LTDMT VII: Battle For The Best Rock Song In History (August 2013- )

Influence is a word that may have gotten away from its Merriam-Webster definition over the years, but it is born of the stars and derived from the astrophysical definition of gravity. Influence, like gravity, puts order to the things around it. The Sun influences the Earth. The moon influences the tides. Every object influences every other object in the universe, in whatever magnificent or microscopic way that may manifest. Influence is life.

We often think of those artists or songs that have influences our love of music and our particular music. But what of those artists before them? Where does this cycle of influence begin? I am a big believer in education, and have spent the Summer of 2013 taking a two part course on The History of Rock offered online through Coursera.org. Throughout my notes, I have painstakingly recorded every single song that has been mentioned in every lecture as representative or influential. If an album is mentioned, I make a note of it as well. He stopped at the year 2000, so to round it out I consulted with a number of regular tournament contributors on appropriate trends in the last 13 years to include an additional 46 songs up to today- again, across different representative genres.

With that, we have 1,037 different songs competing. To make this more manageable, we are adjusting the rules a bit from past tournament. We’ll be running a playlist of different songs at any given point, either 16 or 17 songs deep with four distinct genres in musical history represented. It will be up to you to give songs a score between 0 and 10. For each group of 4 (it’ll be obvious on the ballot,) the winner once voting has commenced automatically advances to the Round of 512. For the rest of the songs, there will be a free for all by average score for at-large spots to fill in the rest.

This is our greatest undertaking to date, but I am a believer in the music lovers on this site and know we can get some great voting and feedback going. Looking forward to seeing you all in the comments over this journey. Let’s do this.

G-mo

List of Competitors by Chronological Group
Rules
Round of 512 Qualifiers