[x] Rehberg & Bauer and Rule 7c

If Rehberg & Bauer are allowed in, why should not Crosby, Stills & Nash?

I make a formal application for Rule 7c to be removed. If it's okay with you guys, of course.

My argument is along the inclusivity grounds - it limits the information about who played on what albums.

If you follow the rule strictly, there's nothing going on. It reads: "A collaboration of solo artists performing under their individual names which would otherwise count as a band per Rule 7b, are not included if the collaboration in question is a subset of a PREVIOUSLY INCLUDED group of individuals."

"Rehberg & Bauer" were included in the tree before "Rehberg / Bauer / Potuznik" was in it. If it would have been the other way around, "Rehberg & Bauer" being in the tree would have been against rule 7c.

On the other hand, both bands have been added the same day so "Rehberg & Bauer" could easily have been skipped but that's another story.

Any rule which results in the same bands being legal or illegal differently depending on when they were added is, IMO, a stupid rule. The fact that band A is legal if added before band B but not if added after means that there is nothing about band A inherently, alone that makes it ineligible, but only its relationship to band B. I claim rules should restrict bands based solely on those bands' merits and nothing else.

I agree with Matt, rule 7c should be removed. I think Kevin & Mark put it in because, as with most of their other (IMO silly) rules, they're trying to produce a data set that "looks nice" instead of one that simply mirrors the real world, and clearly having several bands whose names are identical except that you keep adding members on to the end doesn't "look nice".

But then again, if that's legal grounds for restricting band entries, then I vote for the exclusion of every band with "Gong" in the name except the original "Gong", because having all the others doesn't look nice either.

I think the rule was created because adding a subset of a band afterwards, doesn't create possibilities for new nodes in the tree. The other way around does. However, if that was the reason the rule was created, one-member bands shouldn't be allowed either, and that's not the case. So I would say rule 7c is not consistent with the rest of the rules :)

I didn't even notice that I had added a band that was a subset of another existing band, but I'm always happy when someone calls me out on a rules violation (or some other error). Rule 7c isn't supposed to depend on the time that a band is added. Its sole purpose is to eliminate redundancy--sort of a combination of what Python and PK said.

I'm trying to think of how many bands rule 7c affects. Obviously there is the family of Crosby, Stills, Nash, and Young family bands and we know about Rehberg & Bauer. What else is there?

Forgetting about how many instances of this there are (because in the end, that shouldn't really make a difference), the question is, what is the real reason for the rule? What is it trying to accomplish?

I agree with the folks here who are calling for the abandonment of this rule (and not just because I was the submitter for Rehberg/Bauer/Potuznik and all the rest of it). My reasoning is twofold:

(1) If the goal of the site is to show how albums are connected by personnel to other albums, then "Crosby, Stills & Nash" is just as legitimate a place to start as "American Dream" is. This is not redundancy at all, it just means there's an extra step from point A to point B if it has to go through Neil Young to get there.

(2) There is an inconsistency here because it only applies to bands made up of artists names and not bands in general. It doesn't apply to, say, Wire and Wir (made up of a subset of Wire's personnel).

As an aside, there are many instances of the same lineup of a band being represented by multiple albums. If anything, *this* introduces far more redundancy than adding bands like what we're talking about.

Some that I sent in earlier (still in the inbox, I presume):

Hession/Wilkinson/Fell: The Horrors of Darmstadt (1993)
Alan Wilkinson, soprano saxophone, alto saxophone and baritone saxophone; Simon H. Fell, double bass; Paul Hession, drums.

[www.shef.ac.uk] http://www.shef.ac.uk/~ps/efi/labels/shock/sx025.html

Hession/Wilkinson/Fell + Morris
Registered Firm (1996)
Paul Hession, drumset; Alan Wilkinson, alto and baritone saxophones; Simon H. Fell, double bass; Joe Morris, guitar.
[www.shef.ac.uk] http://www.shef.ac.uk/~ps/efi/labels/incus/incusc33.html



Clicking on the link for Henry Cow (for example) provides a tree containing several bands with this form of name. It's common on the jazz scene. For example, Hession/Wharf/Fell, Coxhill/Haslam/Hession/Rutherford/Fell, Pyle/Iung/Greaves, French/Frith/Kaiser/Thompson, Yoshimo and Yuka, all of which are legitimate under rule 7c, but all of which would become ineligible were (for example) a band to be formed with the name Hession / Wharf / Fell / Coxhill / Haslam / Rutherford / Pyle / ... / Yoshimo / Yuka. Which would be a shame. In addition, it would mean significant deletions in the existing database which seems unnecessary to me.

Given that the number of such bands is (generally) limited, and that inclusion of a subset-group-name shouldn't adversely affect the connectionality of the database (there's already "Yes" and "Anderson Bruford Wakeman Howe", the latter most definitely a subset of the former but not falling into the rule 7c trap).

My take on this site would be to aim to document (as far as possible) everything that's out there.

Best of luck, and my vote is to repeal Rule 7c. And let's have Crosby and Nash in there, as well as Crosby, Stills and Nash. I do *so* love to see bands in there that I loathe ...