Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Icarus imagery in contemporary music


 * The following discussion is an archived debate of the proposed deletion of the article below. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page (such as the article's talk page or in a deletion review).  No further edits should be made to this page.

The result was delete. ✗ plicit  00:11, 19 December 2022 (UTC)

Icarus imagery in contemporary music

 * – ( View AfD View log | edits since nomination)

Unsourced indiscriminate list. Could see this working as a subsection of Icarus with proper sourcing, and maybe that section gets big enough to split off again, but I don't see much point in calling for a merge when there's only a single entry (Måneskin's "Zitti e buoni") which is properly sourced here. QuietHere (talk) 00:41, 12 December 2022 (UTC)
 * Note: This discussion has been included in the deletion sorting lists for the following topics: Music and Mythology. QuietHere (talk) 00:41, 12 December 2022 (UTC)
 * Keep There's a difference between indiscriminate and comprehensive. It's too big to be in the main article. Obviously it's mostly unsourced but no doubt it could be. Johnbod (talk) 05:02, 12 December 2022 (UTC)
 * Note: This discussion has been included in the deletion sorting lists for the following topics: Lists and Greece. — hueman1 ( talk  •  contributions ) 05:40, 12 December 2022 (UTC)
 * Delete: Not only am invoking WP:BURDEN to show that some sort of source exists, I want a source that discusses Icarus in music as a whole. Something like List of films using the music of Richard Wagner has several high-quality, academic sources discussing Wagner in film music, both generally and specifically. I'm not seeing such a source for Icarus references in contemporary music. Not to mention, I'm hesitant on having such a list no matter what. The fate of Icarus is a fairly common idiom, and I fail to see the use in listing common Greek allusions in non-notable works of music (as most entries on this list are decidedly non-notable, hence the indiscriminateness). Why? I Ask (talk) 06:03, 12 December 2022 (UTC)
 * Delete if there aren't enough sources to build this article around, it probably isn't ready yet. I do think the main article on Icarus could use a "pop culture" section or something like it. BuySomeApples (talk) 07:14, 12 December 2022 (UTC)


 * Delete indiscriminate and absolutely trivial. Once again, we are not TV Tropes, and any article that could be renamed “list of media that mentions or alludes to [x] in any way, no matter how minor” should be deleted with extreme prejudice. Dronebogus (talk) 09:41, 12 December 2022 (UTC)


 * Delete: I have no doubt that Johnbod is right that the article could be sourced, insofar as sources could be found which say that a bunch of pop songs reference Icarus, but I cannot find anything written about Icarus in contemporary music as a topic, so I don't think it's notable – I certainly can't find any evidence that "list of songs which mention or allude to Icarus", which is what the article essentially is at the moment, meets WP:LISTN. There are works on the reception of the Icarus myth, and that probably would be a notable topic.  Niall Rudd's two chapters on the reception of the Icarus myth in Ovid Renewed: Ovidian Influences on Literature and Art from the Middle Ages to the Twentieth Century would be the obvious starting point; there's also books on The Myth of Icarus in Spanish Renaissance Poetry and The Flight of Icarus through Western Art.  Probably more – "reception" is the keyword to look for here – but I can't find anything about contemporary music in particular.  But at that point we're moving the article to a new, broader, title (e.g. Reception of the myth of Icarus) and completely rewriting it from scratch, at which point we may as well apply TNT. Caeciliusinhorto (talk) 11:03, 12 December 2022 (UTC)
 * Delete "could be sourced", hmm, don't we have a verifiability policy that requires the actual existence of sources, not a suggestion that there might possibly be some somewhere or other if only anybody could be bothered to look. Only in this case, the topic is too diffuse for any actual sources. And per Caeciliusinhorto, it is indeed a drossy Trope-style topic. Chiswick Chap (talk) 17:09, 12 December 2022 (UTC)
 * Comment if it's too big to be in the main article and (assuming from the above) probably going to be deleted, maybe a category is the way to go?  Aza24  (talk)   20:19, 12 December 2022 (UTC)
 * No, it’s indiscriminate and vague. Only things that are “about [x]” should be in specialized categories. This is, once again, “list of every appearance of anything related ever”. Dronebogus (talk) 04:49, 13 December 2022 (UTC)
 * You just demonstrated why this list is not "indiscriminate". It is clearly not "every appearance of anything related ever"—it is uses of the Icarus theme in contemporary music.  Not art, drama, cooking, antiquity, or 17th-century French poetry.  Not everything related to Icarus—which would include Daedalus, the Labyrinth, the Minotaur, Theseus, Ariadne, etc.  What is truly amazing is how I cannot recall ever seeing anyone correctly cite WP:INDISCRIMINATE.  It is only ever cited by people who clearly have not read what it says, or who have forgotten all of the examples, or who count on nobody else having read it.  This article does not even loosely approximate any of the categories cited as indiscriminate collections of information: 1) summary-only descriptions of works; 2) lyrics databases; 3) excessive listings of unexplained statistics; or 4) exhaustive logs of software updates.  Examples of the Icarus theme in contemporary music may or may not be notable—but they certainly do not constitute an indiscriminate collection of information.  P Aculeius (talk) 06:17, 13 December 2022 (UTC)


 * Comment: I don't know whether this topic could be made reasonably encyclopedic, but some of the votes to delete are ignoring critical guidelines for the deletion of articles. First of all, articles should not be deleted because the content is not cited to reliable sources; they should be deleted because they cannot be cited to reliable sources.  Thus, WP:BEFORE advises those nominating articles for deletion to make at least a cursory search for potentially relevant sources before nominating them.  "Completely unsourced!" is not a Wikipedia policy.  Then again, published works are considered valid and reliable sources for their own contents.  Thus, while "(Just Like) Icarus and Daedalus" by the Reflections may not be a valid source for the psychological underpinnings of the Icarus myth, it is a valid source for the fact that it contains "Icarus imagery"—even if it only appears in a list, such as the one here, without (somewhat redundantly) an inline citation that contains the same information as the item in the list... but in theory every item here could be cited to itself, in which case the "completely unsourced" problem simply goes away.  While ideally the article ought to have some sources discussing Icarus in contemporary music, it is not necessary for any such sources to include a list of songs or compositions, nor for any of the items included to be in such a list in order to be included here.  The discussion should focus on whether the topic is encyclopedic—not whether it contains enough discussion, or is presently cited to good sources.  Those things can be cured (and it does not matter that they have not yet been; as the guidelines for deletion specifically state, there is no time limit for improving articles); lack of notability cannot.  The topic is either notable or it is not; I suspect it has at least sufficient notability to exist, however imperfect the article is now.  It cannot be deleted merely because it needs more sources or ought to contain some discussion.  P Aculeius (talk) 21:13, 12 December 2022 (UTC)
 * It's not obvious to me that the topic of "Icarus imagery in music" is notable enough to be a standalone article. It's the topic that seems unencyclopedic to me. It could be a really important field of study, but just being able to find songs that reference Icarus doesn't make it so. Unless the article was completely overhauled, the best thing is to delete add any meaningful info to the Icarus page. BuySomeApples (talk) 04:47, 13 December 2022 (UTC)
 * I didn't say that it was obviously encyclopedic—I said I suspected it might be, or could be made encyclopedic with some development. But my main point was that the article must stand or fall based on its notability, not on how poorly it's sourced, because sourcing can nearly always be fixed.  P Aculeius (talk) 06:00, 13 December 2022 (UTC)
 * Okay, but you haven't provided any sources that would back that claim up. You may suspect something, but without evidence that's pure conjecture, and that's not gonna save the article. Caeciliusinhorto, on the other hand, went and found evidence of a lack of coverage of the subject, showing notability to be unlikely, which is the same reason I made the nomination in the first place. I do realise now I forgot to mention that in my nomination, my fault for working too quickly I suppose, but from everything I've seen I can say that Caecilius' point holds up to scrutiny.
 * And to your "this list is not 'indiscriminate'" point above, it should be said that while the topic of this list is not quite as broad as it could be, that doesn't mean it isn't still overly broad. "Contemporary music" could reasonably cover anything from the popular music era, meaning any non-classical work from the 1880s on. There are untold numbers of musical works, even notable ones, that have come into existence in that time, and some massive amount of those could make even passing lyric references to the Icarus myth. That doesn't make every one of those examples notable, and based on what's in the list so far, I suspect very few of them will end up being so. We need coverage that talks about these references in these songs specifically, and I wasn't finding much for most of the list. The fact that a list can be so expansive yet so thoroughly unsourced is what makes it an indiscriminate collection of random information. That's the issue at hand. Narrowing the scope alone hasn't fixed that, or else we wouldn't have this AfD in the first place. QuietHere (talk) 06:34, 13 December 2022 (UTC)
 * You might want to go back and read what was said about sourcing and actual Wikipedia policy. Articles are not deleted based on the state of sourcing—and each work listed is a valid source for its own contents.  So it is clearly not unsourced.  Please do not confuse sourcing with notability.  There is nothing "indiscriminate" about this list—the topic is fairly discrete.  That doesn't make it notable—but the notability discussion is getting buried under irrelevant arguments about the article's scope or its sources, neither of which are valid arguments for deletion.
 * As for its notability, Cecil in the Garden made a valid argument, but neglected to consider that if the influence of the Icarus myth in modern culture is a valid topic, and this list is too long to be maintained as a part of that topic, then it could reasonably be split off into its own subtopic—which is essentially what it currently is. You could, as he suggested, just blow it up and start from scratch, but I find that a particularly unproductive way of winding up back at the same place a few years down the road.  Better to try to improve the article and better integrate it with the larger topic, even as a stand-alone list.  You suggested that each of the songs or compositions in the list needed to be notable; this is incorrect.  The subject of the list needs to be notable, but not all of the individual entries in the list.  That is one of the main purposes of list articles on Wikipedia: including information about things which, while not individually notable, collectively form a subject with notability.  It is also incorrect to say that the individual contents need to be listed in another source; since each song or composition can be cited for its own contents, all they need to be is something that readers can read or listen to in order to verify that they do in fact contain Icarus themes.
 * Since the theme of Icarus in culture generally is certainly notable, lists of individual works in specific genres are presumptively notable as subtopics. Of course that is my opinion, and others may disagree.  That's what a deletion discussion is about.  It may be that the article is saved, but individual items removed because they contain only passing mentions, with no special relevance to the works in question.  But as a general proposition, it's usually better to save potentially useful articles than to delete them, only to have similar contents created from scratch in the future.  This article needs a lot of work; but so do countless other articles, and I can certainly see some usefulness in this one, even as it currently stands.  P Aculeius (talk) 14:27, 13 December 2022 (UTC)

I think that you're misreading some of the deletion arguments. Sourcing is just a symptom of the underlying problem, which is that there's no clear reason for this list to exist anymore than a list of songs mentioning Jesus Christ or heart imagery. Thousands of examples might exist, but that doesn't mean they need to be catalogued. An article about Christian music or the use of heart imagery in music is more apparently useful and informative. Similarly, either an article or a section about the reception of Icarus in popular music seems more useful than a list. BuySomeApples (talk) 22:47, 14 December 2022 (UTC)
 * Started a pop culture section in the Icarus article with a couple examples pulled from the list. QuietHere (talk) 14:46, 13 December 2022 (UTC)
 * Thank you ! BuySomeApples (talk) 22:47, 14 December 2022 (UTC)
 * No thanks from me - how long will that last there? Johnbod (talk) 04:01, 15 December 2022 (UTC)
 * Not long, “in pop culture sections” are notorious crap magnets. In fact I might just delete it immediately per WP:INDISCRIMINATE and WP:TRIVIA plus a little bit of WP:MILL (too common) Dronebogus (talk) 13:43, 16 December 2022 (UTC)
 * Deleted. Dronebogus (talk) 13:46, 16 December 2022 (UTC)
 * Undeleted. "Crap magnet" or no, that doesn't invalidate the section's existence. Just remove unsourceable information whenever it's added. QuietHere (talk) 15:37, 16 December 2022 (UTC)


 * Delete This is just a bunch of raw data assembled by way of WP:Original research without any overarching analysis. Regardless of whether a proper article could be written about this subject, this certainly isn't it and is of no use to anybody looking to create such a hypothetical article, so there's nothing whatsoever to preserve here. TompaDompa (talk) 14:05, 16 December 2022 (UTC)
 * Delete. Data, part trivial and part more trivial, with no indication of importance cited to convince me that there might actually be a topic there. Without that evidence from secondary sources, there's nothing. Drmies (talk) 17:16, 16 December 2022 (UTC)


 * The above discussion is preserved as an archive of the debate. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page (such as the article's talk page or in a deletion review). No further edits should be made to this page.