2002-09-22 - 11:53 p.m.

Obsessive Compulsive Music Nerd

Boy this entry is going to make me sound pitiful.

Almost six months ago, in this entry I mentioned that I was going to be cataloguing the music of 1999. Well, today at long last I finished. Well, not exactly finished. Maybe I'm halfway done. At least the hard part is done!

I downloaded over 500 songs that made the charts in 1999 in one way or another. I listed to all of them a couple of times, then started to cull the wheat from the chaff. The ones I didn't like, I deleted. Others that I thought were interesting I investigated buying the CDs they came from. I talked about the results of that little experiment here and here.

After that I decided what of the remaining mp3s I wanted to burn on a CD. I originally was going to burn only two CDs, but I wound up burning three. After all, why not?

After I was done I made labels and CD jewel case inserts for them. And after all my careful work I accidentally switched the labels for two of the discs. Oopsie! Well, they all look alike anyway before you put labels on them!

I'm now in the middle of uploading all the non-mp3 songs off of the various discs, so I can listen to them and put them in the order that I like them. This will probably take more than a month. It's not like it's work or anything. It's just me listening to music while I'm doing other things. In fact, I'm doing it RIGHT NOW while I'm writing this. Is Celine Dion shouting in my ear helping my concentration as I write? Mmmmaybe.

I have to say that this is SO MUCH easier than the way I used to do it. I'd take all the sounds and put them on cassette tapes and just play them to death for a couple of months, and then put the songs in order. However, making the cassette tapes was very time-intensive, and frustrating as well. It made me want to bang my head when the songs I'd picked for a side of a tape turned out to be 10 seconds too long.

However, all those MP3s definitely slowed down the process. I'm just at the point where I'm going to start listening to the finalists and deciding how much I really like them. Well, I haven�t been working at it THAT diligently. I do have other things to do.

Then there is the issue of MP3 sharing, which is illegal, technically. Supposedly it is stealing money from the artists that made the music. While that may be partially true, it mainly is stealing from the scumbag record companies that have done a million times more to crush the souls of musicians than all the downloaders in the world. They can bite me.

Supposedly they are really going to start cracking down on music sharing, subpoenaing major downloaders and whatnot, which as I have said before is penny wise and pound-foolish. Without music sharing I wouldn't have heard the vast majority of these songs, and it caused me to buy discs that I never would have. However, the cheap prick record companies want to have their cake and eat it too. Fine, it's their funeral. How else am I supposed to hear new music? Through the lo-fi 20 second song snippets on amazon.com? I don't think so.

All of this is also a major indictment of how awful American radio is, too. It's incredibly bland and cookie-cutter, like much of American culture. We seem to be forever hearing about the SAME fucking ten artists ad infinitum. For example, I think I may already be sick of Avril Lavigne without actually hearing any of her songs. I'll bet she's not too pleased to be touted as the "next Britney." I'll bet Britney is not too thrilled either.

As I heard some pundit ruminating a couple days ago, U.S. radio is so feeble that people are reduced to finding about breaking acts via car commercials on TV, witness Moby, and more recently Dirty Vegas.

So how naughty am I? Of the roughly 250 songs on my list from 1999, about 60 of them are MP3s that I don't own. The other 75% I bought. I think that's pretty fair.

Let me tell you, when I was first listening to music at the very beginning of the 1970s, I would have KILLED for this computer technology and all the groovy things it lets me do. Maybe it's a good thing that I didn't have it, because I would probably be an even bigger socially maladjusted virtual hermit than I am now.

Hmmm. That's hard to imagine.

However, it does let me answer Diarylanders musical trivial questions. I'm just a big old pop music nerd.