What is this thing?
Well, I think that should be obvious. It's my ego-wanking list/blog of the 300 rock`n'roll records I
think are the best.
Isn't this completely self-indulgent and pretentious? Why should anyone else be interested in your bullshit opinions? Don't you have better things to do?
In order: (1) Yes, completely (2) No one should be but us music geeks love to read each others opinions and get all excited or pissed off about them. I harbor no illusions that I'm going to educate anyone (3) Yes
Why aren't all the selections numbered? You've got #1, and then a bunch of #?'s. Wha'fuck?
Well, truth is I started out with this absurd spreadsheet with all the albums ranked with a numerical score (50 being the top score - no one got a 50)(don't tell me you haven't done this, music geeks - I know you have!). Then I began to discover that there were tons of albums I think are really great that rank about 35. And did I really think a 35 was a lesser creation than a 40, per se? I decided the rank system just wasn't really workable and I needed a more holistic approach - needed to go more by feel. So I'm still figuring out where most things rank. I'll do the rankings when the blog is complete.
Do you have a planned date to complete it?
Nope. I work on it when I feel like it. Might be next week. Might be never.
Seriously, why do you do this?
Seriously - I like to think about music and I like to write about it. Mainly, it's a creative exercise - I wanted to write about music in a way that was a bit "freer" for me (my old writing tended to be a bit academic), but also better than the "this is the shit man" kind of album reviews I usually find online. So, it's a workbook.
Your choices are the usual critics-fave stuff, man. Lots of punk, sixties, indie. Why can't you be bolder? Where's the hip-hop? Where's the metal? Where's Radiohead?
Spare me. The views expressed herein are obviously completely, totally, personal. The idea that opinions not backed up by money can sway the reception of music is absurd. If that were true, Celine Dion would be an unknown and Yo La Tengo would be the biggest band on the planet. Yeah, I freely admit my preferences are pretty well in line with the rock-crit orthodoxy as expressed in countless books and blogs. So? The fact that so many of these albums turn up on everyone's list says something about them, just as much as the mega-million sales on, say, Celine Dion, says something about her. I'm not in the least compelled to compose a list of 300 albums that no one else has chosen, and I'm not a contrarian. I don't cover hip-hop because I'm just not into it. Same goes for metal. Radiohead suck ass.
No comments:
Post a Comment