Pfunk is a band of eras (and a tangled history). Really early it was Parliament: standard Motown vocal R&B. Funkadelic was an acid rock band…Maggot Brain is as fine as albums come and Hazel’s guitar work on the title track is second to none. The height of the band — imo — was when Clinton managed to steal Bootsy and Maceo from James Brown. That period has the complex gospel vocals of Parliament mixed with the acid rock of Funkadelic and the pure funk of the JB’s. At a certain point, the band became something of a parody of itself…or maybe it was too much coke and LSD. Still, it’s hard to argue with ‘Return of the Intergalactic Doodoo Chasers”.

Fela was actually pre-Boomer (being born in 1938), and even the Godfather of Soul gave him credit for the birth of funk. Big bands…though the total of 70 mostly being made with his multiple wives being on stage…lots of horns and the deepest Afrobeat funk grooves ever laid down.

Try “Black Man’s Cry”, recorded in Germany in ’71 with Ginger Baker sitting on the drums:
http://www.last.fm/music/Fela+Kuti/_/Black+Man%27s+Cry

On why the Beatles stopped touring, though, here’s a thought–Lennon and McCartney started playing together in 1957, and Harrison joined them in 1958 (at age 14!). That’s five or six years of non-stop band playing (including Liverpool and Hamburg, and wherever else they could get a gig) before the Stones, PF, or The Who even got together–and about 10 years before Zep got started. That’s a lot of touring back in the days when touring was actually hard, stages and audiences were small, technology was primitive and the music was mostly American R&B. And something no other band in the TOR (since the second round, anyway) can lay claim to. And if you listen to the first two albums, before they really hit their stride as songwriters, you can hear what a tight, working rock and roll band they really were, even though none was a great instrumentalist. So maybe they were just tired. Or maybe they just decided they couldn’t do the music in their heads on stage. Or maybe it was Yoko. It’s history now. But no one should doubt what a good rock band they were, in addition to everything else they became, before anyone else in this TOR even got together.

And I will go listen to Fela Kuti, Lex. Can’t say I was impressed by Pfunk, but I’ll give it another try. My favorite group of all time, btw, is Startled Insects–and I couldn’t even begin to tell you what kind of music they played.

Of course, Boomers are immune to straw men and smoke screens. They don’t have opinions…only unassailable facts, even on subjective matters of taste. That is, Boomers are of mythological importance to themselves. (Or, everything else that was to come from the Boomers fizzled out in hypocrisy so the great tunes are about all they have left.)

Iron Maiden only received 2% of the vote when they came up; this tournament is not about Xers if Maiden can be completely ignored.

I was raised on Boomer rock, and while there have only been a few bands in this tournament that i haven’t heard of (and a few more that i’ve heard of but never really heard), there haven’t been more than 10 that i would actually listen to on anything like a regular basis…certainly no more than that that i would pay money for. I only had a couple of dogs in this fight, and for the most part they were ignored or ridiculed. But take all this with a grain of salt; i’d rather listen to Fela Kuti or Pfunk than most of these bands so i’m obviously an idiot.

Sam: Plant v. Waters – I’ll choose the opening lines from the most famous song from the most famous albums by each band:

Plant: “There’s a lady who’s sure/All that glitters is gold/And she’s buying a stairway to heaven….”

Waters: “Money/Get away/Get a good job with more pay and you’re okay….”

Never said Plant wasn’t awful – just that he was better overall than Waters – this may be saying one pile of shit stinks a little less than another, I admit….

As for your claims about my claims about Xers and Boomers – do you actually read the comments in these threads? I can’t speak to the Boomer/Xer data Quantserv offers – and neither can you – I can and did make inferences from commentary here in these threads – most of which comes from Xers….

fikshun: I think you’re under estimating The Beatles. Yes, that unity thing you speak of is there – at least in one interpretation of their nonverbal behavior. But we’re talking about the guys who developed their “mak show” on the Reeperbahn in Hamburg’s red light district – and who had to do the “smarten up” to suit Epstein…. Imagine them released from that as they were in that brief shining moment atop 3 Savile Row….

As for your “mind/body” dichotomy – there’s more at work there than just intellect v. physicality. The Beatles gave us SGT. Pepper, to be sure, but whole chunks of THE WHITE ALBUM and ABBEY ROAD are body music. As always, The Fabs did both apples and oranges well….

Ann: as always, you slay me….

Interesting. Maybe this is why I prefer Led Zeppelin. Maybe this is also why I’m intensely irritated by the insistence on “Xers are this, Boomers are that.”

When I work, I create with my hands and eyes to physically manipulate fiber and metal and clay and paint. I improvise every moment, whether it’s outcome or method or both, and when I teach there is a difference in venue and materials, but very little in the sheer volume of constant experimentation. A good classroom is a laboratory and in mine I rarely sit. In private life I dance, and do other things, hard and completely in the moment. I value technology when it helps me do what I already want to do. Wii “sports” horrify me. I look at the ground when I’m walking to see what’s down there. I know where the subterranean rocks are in my garden.

So I don’t think it’s only about body versus mind; it’s about damn good body music versus second-rate mind music. World-weary is so… easy. It’s a first step, maybe, and good if it jumpstarts other people’s thinking, but lyrically that’s where Pink Floyd seemed to get stuck. I’m an Xer; I’m a harsh critic of navel-gazing. It’s our natural metier.

Could you picture George Harrison jumping up on stage and doing the windmill? I could picture John tucking the body of his Rick between his legs, and thrusting the neck of the guitar out at the audience as he ripped off a raw, nasty solo, but not in the context of the Beatles. They shared microphones on backing vocals. They huddled together on the Ed Sullivan stage. Visually, they were about unity. While John and Paul had insatiable egos, that wasn’t part of the public persona. That was buried beneath the “we’re just four happy lads from Liverpool” visual mystique.

With bands like the Who and LZ, the bigger the stages got, the better they fared. They were all lead musicians who needed the extra space to prowl around and execute their wild stage antics. In fact, before the moniker “heavy metal” came into common usage, my dad said they called what the Who and LZ did “body music”. They made music to move your body to, plain and simple.

The Beatles, and later Floyd, were doing something entirely different. Psychedelia was about moving the mind (in theory). I don’t think the Beatles or Floyd relied on the technology, but they used it as another instrument to further their mind music. For Floyd, the live show couldn’t be about standing around and playing trippy music. It had to be visual and it had to be over the top, but it wasn’t going to happen with jumping around and setting instruments on fire. They explored the medium from the perspective of a mind-music band.

So, really for me, this comes down to the apples and oranges argument of “which do you value more? music you can move to or music for your mind?” The reason LZ doesn’t resonate much any more is that the X-er generation started the transformation of humans into creatures of thought. We don’t jam. We don’t improvise. We sit at computers all day. We execute programs. We’re completely out of touch with our bodies. We don’t dance. We don’t exercise. We dropped out of sport. We’re a generation of over-caffeinated diabetics who push zeros and ones back and forth to one another.

The Boomer generation was about the physical act of protesting against the government. After the Viet Nam War, the government recognized the value of controlling information. War shouldn’t be seen unfiltered on the evening news. People can’t protest against what they’re not aware of. Now it’s become a bit more of an abstract game of the invisible multi-national corporations vs. the blogosphere. It’s not physical anymore.

To me, that’s why Floyd resonates. It’s about the world-weary truths of the human condition; the knowledge that you can’t change anything forever and that any tangible change starts in a mind, not in a body. Perhaps Pink Floyd doesn’t say as much in their music, but maybe their music gives the listener’s mind the space necessary to make that leap.

As for Kiss being about studio wizardry, I laughed a little at that. Destroyer, their one early foray into studio album rock, is one of the least Kiss-like albums in their catalog. They immediately rebelled against it and went back to their old system for subsequent albums. To listen to the typical Kiss studio album is to listen to a band trying to spend as little time and money in the studio as possible, banging out as many takes as possible. They were the furthest thing from a studio rock band.

Speaking of Rock Band, have you played the Beatles Rock Band game? It’s visually stunning. It does a lot to reinvent the fab four as a more Floyd-like creature.

it was hard. i LOVE “the wall.” i recognize that “dark side” was genius, but it’s always been “the wall” that hit me hardest. even before i saw the movie (i didn’t even understand the movie the first time i saw it).

but zepplin just kills me every time i hear anything off the first four albums. i still find myself thinking “holy shit, this is freakin’ good” as if i hadn’t already had that thought a thousand times before.

Yes. Like listening to a very bright, very articulate fourteen-year-old who was forced to read Animal Farm and Lord of the Flies over his summer break and HAS HAD A REVELATION.

On the other hand, Floyd’s lyrics were ambitious efforts to chronicle a variety of social contexts.

Exactly. Like a very bright, very articulate fourteen-year-old who read… oh.

I love it when everyone agrees.

This entire contest has been about Xers attitudes towards rock history. It is about Xer insights into rock’s great artists – and their biases toward these artists, too.

What a counterintuitive observation. And, best I can tell, wrong. According to Quantcast (and I’m not sure how they arrive at these numbers, but they seem about right) S&R has more Boomer readers than Xers. I can’t prove who votes and who doesn’t vote, but the idea that all these results are about Xer opinions doesn’t appear to be supported by any evidence I can think of. We’ve had Boomers pissing all over the idea that any great music has been made since the dawn of the New Wave, though, and I think if we could afford a good reader poll we’d see that while Xer views on Boomer artists have been important, that dynamic falls WAY short of defining the ToR in the way that you assert.

Xers, much younger, in most cases too young to attend concerts to any significant degree during either the festival or arena rock periods, made most of their decisions based on how studio wizardry (at which Pink Floyd excelled) impressed them. And the album that made PF’s career DARK SIDE OF THE MOON, is a (perhaps THE) model of studio wizardry.

This is probably true. The music world was once about recording the live experience. At some point the live show became about reproducing the album. I’m tempted to put my finger on ELO’s New World Record tour here, for all kinds of reasons. But in any case, the shift commenced sometime around Revolver and was complete by about 1974.

Two bands massively popular with Xers are tributes to their bias toward studio wizardry. Those bands? Boston (the obvious choice) and Kiss (the not so obvious one). For many Xers, their first important concert experience was seeing one of these bands. Many of these Xers saw Boston as able to deliver on their studio promise – but realized that studio technology masked some ugly truths about Kiss….

This argument works perfectly if – and only if – Gen X lasted about three years. Kiss, especially, rocketed to stardom and ceased to matter in a very short period of time. So at best this describes the first two years of X. Also, re Kiss, I’d argue that it only describes working class Xers.

The evolution of entire sub-genres like shoe gazer and space rock comes from their attempts to play live what they heard Pink Floyd do in the studio. This they have (with the help of music tech advances) been able to do in some cases brilliantly – and I salute their contribution to rock.

While this is accurate, it does leave out an important piece – which is what happened when you then tried to translate what you’d been doing live back into the studio. Not an argument, just an observation.

But speaking as a Boomer – and, if only by my own claim, a very knowledgeable one because of my own background as a professional rock musician – I believe that Xers over rate Pink Floyd’s greatness – and under rate Led Zeppelin’s. I saw Zep twice – and both times they kicked ass and took names. I saw Floyd once – and it was a study in technology – impressive as it was.

I don’t know. Even if I buy that we overrate Floyd (and I don’t), I think you’re dead wrong that we underrate Zep. Zep was MASSIVELY more important than Kiss or Boston, for instance, and their importance lasted a lot longer. All the Xers I know still see Zep as Rushmore-worthy (who would be the four artists on Mt. Rockmore, I wonder?) and even in the current contest you don’t see Xers dogging them. They’re getting incredible amounts of respect, and I think that’s typical of Xers early and late.

I’ve said earlier in a comment that I see PF’s songwriting (particularly Waters) as over rated. I certainly don’t see it as as good as Page/Plant’s.

This is hysterical. I’ve heard you abuse Robert Plant more times than I can count. You used to quote Dave Fucking Marsh on how bad his lyrics were. On the other hand, Floyd’s lyrics were ambitious efforts to chronicle a variety of social contexts. So who are you and what have you done with the real Jim Booth?

This entire contest has been about Xers attitudes towards rock history. It is about Xer insights into rock’s great artists – and their biases toward these artists, too.

All this invoking of Boomers and THEIR attitudes and biases is so much smoke screen, so much use of straw men. This tourney has been about Xers.

So when fikshun says Pink Floyd resonates more with Xers, he’s articulating the obvious, profound though he sounds in noting this.

Consider this, for a moment:

The transition from the “British Invasion/teeny bopper idol” period (roughly 1963 – 1966) of rock history to the “arena rock period” (roughly 1972-1980) might easily be called the “festival period.” The majority of the stars who emerged during this period (The Who, Jimi Hendrix, Joe Cocker, Janis Joplin, Santana, Led Zeppelin, et al) all share a common characteristic – high energy performance designed to reach the farthest reaches of a festival audience. In all these cases this is powered by sublime musicianship blended near perfectly with great showmanship.

The Beatles’ greatest tactical mistake (and the tragedy of their career) as this transition was taking place was retreating to the studio (withal their raising the rock album to art form) and refusing to take the stage (despite entreaties and offers of piles of cash that would take one’s breath away) and showing audiences that they could play as well as their contemporaries. While Boomers certainly were dazzled by studio wizardry, they valued equally, perhaps more, live musicianship. Hence the great success of festivals and the evolution towards arena rock (and all its eventual excess).

The bands who emerged as the major stars of the “progressive rock” movement of the late 60′s/early 70′s (Pink Floyd, Yes, Emerson, Lake, and Palmer) found ways to use the rapidly improving performance technology of their times to reach arena audiences. While this impressed Boomer audiences, Boomers have a bias toward musicianship (see above). Truth be told, many Boomers would have rated these bands in the following order based on the live musicianship criterion(within their times):

1) ELP; 2) Yes; 3) Pink Floyd.

Consider this:

Many Boomers would rate Queen as high or higher than ELP, certainly higher than PF. Queen’s live musicianship matched their recording wizardry. But they were such boundary hoppers as to be almost irrelevant to the discussion here.

Xers, much younger, in most cases too young to attend concerts to any significant degree during either the festival or arena rock periods, made most of their decisions based on how studio wizardry (at which Pink Floyd excelled) impressed them. And the album that made PF’s career DARK SIDE OF THE MOON, is a (perhaps THE) model of studio wizardry.

Consider this:

Two bands massively popular with Xers are tributes to their bias toward studio wizardry. Those bands? Boston (the obvious choice) and Kiss (the not so obvious one). For many Xers, their first important concert experience was seeing one of these bands. Many of these Xers saw Boston as able to deliver on their studio promise – but realized that studio technology masked some ugly truths about Kiss….

So while Boomers privilege live performance ability equally (but as different experience) to studio wizardry, Xers have the bias of privileging live performance that mimics the studio wizardry they imprinted on. The evolution of entire sub-genres like shoe gazer and space rock comes from their attempts to play live what they heard Pink Floyd do in the studio. This they have (with the help of music tech advances) been able to do in some cases brilliantly – and I salute their contribution to rock.

But speaking as a Boomer – and, if only by my own claim, a very knowledgeable one because of my own background as a professional rock musician – I believe that Xers over rate Pink Floyd’s greatness – and under rate Led Zeppelin’s. I saw Zep twice – and both times they kicked ass and took names. I saw Floyd once – and it was a study in technology – impressive as it was.

I’ve said earlier in a comment that I see PF’s songwriting (particularly Waters) as over rated. I certainly don’t see it as as good as Page/Plant’s. While PF’s studio wizardry is indeed impressive, I don’t see it as more impressive than that of Page and Jones. And live Zep was only surpassed by the greatest live band of all time, The Who. Pink Floyd is more in line with The Eagles – technically perfect, but somewhat sterile.

So I voted for Led Zeppelin.

In any case, can see either of these bands winning and I won’t feel bad either way. I felt like there were probably 11 or 12 bands that deserved #1 seeds and both of these groups are on that list.

As i said before, this isn’t a round robin. The top 4 do not represent the best 4; only those who managed to win their brackets. In theory, #1 is the only one that should be true.

That said, I’m ashamed of those who voted for Led Zeppelin in this one. A great jam band, sure. But they’re probably already further than they deserve. Dr. Slammy is having fun calling this the boomer hall of fame, but Zep has almost no resonance in Gen-X. Pink probably has more resonance with X than they did with boomers. Why is this so close?