2003-03-24 - 1:45 p.m.

The most useless thing in the world

Well, I've started doing it again, looking at the music of a particular year, figuring out what I like. Just like in this entry.

Right now I'm working on the year 2000. I downloaded every single song that made the charts, and I'm deciding what I like. Some stuff I'll keep as MP3s, but a lot of it I've bought as CDs. Of course since I'm not made of money, I bought them used. This seems to be an ideal situation - two or three years down the line a lot of CDs are available dirt cheap. The most expensive of them are $7.99, some of them are as cheap as $3.99.

Since I was going to be ordering a bunch of CDs I went through my CD database (yes, I have a CD database) and decided see what had come out in the last few years from artists I liked. Sad to say, it looks like a lot my favorite acts are defunct. When you haven't released an album since 1998 that's probably not a good sign. However, to my surprise a number of acts that I thought had given up the ghost in the early 1980s had released records well into the 1990s, like Supertramp and Manfred Mann's Earth Band.

I mainly used the artist lookup on Amazon.com to find out what records were available. Of course I'm not going to pay their prices if I can help it.

One of the interesting things about doing this was reading the reviews that accompanied most of the CDs. A lot of them are written by Amazon customers, not professional reviewers. While some of them are amusing, they are utterly useless if you are trying to figure out what to buy. Nearly all of them are written by fans of the band involved and of course they are going to write a rave review. Nearly every CD has a rating of four and half or five stars - not terribly helpful for figuring out what's crap and what isn't.

The only exception to this rule are the really popular acts like the Rolling Stones or Britney Spears. People feel perfectly free to pan their stuff, but it's rather pointless. Almost everyone has heard their music, and they can make up their own minds whether it's good or not.

Anyway, some of these reviews are side-splittingly funny, and generally not on purpose. For example, some young music fan was writing a review of a CD he liked, but the only positive word he seemed to know was "great." I swear, in one sentence he used it FOUR times! This record was so wonderful it must have knocked the brains right out of him! Get that boy a thesaurus!

Well, it's only to be expected. Amazon.com wants to sell CDs after all, not bury them. It's all good fun, just don't let their happy chatter talk the money out of your pocket.