Troy, you're doing the same thing the other guy did in the first thread. I don't think this is the sixth most influential album of all time, but I read the piece on the day it was published (the day before that Sunday paper hit the stands, actually, it was on the web on the Saturday & linked on another board I was looking at), and that's not exactly what they're saying, although if you want to perceive it that way due to the rankings, fine. I'm with you, it's not the sixth most influential album of all time. But it's a list that was compiled by several people, not 'a woman with an agenda,' and I daresay they don't know Jack about jazz if they think they're going to get anyone who does know anything about it to agree with their poor choices in that genre, which is so unbelievably underrepresented on the list it's beyond description. Considering it came from a country where the leading music magazine's reader's poll resulted in naming the Smiths the most influential band of all time, this is far from a terrible list if you consider it in its context, and certainly worthy of discussion.

10 years ago, or ever since Liz Phair & PJ Harvey hit, that whole 'women in rock' thing WAS quite important, whether you like it or I like it or not. This is the same crap we had in the first thread. 'I don't like it, therefore it was unimportant.' Play games if you must, but if you're denying that this record had a significant influence on music, you're just spouting crap. It'd be like me questioning the influence or importance of Yes, King Crimson, ELP, or Genesis. I couldn't care less about their influence, importance, or whatever it was they were passing off as music, but I don't deny its influence or importance.

And yes, the Pretenders were important, and so were the Roches. I guess it's easy to forget how significant it was to have a musical guest slot on Saturday Night Live in the mid- and late 70s. Patti Smith played the first season, and, in fact, sang 'Jesus died for somebody's sins, but not mine,' the opening line to her version of Gloria, a few minutes after the midnight hour on an Easter Sunday; 15 years before Sinead O'Connor's tantrum. And I well remember the Roches on that program, and if you think it didn't help them sell more records than any buzz from five similarly obscure artists combined in any given week on a Leno or Letterman show, I've got a bridge in Brooklyn for ya. Their performance had a quality to it that the Lilith collection of walking estrogen couldn't come close to. However, before it became that watered-down, I was reminded of that Roches shot when I saw Suzanne Vega perform the night after her first album was released.

Without Patti Smith, the influence of Joni Mitchell, Laura Nyro, and people like that would certainly have stood on its own, but Horses offered artistic counterbalance to records like Court & Spark that led to the whole 'women in rock' thing. Which was significant whether you'd like to believe it or not. That it even spawned a Lollapalooza-like festival that went on for a few years is enough evidence of the significance of the movement, even if I'm not any more interested in arty, acoustic-guitar-strumming alternachix with attitudes as repulsive to men as menstrual period blood, any more than you are.

To deny that Phair, Harvey, & Morrissette had a significant impact on music is as feckless as insisting that Roxy Music was as meaningless as that other joker was claiming. But since I know you realize that, well, that's not the reason I ain't emailed ya yet. My bad. Soon.