THE SPANISH PURPORTED CANON META-LIST: Introduction

Not long ago, the Centre for Sociological Research (a Spanish government agency) published a study called "Autonomy, Submission or Sound Hybridization? The Construction of the Aesthetic Canon of Spanish Pop/Rock", by Fernán del Val, Javier Noya and C. Martín Pérez-Colman, which claims to be based in Pierre Bourdieu's theories of sociology of art, and with the goal of determining what is the current aesthetic canon of Spanish pop/rock music. Their stated objective was to find out to what extent the Spanish canon is influenced by the international one, if the Spanish prefer artists that are unmistakably "Spanish" or the ones who follow the trail of the Anglosphere, and so on.

I won't comment on that objective, or their conclusions. But the thing that has been rather controversial has been that to construct their "canon", they have been based on a meta-list compiled from magazine-published lists. More precisely, four such lists. From 2004-2009, taken from the magazines "Efe eme", "Rock de Lux" and "Rolling Stone (Spanish edition)". Of course, this means that with so few data points the list reflects the preferences of these particular magazines. By limiting themselves to 50 artists - and to 50 entries for each one considered, just because that's the length of the shortest list, when we know that in lists of 100 or 200 entries the middle and lower ranks are usually among the most interesting - the artifacts are even more apparent. Artists of tremendous success like Mecano, Barón Rojo, Amaral or Siniestro Total don't appear anywhere on the list, while a band like Solera - which, their quality notwithstanding, were an one-album band usually considered a transitional stage towards Cánovas, Rodrigo, Adolfo y Guzmán - is included on the strength of just a high rank in one of the lists - by a magazine heavily biased towards the "undersung" heroes of the 60s and 70s.

And later they also comment that entire genres have fallen out of the canon due to being quite in a world of their own, with dedicated audiences and snubbed by the critics. But how could they not, when the magazines that focus in those genres have been systematically excluded? Or when for the lists they use they have cut off the list before the point where these artists appear? The article mentions specifically rumba, heavy rock and punk. Other genres like hip-hop apparently don't even exist. In any case I don't understand why a publication like Ruta 66 is dismissed because they focus on "classic garage rock" and Rock de Lux is considered part of the wide ranging critics when the compilers mention their "strict criteria which occasionally lead it to be labelled snobbish or elitist" and that they "focus on alternative bands". 

Maybe it's just laziness and they simply picked the magazines that attempted to make big, comprehensive (but biased) lists. Far be it from me to cast the first stone, as I personally have used Efe Eme's list as my personal guide in the past, but the difference is that I'm not trying to make a scientific study.

In any way, this list does reflect a big part of which artists are or have been important, although some of the omissions are so glaring that one is tempted to declare it invalid. Still, as a first guideline for people from outside of the Spanish sphere it might suffice. But as I mentioned elsewhere, I won't consider it the final word, just a beginning, and I'm very interested in covering some of the most undeserved (in my opinion) exclusions.