My wife and I have similarly-sized, similarly stupid LP collections. We could have a battle-of-the-snarky-reviews.
This is one of the nicest things I’ve come across in a long time - thank you for pointing it out. I just listened to Black Sabbath’s Changes for the first time in years and am now trying not to leap around too much to Afrique. Happy.
haha, her first sentence reviewing BIg Black’s Atomizer is awesome:
This is very unpleasant. Right off the bat, it just feels really unpleasant and painful.
I love Big Black to death but that’s fantastic. She’s a funny writer. A shame her fella doesn’t have Songs About Fucking.
I’ve been happily skimming through her blog for the last 15 or so minutes-it’s good!
I can’t help but think about how different a similar blog from my wife–if I was married–would be. it would not be alphabetical since they’re all in crates by genre/mood/BPM, and she would be making snarky comments about how over half of it are singles so it’s a whole side of the same song, its remixes, instrumental, and acapella tracks i.e. boring to listen to the whole side. In terms of something the reader wants to come back to, It’s probably a much better blog for the fact that her husband’s collection is alphabetical. there’s plenty of the same stuff her husband is into in mine but she’d be wading through a fuck-ton more hip hop, jazz, and funk/soul in between.
there’d be plenty of snark today, since a crate’s worth of records got rained on at a festival yesterday so all the sleeves are wedged open and airing out all over my apartment right now.
I like Big Black quite a bit, Atomizer is my favorite of their albums, and her review is completely spot on (and, as you say, funny).
FIVE Adam Ant records and only one Beatles album? Stupid record collection indeed.
I like the idea. Wandering through someone else’s tended collection (assuming it has been weeded through, throughout the years to not just have a collection of bought stuff) can be a lot of fun.
I like to think of music as atemporal nowadays. Some song/record/artist is going to be new to someone at any given moment, especially with digital versions being available. I can’t wait until larger traditional broadcasters get into the act more fully (some stations might do a “retro” or “party” night now that play the hits of yesteryear but I’m talking more like deep album tracks that some FM stations used to all night long… to be integrated into the current offerings playlists, rather than merely an “oldies station”).
I made the mistake of clicking on that Jezebel link, and wish I could take my click back. I despise Gawker’s “you need to be angry right now, no time to explain” approach, so I just skimmed it; my apologize if I missed something important. It just seemed…very ranty, and almost entirely not about the blog. If anything, it seemed to be complaining that she wasn’t catching shit from the dudebros, which just about made me nope right the hell out of even skimming it.
The comment section went straight to cosplay. It’s depressing as hell to read, but it has nothing to do with the blog.
I just saved you a few minutes. You’re welcome.
Something I realized by listening to a local station: they were mixing together 90s music with some relatively new 90s-nostalgic music, and there’s virtually no difference in audio quality between the two. There’s not that stark difference in recording quality between, say, 70s rock and the 70s-nostalgia rock of the 90s. And some bands, like Led Zeppelin, had such awesome sound to start with that, even though the music is dated, the recordings sound astoundingly good.
We had a local station that was a JACK affiliate for a while, and though I don’t tend to like corporate radio, it seemed like a station based on throwing everything into iTunes and seeing what happens. Loved it.
Sounds like a fun way to do things, I wonder how the advertisers feel about the ROI against more traditional airplay rotation… 
I noticed that the local JACK affiliate here in Seattle does (did?) not have DJs per se just canned station announcements and as far as I could tell no backannoucing of the songs. So yes basically a giant music library on shuffle play. I am sure they have someone local manning the board but I am not sure I ever noticed it when I have given it a listen.
So, apparently it’s a big corporate thing.
That said, it makes me think of the time that Howard Stern pitted a program director against a monkey, and the monkey won.
In the era of Pandora, etc, I’m not sure this is a bad move. Unless you like the style of SLAMMIN WILD BAMBOO FM DJ HERE WITH YA TILL THE SUN GOES DOWN HOT HOT HOT kind of thing yelled at you from your radio.
And to comment on the subject itself. I saw a reference to this blog awhile ago. I found it fun. I long ago have given up on too much judging of musical taste. I mean there is stuff I have come to realize meh, not my personal thing but then I don’t expect everyone to like all the stuff I find interesting either. God knows I have no way room fault people for liking Justin Bieber when I went sqeee like a little girl upon discovering Baby Metal (thank you Boing Boing). I think it is a very interesting exercise where she is actually exploring new to her music and really dismissing things when she doesn’t like it so much as just say hey I didn’t like XYZ with this and taking pokes at it without being mean.
I’m really digging her blog. It’s not too often that people sit down and listen to a whole album and really think about how it makes them feel. She seems super awesome.
Does everyone have to over-simplify and over-analyse EVERYTHING? There isn’t some hidden, anti-woman agenda at work here. It’s just a stupid, fun, blog. Do the folks who wrote these articles have some deep-rooted insecurity about how knowledgeable they are vs. men when it comes to music? Probably not, so why the fuck scream about it? It really takes from the pure wonder of the thing. Just enjoy it.
Yeah…I didn’t get that. It’s not like she’s twirling her hair and saying, “I don’t get this music 'coz I’m just a girl, tee hee!” and we’re all just passing it on because look gurls r dum.
That sounds suspiciously like my wife’s stupid record collection. I wouldn’t allow a Beatles album anywhere near my own record collection.
I don’t know about the record collection, but his record player sure is stoopid.
Technics SL1200 Mk!! : What everyone bought in the 90’s , just because they saw it in the club/bar
