(no subject)
Dec. 9th, 2004 12:02 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
which_chickI'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.)
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.)
no subject
Date: 2004-12-10 07:46 pm (UTC)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.