Best Basslines

This morning, a friend of ours, shared a link to an article in an online website, MusicRadar. I’m not familiar with this particular site, but it is described as “No. 1 website for musicians.” Interesting. I’ll come back to that in a bit.

This particular article, which you can read for yourself here, focused on the top 25 basslines of all time as voted by the readers. Based on how this site is described, I can assume the readers are people who identify as musicians. So, why was this link shared? As you can imagine, a certain bass player made the list! Yes, John Taylor was picked to have one of the top 25 basslines of all time! Anyone want to make a guess about which song was recognized?

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Yes, the song that the readers acknowledged was, indeed, Rio! Here is how it was described on the site before they shared the video of John’s Rio tutorial:

A hyper-kinetic bassline, Rio was described by John Taylor as being a love letter to classic rhythm sections who inspired him and drummer Roger Taylor. It’s Duran Duran’s finest hour, maybe British pop’s too.

As it has to be with pop music, everything is in lockstep, bolted together, engineered first then tested before taking flight. It has to be; the syncopation here is frightening, and you’ve got some massive hooks to land for the song to work. 

In the video above, Taylor explains how they put the song together and his approach. In paying homage to great rhythm sections of yore, the Taylors became one themselves.

So, this leads me to have a couple of questions that I pose to you Duranies. First, is Rio the best bassline of John’s? Do you agree with that pick? Second, what do you think about the description? The part that caught my attention is how it acknowledged Roger as well and how they form such an awesome duo. I liked that. Lastly, I have to wonder if acknowledgements like this matter. Does it mean a lot that John was recognized by other musicians? If you were John, would it matter to you? I know that we have talked about critical acclaim a lot on this site over the years. Often, our focus has been about how overlooked or mistreated Duran has been, which has led us to dismiss critical acclaim, in general. Yet, there is a part of me that loves when they do get a little love back from those who determine “quality” music. I care, mostly because I think they deserve that love, that attention. What do you all think?

-A