Who's In Your Top Ten?

10. The Cast of Monty Python: You may not be willing to admit you like them in public - but with a catalog including Gregorian Chant, medieval lyre, pirate shanties, lounge tunes and Broadway show tunes, you have to admit they know what they're up to. And it's their infamous Spam song and skit that defined all that crap we get in our inboxes. If that's not influential, I don't know what is.

9. Bernard Herrmann: Movie composer extraordinaire. He's the guy to thank each time you hesitate before opening your shower curtain.

8. Ann Margaret: She did a rock opera with The Who, sent Birdie off to war, and managed to conquer Elvis and Fred Flintstone - what artist has
managed that other than this whip-wielding kitten?

7. The Rat Pack: They defined martini-swilling Vegas cool. Without them, we'd all know less about Chicago, New York (alas, no crooning about Philly) and Mr. Bojangles - and the world wouldn't have Swingers or the remake of Oceans 11. How sad would that be?

6. The Beatles: It is said you are either in the Beatles camp, or the Elvis camp. I suppose I prefer head shaking to hip shaking...at least when it comes to music. Besides which - without them, there would have been no Monkees. And without the Monkees, we likely wouldn't have had the Banana Splits. And what kind of whacked-out Saturday morning childhoods would we have had then, I ask you?

5. Billie Holiday: A Philly-born chanteuse whose latter day recordings can make even the sunniest Sunday seeming rainy and bittersweet.

4. Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart: Child prodigy, prolific composer - and they made that fantastic movie about his life. (Also, he wrote some lovely variations for the tune one associates with Twinkle Twinkle Little Star - a song of which I am, perhaps unsurprisingly, fond.)

3. Leonard Cohen: Read the man's lyrics. Seriously. He's a genius.

2. Orpheus: Mythological musician who was so skilled that he could make even inanimate objects dance. He may not have had a top 10 hit, but when your music allows you to traverse hell and come out with your life and soul intact, you deserve to be called the greatest. Well, nearly the greatest.

1. David Bowie: You can leave out his time with Tin Machine (sorry, Thin White Duke), but whether he's a space man, a goblin king, or crooning with Crosby, all of Bowie's glitter is gold. (Except when it's Aladdin Sane blue and red.)

So - this is where my list stands so far^*. Still, I feel as though I skipped quite a number of eras, and perhaps didn't go back far enough. Maybe the Rat Pack need to be bumped to accommodate the cast of Caveman, since they invented music to begin with?

^*Note: Final list may vary greatly from current list.

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