What's Old to My iPod

09/26/08 8:56am

by Chris Burland (CHARTattack)

In an attempt to be new, I’ve gone old yesterday by stomping galumphing down two sets of stairs to the basement and back again with two stacks of CDs from my over-burgeoning CD collection.

After almost a decade and half of purchasing receiving review copies of CDs, I have somewhere between 1500 and 2000 albums, many of which I haven’t listened to since I bought or reviewed them. In fact there are even a dozen or so that I never removed the cellophane from the purchase including a couple of Ramones and Pink Floyd albums I got in one of those two for one sales half a decade back.

So in order to include them into my new music scene, I added about 20 of them onto my new iPod. I attempted to cross musical genres with my selections, but the choices were haphazard at best.

In retrospect, I added a number of folk/rock/pop faves from the 60s: Serge Gainsbourg’s Comic Strip, Dylan’s Highway 61 Revisited, Phil Ochs’ All The News That’s Fit To Sing and Fairport Convention’s UnHalfbricking. There was one jazz album, Art Pepper’s late-50s tour-de-force album, Art Pepper Meets The Rhythm Section; a punk classic, Wire’s Pink Flag; some hip hoppy/electronic stuff, Thievery Corporation’s DJ Kicks compilation and Tribe Called Quest’s People’s Instinctive Travels and the Paths of Rhythm and of course a bunch of rock and roll.

That gigantic musical category stretched from Kensington Market's Avenue Road, Love’s Forever Changes and Brian Eno’s Here Come The Warm Jets through the early 80’s of Split Enz’ True Colours and the 90s eclecticism of Versus’ Two Cents Plus Tax, Tortoise’s Millions Now Living Will Never Die, Unrest’s Perfect Teeth, Seam’s Are You Driving Me Crazy? and Red Red Meat's Jimmywine Majestic.

In this new world, don’t forget to go back to your salad days, those times when an album caught your ear that countered the styles of music that all of your friends were listening to. Be an individual. Celebrate your uniqueness. I am today!

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