As I believe I mentioned in my opening entry last week, I'm somewhat obsessed with music. Now, by this I don't mean to claim in the slightest that I have any exclusive understanding of all genres of music or a richly cultivated insight into the inner workings of creative musical mind, but rather that the appreciation of certain music seems to take up more space in my brain than it does in most other folks' (space invariably meant for other things like knowing how to do one's own taxes or knowing how to properly crack an egg without getting yoke and shell everywhere or knowing how to drive before the age of 36, etc.). As such, the majority of the writing I've done over the past several years has been about music. Sometime in early 2001, though, I happened upon an internet forum wherein other like-minded music dorks from all walks of life converged to debate, discuss and argue about music until they were all blue in the face. Clearly, I'd found a home. This place, should you be curious to check it out yourself, is the ILM ("I Love Music") board, and you can find it as the top link in the column to the immediate left of this entry.
In any case, after a few years of regular posting there, I introduced a new type of discussion thread wherein the merits of individual albums are rapturously extolled in needlessly fawning detail. After a while, I was happy to note, the In Praise Of... threads caught on, and now other posters log in their favorite albums and swoon about why they're so great, significant, meaningful to them, etc. I should point out that these are not record reviews. There's been a bit of a trend recently rife in a few periodicals I shan't name where record reviews are composed in the first person and are littered with arguably witty personal details about the writer and little or no relevance to the subject he or she is purportedly reviewing. As far as I'm concerned, reviews should stick to the facts of the subject and not be about one's experience at summer camp or high school. That said, the In Praise Of.. entries that I am now going to duplicate here (reprised and edited from their original threads on ILM) are NOT record reviews, so personal information can and often is included. I hope that makes sense. Let me know if it doesn't.
Some of my fellow regular ILM'rs who bother to read this weblog might recognize some of these, but they'll have been slightly edited and tweaked. Look for them coming very shortly.
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