The internet is not a good place to argue with people--did you know that? Bookmark this page so you
don’t forget.
Spent the better part of two days arguing over something on a message board earlier this week. The
argument was tangential to what was being discussed initially, a question posed by me after seeing
the new David Bowie documentary: along with Bowie, who were the most chameleon-like pop stars
ever?
The question was a little vague, though I tried to clarify with three other names that I thought fit
what I was thinking about: Madonna, Dylan, and Neil Young. I mentioned a couple of other possibilities
I was less sure about: Beyoncé and Taylor Swift. It was meant to be a combination of the way these
people presented themselves to the world, and also--the two usually went hand-in-hand--stylistic
changes in their music.
The thread puttered along for a few days--understandably; it’s hard to come up with anyone who fits
the idea as well as Bowie--at which point someone suggested the Isley Brothers. As I wrote in an
online inventory of my albums many years ago, I’m not the biggest Isley Brothers fan, but I do have
five different compilations of their work, covering three distinct phases of their career (and in the
running “mixworthy” section of said inventory, I included “Shout” and “Twist and Shout”--and probably
should have included “This Old Heart of Mine” too). So, while I was aware of their stylistic changes
musically, I said that I didn’t think they were famous enough to qualify; I hadn’t mentioned this yet,
but I realized right then that a certain level of fame was always implied as to who might fit. Bowie,
Madonna, Dylan, Neil Young, Beyoncé, Taylor Swift: they’re all, in my mind, very famous, and when
they change musical direction or reemerge looking completely different than they did a year ago, people
talk about that. They make news (or made, as the case may be; the first four are either dead or old
and not very chameleon-like anymore).
Within half an hour, someone jumped in with an addendum (italicized) to my response: “I like the Isley
Brothers fine, but they wouldn't rise to that level of fame among white people.” Somehow, an assessment
of general fame--I used the term “pop audience,” which to me encompasses people who listen to popular
music of all kinds; to me, it includes everybody--was turned into a racial issue. If we section off
this part of the pop audience, it's being explained to me, the Isley Brothers are famous--and by not
realizing that, I’m probably a blinkered white guy (or worse) who doesn’t know anything about the
Isley Brothers. (The poster of this comment was white.)
Chiming in, another poster (also white) half went after the first poster for making the distinction
between white and black listeners (the Isleys, he pointed out, had played a Pitchfork Festival, with
billing proximate to Stereolab--his comment included an internet acronym that lost me, so I misunder-
stood his point; more on internet-speak later), and half went after me for suggesting that Neil Young
and Lou Reed (another possibility I’d mentioned, although I dismissed him for settling into “regular-
guy Lou” sometime around 1980) are more famous than the Isley Brothers. And at that point, that’s what
the thread became about: are the Isley Brothers as famous as Neil Young and Lou Reed?
To me, the answer is obvious: no. I’m not saying the Isley Brothers aren’t famous, but (as I pointed
out in another comment) fame is relative, and it can’t be measured one way (the first poster threw in a
list of how many Top 40 hits they’d had, including--this seemed very important to those who disagreed
with me--a #1 song of Beyoncé's they’d just collaborated on). I tried to analogize: yes, they’d had a
lot of Top 40 hits, but so did Brenda Lee in her day: did that make her more famous than the Ronettes,
Janis Joplin, or Jimi Hendrix, all of whom had far fewer? Hits and commercial success are a component
of fame, but does that mean that whoever directs the next Marvel film will automatically be more famous
than Jean-Luc Godard, whose films--all of them combined--were probably seen by fewer people than will
see that next Marvel film on its opening weekend? (I’m just guessing there, but you get the point.) I
turned the question back on the message board where all this was taking place, pointing out that while
there are multiple threads on the board devoted to Neil Young and Lou Reed, with hundreds upon hundreds
of posts, the Isley Brothers have eight threads totalling fewer than 200 posts (with seven of them com-
bining for probably 50 posts). Only one response there: that discussion on this message board is not
a good barometer of fame. (To me, how much people talk about someone is one of the best barometers of
fame there is.) I also mentioned how often Neil Young and the Velvet Underground have been covered
by other artists--I’ve got hundreds of covers on my hard-drive--and that I thought that mattered, too.
The last point was dismissed--confirmation bias--the first two weren’t really addressed. A couple of
people (I think I was arguing with about eight at this point) made what I thought were good counter-
arguments, and I said so: one, that I’d overlooked sampling (I assume that the Isley Brothers, espe-
cially their ‘70s work, have been sampled a lot), and two, that Hendrix got his start playing backup
with the Isleys. The second poster I mentioned--the Stereolab/Pitchfork guy--chipped in with a couple
of ridiculous posts: one, a caricature of the Velvet Underground that I think was supposed to be funny,
either as cutting ridicule or in the spirit of “this is so ridiculous it’s funny,” but if anything
reminded me of Greg Gutfeld, that cretin who’s all over Fox, and two, an equation of Neil Young and
Lou Reed with Robyn Hitchcock in the fame department. Onward and downward.
Which brings me to internet jargon--I don’t think there’s anything I despise more these days. By jargon,
I mean all internet acronyms, stylistic tics, ways of phrasing things, and the widespread assumption that
everyone knows what you mean when you engage in this kind of silliness. A couple of examples:
A phrase turned into single-word sentences: Dumbest. Idea. Ever. There were all sorts of useful methods
already around for emphasizing your words; I can’t see that this one has added anything.
The Facebook post that begins with “So”: “So I just wrote this thing,” or “So I just won the Nobel Prize
for physics”--the “so,” I think, is to let you know that geez, this big thing I’m telling you about really
isn’t that big a deal to me, but I’m telling you anyway, because I’m incapable of not telling you, because
it’s a really, really, really big deal.”
And so on--there are many that drive me around the bend. I don’t get the appeal at all. It’s like you’ve
been reading everything people are saying on the internet, and you suddenly notice that everybody’s
saying this one thing, and you decide...what? “I want to use that; I want to sound exactly like everybody
else.”
I bring all this up because, with the argument winding down, someone jumped on the thread--it always
takes courage to join a pile-on--and, in a very theatrical display of incredulity, threw one of these
phrases at me: “_________ (my display name on this message board)...I can’t.” Which is usually, I be-
lieve, rendered as “I can’t even.”
The point there is that my side of the argument--that Neil Young and Lou Reed are more famous than the
Isley Brothers--is so wrong, so hopelessly beyond the pale, that this person can’t even find the words
to express how egregiously wrong I am. And--nudge-nudge--race is again insinuated: the person wondered
if I listened to much R&B, hip-hop, or funk.
Okay. I knew this person enough to respond in a FB message, and I did; no need to share that here. I
wasn’t happy with the question.
The thread had basically (and understandably) scared off everyone by this point, including me, so after
a few more posts, it’s been dormant for a couple of days, where it will hopefully remain forever. Not
wanting to reopen the issue, I’ll post a couple of follow-up thoughts here.
1) Not sure why--it’s not like I consider his word gospel or anything, though I do trust him on the
subject of the Isley Brothers more than some of the people I’d been arguing with--I thought I’d look
up what Robert Christgau has written on them, by which I mean reviews of their albums in his Consumer
Guide. As least in the online version, he’s reviewed 18 albums of theirs, including compilations and a
box set; that would seem to indicate sufficient familiarity with their music, and, by extension, their
relative place in the grand scheme of things. Sixteen of the albums get grades from C+ to a B+, one
(the latest, a collaboration with Carlos Santana) gets the star treatment (which approximately trans-
lates as a B, I think), and the box set gets an A-: “an honorable job on a significant band whose catalog
cries out for landscaping.” Great rating, words of praise. He also writes this, though, in the same entry:
“But folks, this is only the Isley Brothers. They gave us ‘Twist and Shout’ and ‘It's Your Thing’ and, um,
‘That Lady,’ they hired Jimi Hendrix young and learned a few things, they formed their own label and held
on like heroes. They have a great single disc in them. But who's up for canonization next? Frankie Beverly
and Maze?”
I’d say that’s pretty much what I’d been saying all along, except Christgau’s sometimes harsher--“only the
Isley Brothers.” Even if I’d still been posting in the thread, though, I don’t think I would have brought
up Christgau. He’s a lightning rod on this message board, and any mention of him would have immediately
been dismissed out of hand.
2) Something I just thought to check today (not that I’m still thinking about the whole episode--not me):
how many books have been written about these three artists? With Neil Young and Lou Reed (as solo artists
only, not including books on some famous bands they’ve been in), I found at least 10 each. Neil: Jimmy
McDonough’s Shakey, Sam Inglis’s Harvest, Johnny Rogan’s Zero to Sixty, John Einarson’s (and others’)
Don’t Be Denied, Kevin Chong’s Neil Young Nation, Daniel Durchholz and Gary Graff’s Long May You Run,
Harvey Kubernik’s Heart of Gold, Sharry Wilson’s The Sugar Mountain Years, Nigel Williamson’s Stories
Behind the Songs 1966-1992, Sylvie Simmons’ Reflections in a Broken Glass, The Rolling Stone Files (vari-
ous), Carole Dufrechou’s Neil Young. That’s 12--the last one, the earliest, I used to own back in high
school, but somehow I lost it along the way (still can’t remember when or how). Same with Lou Reed, give
or take a book or two.
I can’t find a single book on the Isley Brothers. I have to believe that there was at least one written
at some point, and that it went out of print (such books still tend to turn up on sites like AbeBooks--
e.g., the Carole Dufrechou book), but I didn’t turn up anything. They do get indexed in Nelson George’s
The Death of Rhythm and Blues seven times, which in fairness is only one fewer mention than Smokey Rob-
inson. In my mind, Smokey Robinson is much more famous than the Isley Brothers--and on par with Neil
Young and Lou Reed--so that’s another piece of evidence worth considering.
Anyway, is the number of books written about someone a meaningful measure of fame? Does that count for
anything?
3) Another board-centric way to approach the question. This message board is often the site of artist
polls: people send in ballots on their favourite songs, the results are compiled and counted down. I’ve
run one poll myself--surprise, Neil Young--co-ran a Yo La Tengo poll with someone else, and looked after
the vote tabulation for a Motown singles poll. (I’ve also run a few film polls.) To try to bring some
semblance of order to the whole process, there’s a thread where people throw out ideas, and a running
list of who’s next in line is maintained. Three threads, actually--the first got so long, a second and
then a third thread were started.
As I say, there’s been a Neil Young poll. There’s been an all-encompassing Velvet Underground poll that
combined the VU with solo work. There’s been a David Bowie poll, a Madonna poll, and a Dylan poll. Some
other obvious ones: the Beatles, Prince, Led Zeppelin, the Beach Boys, an all-encompassing Jacksons poll
that combined group and solo work, the Who. There’ve been over 100 of them the past decade, and if you
were to look at the whole list, it’s not like everyone is that famous--far from it. There’ve been a
number of polls where my first thought was “Really? You’re going to run a poll on them?”
There hasn’t been an Isley Brothers poll, though “Shout” did place #38 on a ‘50s poll from a few years
ago. I don’t have my own ballot from that poll--it was run on a Google Form--so I’m wondering if I voted
for it myself. (Probably not--much of my 50-song ballot was devoted to doo-wop.) No Isleys poll is not,
in and of itself, especially significant: I could name a lot of important and famous artists where there’s
never been a poll. The thing that caught my eye when I looked at the three housekeeping threads, though,
is that--if the “find” command is to be trusted--not a single person has even suggested the Isley Brothers
as a poll possibility. The three threads combine for around 5,500 posts. Not one mention. I’m sure, had I
made this point, this also would have been brushed aside, but seeing as this is the very message board
where this argument is taking place, doesn’t this at least suggest some kind of disconnect?
4) I said that the charge of confirmation bias towards me--that the mere fact that I’d been collecting
covers of Neil Young and the Velvet Underground (Beatles, too) already ensured that I’d consider Neil
Young and Lou Reed more famous--was valid. I’ll bring up another common bias, regularly brought up in
all kinds of contexts when it comes to baseball: recency bias. This Beyoncé/Isley Brothers record on
the charts right now came up a few times, almost like its success was a function of the Isleys' enduring
fame rather than Beyoncé’s.
5) Is the latest version of Rolling Stone's Top 500 worth anything? I wouldn't mention it in the thread,
no, although clearly this is not the same Top 500 as their 2004 or even 2010 list (the top three spots
and six of the top ten are held down by black artists). On the 2021 list, the Isley Brothers placed
one song, "Shout" at #268; Neil Young had three ("Heart of Gold" at #259, "After the Gold Rush" at
#322, and "Powderfinger at #450), Lou Reed also three ("I'm Waiting for the Man" at #81, "Walk on the
Wild Side" at #180, and "Sweet Jane" at #294). Again, to be fair, of those seven songs, the two most
specious for me are "Heart of Gold" and "Walk on the Wild Side."
6) In my mind, the fame of the Isley Brothers has been exceeded by that of their two most famous songs.
Play “Shout” for 1,000 random people--music fans, non-music fans, a mix--and my guess is that more people
will identify it as “the Animal House song” than as an Isley Brothers song. And if you were to do the
same with “Twist and Shout,” I’m pretty sure it would be identified as a Beatles song far more often than
an Isley Brothers song. That’s not their fault, and such things can be infuriating, I know--I wince at
the reality that certain cover versions have become more famous than the originals. (There’s one in par-
ticular that gets under my skin, but I’m drawing a blank right now--obviously I'm not talking about the
Beatles’ great “Twist and Shout” cover.) It is a reality, though.
Not sure if anyone I’d been arguing with will ever see this. In any event, I’ll say it again: the Isley
Brothers, who were elected to the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1992 (Young and Reed are each in there
twice--we can discount that, too), are not as famous as Neil Young or Lou Reed. To me, they’re not all
that close to being as famous.