chiles@cad.cs.cmu.edu.ARPA (Bill Chiles) (10/05/85)
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. Perhaps a top hundred album survey would be reasonable, but then you might still have to restrict the sample space to certain genres, styles, time periods, artists, or other attributes used for classification and description of music. I believe that most of the people who responded to the survey were 19-27 years old. Okay, so that is probably likely for everyone reading this bboard, but I find the top albums to be representative of seventies children and those of close proximity. I also find the tastes examplified extremely narrow; am I to believe that of all the people reading this bboard that only pop and pop progressive rock albums made in people's top ten albums. Ugh! My album collection is not very big (maybe 300 albums), but I'm certain that at least 100 are necessary for my survival. Admittedly, I don't usually buy albums without having heard them before, so my percentage of "great" albums is probably higher than most people's. I am not trying to say "Oh, I'm the broad minded renaissance man; look at how much I like." 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?" I haven't even addressed the issue of fluctuation over time. Yeah, some albums withstand all passing time to remain always great, but even those get played less and less as more and more music becomes available for your listening. How can you hope to become familiar with all the stuff that is really good if you always play the really good albums you first fell in love with. I'm not saying that you should hold back urges to hear great stuff that you first became familiar with, but that there are libraries of music that is outstanding that should be calling equally or more so than those albums already heard hundreds of times already. Bill