88 of my 100 or so favorite albums of 2012
I made this in half an hour.
Done. Is there a more fun-masturbatory thing than the Pitchfork People’s List? No.
I settled on using one album per artist because I had way too many forgotten/missed albums (and come on I can’t have 5% Kanye West albums and 6% Radiohead albums).
The Interpol-Broken Social Scene-Arcade Fire-Wilco block is one part of my life; the National-Sleater-Kinney-Hold Steady block is another. I generally broke my list down into genre blocks, life blocks, or year blocks, which made it easier and gave numbers, like, 21-100 a bit more meaning. Anyway, super fun thing to do. You should do it.
“I’ve listened to “Don’t Go Away” about 200 times over the past two weeks. Because repetition soothes me, I’ve formed strange and bone-deep attachments to books and movies in my life, things I return to compulsively. But I’d have to quit my job and abandon sleep and drinking to watch Paul Thomas Anderson’s Magnolia or read Dave Eggers’s A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius that many times. “Don’t Go Away” lasts four minutes and 40 seconds. For pure catharsis, that’s a damn good return on investment.”
Sarah Hepola on the phenomenon of listening to one song over and over again, which I have to say, I also do (and love doing). I cannot tell you, to intersect a bit with the above, how many times I’ve listened to Aimee Mann’s “Driving Sidways” over the last few weeks. (Thirty? Three hundred? Somewhere in the middle, for sure.)
There’s something about listening to one song over and over that is just, like, you don’t learn anything from the experience. I don’t, at least. But it like soothes this part of you. It really does. It’s like using fine grit sandpaper to smooth out a bit of your psyche, but in away, of course, that doesn’t hurt. Quite the opposite.
Fluxblog Live: 10 Years of Perfect Tunes with Rob Sheffield, Emily Gould, Mark Richardson, and More
I’ll be hosting a special event at Housing Works in Manhattan on Monday, July 23rd. Basically, we’re going to be doing Fluxblog on stage - my guests will pick a song, we’ll play a bit of it, and they’ll talk a bit about it. In addition to Rob, Emily and Mark, my guests will include Heather D’Angelo from Au Revoir Simone, Dick Valentine from Electric Six, Amanda Petrusich, Sean T. Collins and Amy Rose Spiegel from Rookie. It’s going to be great, so please come!
I will also be a guest here, but not in the way those people will be. But you know.
