My blog has been getting all this traffic from people in Denmark who arrive here after googling, "Don't tell anyone you don't own 'Blonde on Blonde'. It's gonna be okay." If any of you arriving here via that vector could let me know why... well... then I'd know why. :)
UPDATE: Someone in the comments explained that it's for a contest so, if it helps, the line is spoken by Jack Black's character, Barry, in the movie High Fidelity (2000).
I think we now have our first SLIS-O-Sphere to Balt-O-Sphere blog connection: Mike lists his Blonde On Blonde cuts and links to John.
Perestroika!
Sarah has her list up... she notes that she's one of the few people including ANY women (a fair point, what's it mean?) and the only ska thus far. I'd also like to say that her selection of Pet Sounds set me up the bomb and that Hejira missed the list in the last cut.
Don't forget John's mirror post at Easily Amusing, which has several lists in the comments.
Will you play along, dear reader?
Current Listening: The New York Ska Jazz Ensemble, Arachnid
Question 1: "How would you divide up the 50 discs? By genre? By theme? By chronology? By influence?"
Influence. It would be interesting to graph obvious (and not-so-obvious) relationships so that you can see where Bitches Brew splits off from jazz as it was known and hits stuff like Blues for Allah or whatever. I don't know enough Sly Stone to get into all that, but you get my drift. Flat chronologies, I feel, the realities that we're getting in to now where a given musician/listener can experience something released in the first half of the last century with a clarity that equals, or even surpasses, that experienced by contemporary listeners. I'm not even going to get started with sampling, etc.
2) What are your "Don't tell anyone you don't own Blonde on Blonde. It's gonna be okay" albums?
I should preface this by saying that this is a snapshot not of life on Earth, but of my life as a reasonably-educated, white, lower-middle class American male. The distinctions are important, but I suppose that if you view my selections in that light you can see a bit of where I'm coming from. The selections are in willfully-random order...
The Beatles, Abbey Road
Madvillain, Madvillainy
The Cure, Seventeen Seconds
Public Enemy, Fear of a Black Planet
John Coltrane, A Love Supreme
Boards of Canada, Geogaddi
Augustus Pablo, Original Rockers
J.S. Bach, The Well-Tempered Clavier
Greatful Dead, Workingman's Dead
Wilco, Yankee Hotel Foxtrot
So there we are.
Current Listening: The Tindersticks, Another Night In
Here's an interview with John Francis, an African American environmental activist who took a vow of silence for 17 years and refused to use modes of transportation that required petroleum. Interesting stuff.
I have a query. Two actually. Suppose you were given 50 blank CDs by someone who had little to no knowledge of popular music, either comtemporarily or historically. Yet said person enjoyed music and wanted to be exposed to it. Or, pretend the person is an alien (if you're into that sort of thing) and gave you 50 discs to deliver a crash course in what's going on in music and where it came from. And if it sucked, said alien would destroy the planet. Or, maybe just your neighborhood.
1) How would you divide up the 50 discs? By genre? By theme? By chronology? By influence?
2) What are your "Don't tell anyone you don't own Blonde on Blonde. It's gonna be okay" albums? That is, regardless of genre, what are the 10 essential albums? What are the 10 albums someone absolutely, positively must own in order to understand life on this planet during the second half of the first decade of the 21st millennium? Please justify your answer with a brief response to each one.
Respondents will receive a list of the 50 discs I end up choosing. Also a raffle ticket qualifying them for a free MP3 mix of selections from the discs.
I'd be interested to see what the SLIS-O-Sphere has to say about this, particularly given John's question about organization of the information. Consider yourself queried. I'll post my own thoughts a bit later.
You know... as self-indulgent as they seem, I always knew there was a reason for the Sampo Method, the Fuck Off Method, the Your Son Is An Underachiever Method, etc. It's interesting to see some research backing my assumptions up, but when you watch Google traffic come in on these albums and artists and consider the easy affinity that one feels for someone else who really digs Artist X when you meet them at a party... well... we're rather on to something here, aren't we? Interesting to note the parallels with the practice of DJs publishing current charts to rave mailing lists/boards, never mind publishing them to zines and glossy mags.
Sarah and I watched Donnie Darko last night... wow. We had debated seeing it for a long while because the trailers we'd seen made it look like a lame teen horror flick fueled by post-Columbine angst, but we'd also heard great things about it from most of our friends. We should have taken their advice sooner. If you haven't seen it yet, do yourself the favor.
Tangential query: anyone played around with Neooffice? (via some random blog I coded yesterday)
Tangential plug: New Warren Ellis graphic novel! Get Desolation Jones at your local comics dungeon/shoppe/retailer (via Boing Boing).
Tangential factoid: Wikipedia is now the second-most visited reference source on the web (via Professional Lurker). Interesting... the librarians in Information Services at the Enoch Pratt Free Library used it quite a bit when I worked there, though they default to offline resources for most queries.
Tangential quote:
Should any political party attempt to abolish social security, unemployment insurance, and eliminate labor laws and farm programs, you would not hear of that party again in our political history. There is a tiny splinter group, of course, that believes you can do these things. Among them are H. L. Hunt (you possibly know his background), a few other Texas oil millionaires, and an occasional politician or business man from other areas. Their number is negligible and they are stupid.
