Investing in CDs
By Todd Stadler · Saturday, February 17, 2001 1:33am
I went CD shopping today. I was able to cross off lots of items on my list of "CDs I've been thinking of buying".
And may I say how much I like Everyday Music's policy of letting me listen to anything, new or used, before I buy it (or not)? Too often an album will have a few good tracks that I'm familiar with, with a bunch of other tracks I don't know about. Sometimes the other stuff is decent enough or even better than the familiar tracks. But other times, it's just junk, and I can't stand to own albums with only a few good songs. If I have to skip over some tracks, I'd rather not own the album. That's been my policy for some time now, to keep me from buying CDs frivolously. It's worked pretty well.
Unfortunately, it often precludes me from buying rap and R&B albums, which tend to have talking and skits and other nonsense scattered between the songs I like so much. That's why I didn't end up buying any Outkast or TLC, although Stankonia has some really good stuff on it. It's those other tracks I'm worried about.
But I did get two albums by the Roots, Destiny's Child's most recent album, and Whoa, Nelly! to tide over any hip-hop cravings I was having.
On the techno side, I bought Squarepusher's Big Loada, which is just what I want from techno right now. That album was promoted to me solely over a shared MP3 disk at work (now forcefully removed). Which goes to show that MP3's, even when they're shared, aren't always used for piracy as such. Not that this argument could possibly sway a record company executive, who is nonetheless happy that I bought the album.
In the "filling in the back category" vein, I bought Van Halen's 1984 and three albums by Rush - Hemispheres, Moving Pictures, and A Farewell To Kings. It's no coincidence that the Rush albums all contain songs featured on the live album Exit Stage Left, my only previous Rush album. Of course, I'm at least a decade too late for this, now well past my dorky geek phase. Or so I'd like to think.