which_chick | (no subject)

I'm up for music suggestions. Pick an album you like and suggest it to me. (One album per person, please.) The critera here are (1) must not suck (in your opinion) and (2) should be something I don't hear on my redneck classic-rock station. (So no Rush, no Queen, no ZZ Top, no Van Halen, no Pink Floyd, no Jimi Hendrix, no hair bands, no power ballads, no Kiss, no Judas Priest, no Ozzy, no Aerosmith... that sort of thing, I already hear enough of.) Also, I do not need to be exposed to anything that was played on the radio as mainstream Top-40 music from the mid 80's through the early 1990's. I have the, er, lifetime merit badge for that stuff.

Pretty much anything you suggest will be news to me -- I only recently discovered that Kid Rock's album Cocky is somewhat catchy, if laden with hubris and a bit fond of the word motherf***er. (It's amazing how he can say all those asterisks, isn't it? You'd think that the pointy bits would all get stuck...) My cousin (the one with the master's degree, fondness for Louis Vuitton handbags, and BMW [edit: Might be a Mercedes. It's something expensive, anyway. Probably I should be paying more attention, but I really don't give a shit what San drives. It makes her happy, and that's what is important, here.]) pointed this out to me as a worth-listening artist and I asked her where the hell she learned about it. It isn't the sort of thing I'd have expected of her, see. She said Kid Rock came from her sister, the minivan-driving one with three kids under the age of six, the Stay At Home Mom. Apparently in the fine state of Virginia, there is at least one minivan-driving SAHM blasting sanitized (I'm told that there exists a version without the asterisked word, suitable for radio playage and toddler-exposure) Kid Rock while she drives to and from the WalMart.

Anyway. If you can come up with an album that I need to lay down good money to hear, I promise to go buy it legitimately (ie. not downloading) and give it a fair trial run -- at least two or three times through. (I've found that some things grow on me after the first listen. Once through often isn't enough.)

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

Mason Jennings's eponymous first album. Buy it. I mean it! It's only 23 minutes, but it's all stuff that'll stick with you. I, myself, have been singing the first track for five years on a loop.

Make yerself at home
'cause I'm goin' out
across the street
to get us some water

'Cause this water's brown
and I'm so embarassed
to have you here
but I want you around,

Usually I'd sing,
play on my guitar
but I know that won't
get very far with you

'Cause you like music
that makes ya move,
mine's gotta groove
there's nothing I can do.

Please know what I mean
when I say
nothing.

Or another great song...

Dontcha know baby?
I'm a leadin' man.
I dig down deep when
I say "I love you."

OWN IT. I've been singing 1997 for three days straight, and I've owned the album for years.

Okay, so I've thought about it for a while now, and decided that if I was stuck on a desert island with only one CD, it would be this one (http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/B0000041ZF/qid=1102684456/sr=2-1/ref=sr_2_1/103-9259962-6363829). I'm not nearly geeky enough to follow the arguments going on in the reviews, but I have heard several different recordings of the opera, and this one is my favorite. Some of the parts aren't spectacular, but even the non-superstar singers are all solid.

(deleted comment)

Assuredly so... that's not what I asked, though. I asked for an album you like -- not an album I like. I already know what I like. However, there are things out there that I might like that I don't even *know* about. That, there, is teh suck.

Now, Amazon and Netflix are making all kinds of money helping people find things they might like (there was a fairly-thoughtful Wired article (http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/12.10/tail.html) partially about this a couple of months back) based on the sorts of things they have already liked. However, this approach, while not as incestuous-of-thought as an average college English department, doesn't expose people to entirely new and different things. It exposes people to more of the same sorts of things they've already liked, or, at the most, exposes them to the sorts of things that other people who liked some of what they like also liked. (If you fail in parsing that, I'm sorry. I did the best I could.)

Amazon.com and Netflix use their suggestion-engines to come up with stuff that will score as a win. They want to suggest successful things, things that the buyer/renter will like... first, for a satisfied customer, and second for a REPEAT customer willing to trust and use their suggestion feature as the AstroGlide of a consumerist orgy. Neither of these goals is a bad thing, but it makes their suggestion engines less than helpful for finding things that I might like that I didn't even know existed.

To find things that I didn't even know existed, I have to be willing to risk the chance of failure. It's possible that someone will suggest an album that I just cannot bear to listen to more than three times through, one that I never want to hear again. It's possible... and I am willing to risk that in order to find new, delightful things that I didn't even know existed.

In my world, I own (legit) copies of the Dropkick Murphys album Blackout and the Kid Rock album Cocky. Both of these were recs from people who swore up and down that the music DID NOT SUCK even though they were not the sorts of things I would ever listen to on my own. And lo, a couple of fair whirls later, the music did not suck. So that's how we got here, to where I want to know about an album you like.

I briefly considered trying to guess what you'd like best, but decided that way was fraught with peril. So this is what I like best.

I think the single best CD I've heard in the last few years is Coldplay, A Rush of Blood to the Head. It doesn't really rock you, though.

Have you heard any Mary Prankster? Profane, literate, smartass punk-pop. Dave A. has it constantly playing on his car stereo and at work. I also liked Tom Waits' Blood Money.