The Ship Of Theseus and Bands With No Original Members

A number of the responses to my last post here - RATT - immediately referenced the "Ship of Theseus".  That's not surprising, since what I was writing about focused on the identity of a band in terms of its membership, and the "Ship of Theseus" is a classic puzzle about a whole and its constituent parts.  But as I pointed out to those commenters, that puzzle really has to do with a different kind of case.

It's not as if there aren't some bands, though, to which the "Ship of Theseus" issue would apply.  I thought it might be useful for others - and interesting for me - to write a follow-up piece specifically discussing how and why.  Simply put, the Ship of Theseus bears upon cases where none of the constituent parts of a whole are original to it.  In terms of bands, this means we would be focused on bands that contain none of their original members.

The fundamental question then is whether they do remain the same band or not, despite all of the replacements of members.  It is always useful to consider examples, and in classic metal, we do have a number of illustrative cases we can examine - and discuss (in comments or social media).  I think it might also be helpful to consider some cases close to but not quite like the Ship of Theseus as well, where one original member of the band is left (but reserve that issue for a later post)

10 Great Classic Metal Bassists: What Makes for Greatness?

As with any sort of highly positive qualifier -- "supreme," "top-notch," "greatest" and so on -- the quickest and most cursory of internet searches uncovers dozens of lists (not all of which would necessarily qualify as "great" themselves).  There's Metal Descent's Top Ten Most Recognizable Heavy Metal Bassists, Heavy Metal Time Machine's Top Ten Bass Players,  Gears of Rock's Top Ten Metal Bassists of All Time -- there's even more specialized lists like Metalholic's Top 12 Female Hard Rock/Metal Bassists 2013.

Interestingly, you see quite a few now-iconic metal bassists make their way into less genre-focused lists like Ultimate Guitar's Top 10 Bassists of All Time -- which includes a few proto-metal band's long-axemen (Cream's Jack Bruce, for example).  Steve Harris and Cliff Burton often jockey for position as the top-number metal representatives on these sorts of lists -- and rightly so, I think.  In fact, I've been doing quite a bit of thinking off and on, not so much about these sorts of lists, but of just what qualifies a bassist as being genuinely "great" -- not just good, competent, a contributor to his or her band, their songs, and their sound -- but someone outstanding, of a clearly superlative rank.  Those musings have had me assembling a list of my own -- one restricted, understandably enough, to  bass heroes of the core of metal, the now-classic, dynamic forms it assumed and spilled over into during the 1970s and 1980s.