I recently bought a portable CD player that plays MP3s. Such a thing is obviously useful for someone who (a) travels a lot and (b) is indecisive. Because I can fit 10 times as many MP3s as regular tracks on a CD, the MP3 player means I can carry 250 albums or so in a small-ish CD case. It’s all very good. In theory.
The first problem was getting data CDs that stored MP3s in a format that the little player can read. The first 15 or so CDs I tried were mostly incomprehensible to the player. (If anyone needs any coasters, I’ve got some spare CDs lying around…) Mostly incomprehensible, because 1 of them somehow worked. I was hoping I could use that 1 to tell me just exactly what format a CD needed to be in for the player to read it. Very scientific, I thought. Except when I tried to duplicate the settings I used for the one that worked, the CD player still wasn’t happy. At this stage I knew what to do. The difference between the CD that worked and the CD that didn’t work could be broken into a series of small steps such that each step was too small to possibly make a difference to whether the CD actually worked. In essence I could march the CD player along a forced march Sorites. This strategy required burning (literally) even more blank CDs to make sure the steps were small enough, but the strategy worked! Who said philosophy is useless! Not even a machine can withstand the forced march Sorites! (I leave the philosophical consequences of this for another day.)
The second problem was figuring out which albums should go with what. Some of it was easy. For several bands it was easy to create one CD with all their albums. But that didn’t always work, and wasn’t obviously optimal. And I’m an obsessive listmaker. So I decided I had to have one CD with my 10 favourite albums on it. Which required working out what those albums are. So here’s the list. (I know, this ceased being a philosophy post long ago.)
Brian’s 10 favourite albums (as of May 27, 2003), in approximate chronological order
- Blonde on Blonde (Bob Dylan)
- The Velvet Underground and Nico (The Velvet Underground and Nico)
- Sgt Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band (The Beatles)
- Post (Paul Kelly)
- The Queen is Dead (The Smiths)
- Stone Roses (Stone Roses)
- Parklife (Blur)
- The Boy with the Arab Strap (Belle and Sebastian)
- Watching Angels Mend (Alex Lloyd)
- The Strokes (The Strokes)
It’s approximate chronological order because in several cases I don’t know exactly which album came out before which. I think that’s the right order, but I’m very uncertain about the last two, a little uncertain about the Post/Queen is Dead order, and quite uncertain about the Banana/Sgt Peppers order.
If I was a real list maniac I’d order the list by Brian’s preferences. But that’s too hard. Or I’m trying to cut back on lists. Stone Roses would be at #1, beyond that it’d be a bit random.
I was a bit surprised when making up the list to realise that Watching Angels Mend was (just about) my favourite album of the last few years. It’s a kind of boring conventional choice, at least for a young professional Australian type. I’m just a sucker for music that screams I’M A GENIUS while remaining within by now well-established indie-pop boundaries. Especially if it’s by an Australian. I’d like there to be more Australian albums there, but most of my favourite Australian acts (Crowded House, Go-Betweens, Nick Cave, You Am I) don’t have a real standout album that easily makes the list.
The Strokes album has to be the UK release, not the horrible bastardised version of the album (with dubious cover art) that got released in America. The US version might not be in the top 100.
There’s a lot of choices there that are not particularly fashionable. Blonde on Blonde over Highway 61, Sgt Peppers over Revolver, Post over Gossip, anything over anything by Radiohead. Again, my goodness judgments don’t necessarily track fashion as well as may be hoped.
I know I said a few days ago that Bringing It all Back Home was the perfect Dylan album. I changed my mind. I could try and save the consistency by saying that there’s a difference between being Dylan’s best album and being the best Dylan album. The analogy would be those who claim that Let It Bleed is the Stones’ best album, but Exile on Main St is the best Stones album. But this is barely coherent at best, and in any case is wrong about the relative quality of Stones records, so I shouldn’t rely on it. I just changed my mind. (How did I leave Exile off this list? Don’t know. Could be getting late.)
Yes, I am a little embarrassed about having Parklife on the list. It’s a little sad I guess, but I have a hopeless nostalgia for the mid-90s in the way that some old lefties have a nostalgia for the late 60s, or some conservatives have a nostalgia for the reign of Henry VIII. Clinton in the White House and Keating in the Lodge; the long (inter)national nightmare of peace and prosperity; good music, good movies, even occasionally good television (pre-Survivor!) and, perhaps not coincidentally, some very good philosophy. I was never the kind of hard partying hard drinking carefree irresponsible friendly anti-social repulsive attractive type that’s celebrated on Parklife – and the greyhound on the cover of the album is the closest I’ve been to the dogs for a very long time – so I don’t really have a good excuse for liking it. Maybe it’s moments like this that make people like the view that reason is slave of the passions.