According to Wired Magazine, I have lousy taste in music. Or at least Scott Brown does, and therefore by the sheer amount of overlap in our libraries, I must also have terrible taste:
I was 10 when I realized I had lousy taste in music. Billy Joel’s “An Innocent Man” was my gateway drug: I listened to it on infinite loop, in perfect contentment, for days. Later, in high school, I began huffing a deadly theater-nerd mix of piano-driven rock balladry, pseudo-political folk-pop, Danny Elfman soundtracks, and Enigma. College, the place where most people atone for the sonic sins of their youth, was a haze of Ben Folds Five and Dave Matthews Band. And things haven’t really improved since. Bad taste was less of a problem when our playlists were private affairs. Today, however, our personal soundtracks broadcast who we are, and it’s simply not acceptable to swan around with the Indigo Girls’ “Galileo,” Annie Lennox’s “Walking on Broken Glass,” or (God help me!) Billy Joel’s “Big Man on Mulberry Street” blazing across your iPhone screen. (One is ironic, two is quixotic, but try all three and you can hear the NSA giggling on the other end of the line.)
Ben Folds? I own every album. Billy Joel? Back in high school, I could play his entire catalog on the piano. (I still bust out a mean “Angry Young Man.”) Indigo Girls? Guilty as charged.
Oh, and I’m a musical theater buff. And I’m straight. By most accounts, I have terrible taste in music. It’s not that I don’t appreciate indie rock, it’s just that if you dumped me on a desert island and forced me to choose between Spoon and Paul Simon’s 1970′s catalog, I’d take Paul faster than you could call me Al.
So that’s where I’m coming from with this little project. A quick glance through the book shows I’m familiar with about half the material, although I’ve probably listened seriously to less than a quarter of it.
Tom Moon is an accomplished music writer, and it looks like he approached the 1,000 Recordings project from a fairly genre-neutral standpoint, although country and hip-hop may be under-represented. That’s fine by me, since my country preferences start with Johnny Cash and end with Willie Nelson, and my limited hip-hop library leans toward obscure white guys like Atmosphere and Aesop Rock.
In other words, the book is probably a good fit for my crappy musical taste: Broad enough to expose me to artists I might not have considered before, but not so far out there that I’ll go weeks at a stretch listening to music that everyone else says I should love but I can’t stand.
