"Spoken Like A True MP3 Blogger"

Which is to say, I guess I agree w/your defense to this guy, Matthew.

Yancey, I never at any point said that the Gwen album was at all "bad"!

and none of this is meant to be an attack on you personally or even you as a critic (i dunno if you even consider yourself one, come to think), but while earl's arguments are k-lame, yours aren't k-great either. (this comes from someone who has absolutely NOTHING at stake in the subject of the argument -- gwen -- but gets annoyed with tiffs like these.)

x-post

oh shit yr right. i completely misread this part:

"Not really, Mr. Vitriol. I tend to judge records on averages. I would rate half of the Stefani record as being excellent, one fourth of it as being very good, and the rest as being good but not great. That's waaaaay better than most records, and I hear a whole lot of them. Either way, I'm not so hung up on records being consistently great. I'm pretty forgiving of filler, since I simply elect not to listen to those songs and focus on the stuff that I do enjoy. To me, an album with only one or two really amazing songs is a LOT better than a record made up of consistently so-so material, even if the rest of the record is very bad."

apologies, matthew.

Definitely have to agree on this one. This is bad mojo all around, and I haven't liked many similar examples of its ilk.

Arguing for the love of a song is no bad thing at all, which you of course know implicitly. That said, while I see your point about how an album with a couple of spectacular songs can trump a generally indifferent one, I think there's no reason why you can't just simply say, "Look, ditch the album, just keep these couple of winners" instead of trying to defend the album format as such in that case. I would NEVER go around saying that the Beyonce album was great just because "Crazy in Love" was spiff, because I thought just about everything else was draggy, dull and useless. The presence of "Crazy in Love" doesn't make the album automatically better than, I dunno, any album I've heard by Springsteen, it just means that there's a really great song to hear.

ok well, I can IMAGINE, I just mean that from my current standpoint (1:20pm) it seems painful to do.

Oh, bullshit.

Some of us enjoy music on a per-song basic - end of story, and the internet has nothing to do with with it. I was buying seven- and twelve- inch vinyl in junior high school because I knew bloody well that I didn't need a whole damn album of most of the artists I liked. Technology has just made the wheat-from-chaff-extraction process easier.

Oh man, do I ever love "A Life Of Possibilities."

"I follow you but you're patently wrong. But if what you provide here is a service that weeds out 95% of the crap from an album so that the rest of us know to just download the one song and not waste our money on the rest then thank you. Keep up the great work."

--Earl

sshhh!!! that kind of self-awareness is gonna get you in trouble!!!

but seriously, while I myself would probably do the same thing if I was hosting mp3s, if someone really loves a track they'll do some exploring even if the person who shared it doesn't like the rest of the album. They're not going to take your word as gospel, so don't worry about it.

indie music-crit got a lot to answer for

Oh it goes back to the Noise Boys, at least.

(I'm assuming that he meant "curdling" but who knows.)

Anthony, I normally just avoid talking about the albums that songs come from unless I have something that I want to say about the record as a whole (so Travis Morrison and Gwen Stefani are exceptions to the rule.) I don't want to discourage anyone from buying a record and making up their own mind about the quality, especially when it comes to artists who need all the sales help they can get.

...Keep up the good work."

Hahahaha. YOU SUCK MATTHEW PLEASE PUT MORE FREE MUSIC IN MY PALMS K THNX BYE.

I've noticed and it's commendable. I don't think I'd be able to avoid shrieking DO NOT BUY THIS ALBUM!!! HERE, TAKE TRACK 8 AND RUN AWAY!!!

Even if it could curdle it would be a very poor metaphor.

http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v216/sexymollusk/winner.gif

and i suspect matthew was anticipating/hoping for a response like earl's by, as yancey said, putting anyone who doesn't like the record on "the bad side". i hereby declare matthew perpetua the george w. bush of bloggers.

see instead of debating, you can just let a pull quote speak for itself! it's fun!

talk about seeing the glass as half empty! i believe matthew's "service," if you want to call it that, is to celebrate songs that are great. it's pretty much as simple as that, isn't it?

I wonder if maybe there is a downside to the way that I process music now as a result of doing the blog. Basically, I go through lots and lots of records looking for good songs and barely spend time with anything that doesn't grab me right away

About 5-6 years ago my personal pattern of music consumption was to go down to the record shop once a fortnight, get a stack of all the new 12"s and listen to them all. I'd play each one for between 2 and 16 bars, discarding any that I instantly hated, or that were boring then listen to the shortlist again, picking out the ones that had some sort of instant hook. Never listened to albums, never bought cds.

And most of those records never brought me any long-term joy. I had to revisit that period years later and find all the good records that hadn't had that instant impact.

So I know what you mean - if you browse very quickly through large quantities of music looking only for an immediately perceptible punctum you can miss out on a lot of things that are slower to make an impression, but that you can really grow to love.

Maybe it's a necessary evil of having to sift through the vast quantities of music out there, but I think it does prejudice consumption towards the "smack you in the face" school of music rather than the "tickly you under the chin" one.