FRANKENSTEIN, ppl

and Free Ride.

AND Slowbird

omg slowbird

Writing in slowbird

Danger: slowbird

is there anything more classic rock than being called 'the florida guitar army'

The master list of songs from the fivethirtyeight article:
https://github.com/fivethirtyeight/data/blob/master/classic-rock/classic-rock-song-list.csv

Correction (1:23 p.m., July 7, 2014): A previous version of this article misspelled Thin Lizzy.

the classic rock canon sorted by year of release can only be modelled as a bell curve centered on 1975 IMO

looks more like 78 tbh

free ride so awesome!!!!

I always get it muddled up in my head with Free's 'All Right Now', just bc of 'free' appearing in both.

'All right now' is one of those trap songs, where you remember it being cool and you dig hearing it after a long time and then you're like OH WAIT THIS SONG GOES FOR 900 YEARS FUCK OFFFFFFFFF

rong