Originally published at: A playlist of every "Now That's What I Call Music" compilation - Boing Boing
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It’s Spotify, so I guess I won’t be listening, but I may seek out the track listing. Interested to know if this is all of the US “Now…” albums, specifically (I’m guessing it is) 'cos I’d like to see a listing of all the UK ones.
(Also, one simply peruses something, one does not peruse through something.)
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It is the UK ones. The US and the UK ones (and a bunch of other countries’ versions) are all listed on Discogs, if you just want to peruse the track listings.
It’s wasn’t “Now” that invented this- K-tel (and probably others) had already been doing it for a while. Not to mention the “Top of the Pops” cover record series, which probably has its own circle of hell.
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And they didn’t call it Now that’s what I call Now that’s what I call music!
Very disappointed.
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We used to pile into a mate of mine’s place every Sunday evening in time for the Top 40.
He had a double cassette player, fingers-like-a-ninjas ready to record Radio 1.
Now that’s what I call fun!
And if we were dead lucky, we might get an actual girl to come round!
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From what I remember of the US releases, this would be a handy way to mass block a lot of stuff I never want to hear again.
CMJ used to release a “new music” cd with its print magazine. That would make a great playlist.
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Sadly (!), some of us don’t need to do that because we’ve still got the originals. I even have the first few on cassette tape before they started to have CD editions.
I admit that young-me didn’t realise that the artists probably didn’t make any money from them; later it had become a habit that I admit I haven’t gone out of my way to break as it’s a decent way to catch up on trends without needing to brave the wilds of music radio or tv. There are usually a few songs on every edition that I’m glad I’ve heard, and it’s sometimes fun to go back to earlier ones to see the first sightings of singers and bands that go on to become huge (and the one-hit wonders too.)
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Is this gonna be one of those things when I was a copywriter at MIT and they told me never to use “comprised” in any form because people had very strong opinions about whether it required a preposition like “of” afterward or whether the relationship was implied in and intrinsic to the word itself?
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It looks like Now 19 UK is the point where house and techno crossed over from being occasional interlopers in a pop and rock world, to being half the compilation.
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Did they also follow K-tel’s lead in butchering the songs? I used to hate that they’d remove guitar solos, bridges, movements, and such so they could squeeze twenty songs on the albums. 
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They didn’t put all of Blue Room by the Orb on it, for some reason.
The BPI changed the rules about what counted as a single after it got into the top 10.
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No. It’s not. 
My earlier comment is comprised of some words that, taken together, denote the correct usage of peruse, whilst the words themselves comprised the whole of the message on that topic.
(I.e. tell your old MIT mates that whether or not ‘of’ is used, is based entirely on context and usage.)
Peruse is different because it means ‘to look through’ so adding ‘through’ is redundant seeing as it is always implied by the word itself.
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Noted!
I think the problem with the “comprise” debate is that you have some very, very intelligent people at MIT, with very, very strong opinions, and a lot of confidence in the power of those opinions. As such, it can difficult to convince some of those people that their expertise in, say, optics doesn’t always translate directly to an expertise in language and grammar.
Some of them are quite grateful to let someone else make their words sound all pretty and stuff! Others are quite sure that the word “comprise” must never ever ever be followed by an “of,” and that anyone who suggests otherwise is a complete moron who should be immediately terminated from their position, possibly executed in public.
And sometimes, you just gotta pick your battles, ya know?
(My wife ran into a similar sort of tension when she ran a theatre company in a small college town. Lots of tenured mathematics professors insisting that their aesthetic preferences were inherently more valuable, and that their interpretations of artwork therefore were not only objectively correct but also should be prioritized in all future artistic discussions and programming.)
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As such, it can difficult to convince some of those people that their expertise in, say, optics doesn’t always translate directly to an expertise in language and grammar.
Some of them are quite grateful to let someone else make their words sound all pretty and stuff!
Been there, done that. Worked with many professional (commercial) subject matter experts, nearly all of whom would defer to my improvement of their content as long as I kept their material accurate. Most were grateful I made their stuff better. I guess in non-commercial arenas - e.g. opinionated academics - they think it IS their profession, so will argue the toss.
In non-professional arenas (amateur voluntary articles for a magazine, for example) I am constantly frustrated by pompous arses who not only think they can write elegant prose (they can’t) but also believe they know how it should be laid out and how it should be spaced and how it should appear on the page.
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