dsi@unccvax.UUCP (Dataspan Inc) (10/15/85)
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From: chiles@cad.cs.cmu.edu.ARPA (Bill Chiles)
I think these survey efforts are silly. I find them even more
silly than "best movie" surveys. I find it incredible that
someone reading this bboard can list his top ten favorite albums,
let alone top three, but I am not surprised that the results were
exactly as they were -- representative of nostalgia, high school
enthusiasm, and familiarity.....
What I am trying to get across is how utterly
stupid I think questions like "What's your favorite album or movie?" or
"What's your top then albums or movies?"
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Did you really read the same survey I did, or do you have a total
of 16 k text buffer space on your Commodore PET? I've a printout
of both "favourite album" postings before me. If you are trying
to state your opinion, please do so (evidently, you feel that such
surveys are "utterly stupid") but don't cloud the issue with a
bunch of justification.
This survey is reasonably well distributed by the "histogram"
of the date it was released. It is ** NOT ** dramatically skewed
towards 1965. Even if the survey has 100 fatal flaws, and is
methodologically worthless, I found it useful to have a printed
list of all those albums I meant to buy but forget about when
one goes into the record store. Do you have all 319 albums listed
in the "only one vote" list ??
I really don't know what you are trying to say here, but it
it reeks of some kind of "reverse snobbery" whereby it is somehow
not OK for people to comfort themselves with the albums they liked
in high school. People who are from 19 to 27 years old were damn
surely different in their tastes and points of view in 1977 as
they are in 1983. Yet, isn't it strange how a bunch of pre-HS
grads still make up a substantial audience for the local daytime
AM 60's and 70's nostalgia rock outlet? Isn't it strange how they
keep buying these albums?
Whether you like it or not, each year yields its own set of
"classic" albums which do withstand the test of time. Some years
are poorer than others, but an album which millions of people buy
is "relatively important" if for no other reason than millions of
people actually agreed on something. Incidentally, if you will
** READ ** the survey, and then go and poll a bunch of "high schoolers"
I doubt very seriously if many of them are jammin' to Laura Nyro,
Kate Bush, Mannheim Steamroller, Suzanne Vega, etc. I can't
even get my boss's 16 year old son to even take one listen to
any of these artists.
David Anthony
CDE
DataSpan, Inc.