(originally
posted on Facebook)
In honor of a
completely arbitrary accomplishment I've decided to take a look back
at my musical journey. Coincidentally after 100 reviews I am about 1
year into my project. This does not bode well for my progress, as 100
reviews out of a planned 1,032 is hardly progress at all. I hate
doing the math on my time frame and thinking I won't finish this
project until I'm 40. I also hate to think that new issues of the
"1,001 Albums To Hear Before You Die" list will add yet
more albums to the total, and I'll just be doing stupid music reviews
for the rest of my life.
What have I really
learned after hearing more complete albums in the past year than I
have probably in the rest of my life? My guess is the people who know
me assume I am pretty stubborn in my choice of music. I am constantly
advocating for 3 or 4 great bands that I am fond of and most
everything else is crap. A year ago this opinion was largely
unjustified as I really didn't expand my musical horizons very far
beyond my narrow vision.
I had two solid
reasons for keeping a tight focus. For one there's a lot of music out
there and I can't possibly listen to all of it. Even if I tried to
find a representative chunk on which to focus my attention there was
no guarantee my source would be definitive. The second problem was up
until recently there was no easy way for me to consume specific
chunks of music freely. Pandora never really fit my needs, because it
offers mostly random individual songs at a time, and individual songs
are a poor indicator of a band's greatness.
Eventually, I
decided to use Dimery and Lydon's 1,001 Albums You Must Hear
Before You Die as my definitive list. As the concept of "great
music" is largely subjective choosing an authority can also be
subjective. I figure anyone with the balls to come up with a book
talking about 1,001 albums probably has a good grasp on the subject.
Of course they could be making it up and just selecting albums at
random. Still 1,001 albums is a pretty representative sample. Around
the same time I was introduced to Rdio.com (thanks Jenn!) which let
me pay a flat monthly fee and download as much music to my iPod as I
wanted. They even had most of the albums I was looking for!
Back to my
question... What have I learned? In simplest terms I have realized I
was right in the first place. When I was limiting myself to a small
sample of great music it was because I figured it would be really
difficult to find more great music, and in that assumption I was spot
on. After one hundred new albums, I can honestly say only one stood
out as truly special. I have discovered a handful of new songs that
are now in my general playlist, but only one album that I realized
was missing from my collection of greats. In the past year I've only
solidified my belief that sure, there are hidden treasures out there,
but the search is very difficult.
So let's review the
state of my reviews. Out of my first 100 albums I have:
17 1-star albums. Lots of these are big beat, rap, hip-hop and 80s
crap. I would say there's nothing really surprising about me hating
this group, though I was a bit shocked at how awful the Grateful Dead
album was.
42 2-star albums. The number is not surprising as this is the "didn't
hate it" category. I was hoping for a bit more out of Frank
Zappa and R.E.M, but the rest of this stuff I'd never heard before
and it makes no difference if I ever hear it again.
28 3-star albums. A few pleasant surprises- I kinda liked Iron
Maiden, which I wasn't expecting. I was also slightly dreading Rush,
but it turned out OK. I wound up downloading a couple of songs by The
Dictators, so they're probably the most pleasant surprise of this
group. The biggest letdown was Pink Floyd's The Wall. It got 3
stars because I have this default rule that if an album has four or
five good songs on it the album must be good. But The Wall as
a whole has a TON of junk on it, so I actually didn't like it at all.
12 4-star albums. These are the ones I have to go back and revisit.
Did I really like Meat Puppets all that much? I have to wonder. I
am glad I found Jorge Ben, John Cale, Scott Walker, Tim Buckley and
The Beau Brummels. This was the music I was really hoping to find
when I started my project.
1 5-star album. I am really glad that when I generated my random list
American Gothic wound up at number 9. I'm not sure if there's
a good word to describe this feeling, but I'm anticipating my
depression years in advance when I find another treasure like
American Gothic deep in the list at like number 813. All I'll
be thinking if that happens is, "Why couldn't you have been
closer to the top? I had to listen to three hours of Eminem before I
found you?
How about some time
stats? If I were to listen to all 100 of these albums back-to-back,
how long do you think it would take? The answer is 3 days, 3 hours,
29 minutes, and 37 seconds according to the times listed for the
albums on Wikipedia. When said like that it doesn't sound that
difficult, especially when that time is spread out over a year. I'm
still working on tabulating times for every album on the list, but if
that holds over the full 1,047 album list it would take a month to
listen to the whole thing.
The average number
of stars for my reviews is 2.38, which means in my average opinion I
did not hate the music I've heard. It doesn't seem that way, because
some of those 1-star albums were just plain AWFUL, and I wish my
arbitrary rating system would allow me to rate it worse.
I was also curious
if I had any particular hot or cold streaks or if the average review
held steady throughout the course of the year. So starting with my
11th review I tabulated an average of the previous 10. The average
started at 2.6 with New Order's Low Life then quickly dropped
as low as 1.8 when I got to The Cure's Pornography. The
reviews slowly recovered to 2.6 when I got to John Cale's Paris
1919, then cratered at 1.7 with Fatboy Slim's You've Come A
Long Way Baby. My worst run came between this album and John
Coltrane's A Love Supreme, a stretch that saw 4 2-stars and 5
1-stars.
I had my first
legitimate hot streak starting with Rufus Wainwright's Want Two
and ending, surprisingly enough, with Christina Aguilera's Back To
Basics. My best run so far just came to an end between David
Bowie's Aladdin Sane and Belle and Sebastian's Tigermilk.
I handed out 5 4-star reviews and 3 3-star reviews. I'd love to come
up with more ways to statistically analyze (or as I like to say
"statify") my reviews.
Of course what
really matters is what music do I think really belongs on a list of
music everyone must hear before they die. Obviously I think everyone
should hear American Gothic by David Ackles. But the other
stuff I listed highly really isn't that important in the grand scheme
of music. I just happen to like it. Rather I'm gonna recommend the
other extreme, and say you must hear Scum by Napalm Death.
American Gothic
is a masterful achievement, something that all music should aspire to
be- wonderfully composed, expertly arranged and performed, and
preserved with a beautiful recording. Scum is something else.
It's tough to tell if what's on the album is music, or if the
musicians are particularly talented, or if it was performed in any
sort of earnestness. Scum is a full-frontal assault on your
musical taste, an attack on your sense of hearing. So you must
listen, and then tell me if musical greatness really is entirely
subjective.
With that, I plunge
ahead into my next 100 albums. Maybe next year I'll write another
essay about how things are going. For now I'm just hoping I never
need to hear Echo and the Bunnymen again.
-Dave
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