Esquire magazine has a slideshow of the “75 Albums Every Man Should Own”.
Now, my music collection is nothing to sneeze at. According to iTunes, I have 16,764 songs, which, if played one after another would go on continuously for 41.5 days without repeating a single track. My music collection takes up 70 gigabytes of space on an external hard drive I use exclusively for saving my assorted collected media items. That’s not very much compared to some people I know online; one person at the “Site Which Must Not Be Named” said his music collection was around 190GB, almost triple the amount of storage mine takes up. Nevertheless, I think it’s reasonable to say that I’ve reached a point where I lack for very little of the things I want to listen to.
And yet…somehow I only have 5 of the 75 albums on this list from Esquire. Here they are, in random order:
Rubber Soul, The Beatles
In The Wee Small Hours, Frank Sinatra
Sketches of Spain, Miles Davis
Buena Vista Social Club, Buena Vista Social Club
Johnny Cash At Folsom Prison, Johnny Cash
Honestly, of the several dozen on their list, these are probably among the few genuine classics you could actually point to, so I don’t feel that my manhood is particularly bruised by falling so short from their requirement. To be sure, there are probably another five or six that I surprised myself with the realization that I *didn’t* have it (The Beach Boys’ Pet Sounds, for one, and Night Beat by Sam Cooke for another). Plus, in some cases I might have a track or two from this album or that, especially if that album had any Billboard #1 hits. But, overall, I have to say that if that’s a “must-have” list if you want “guy cred”, then I’m never going to hang with the big dogs, and wouldn’t particularly want to.
I have 11 on electronic media and an additional 6 on vinyl that has not been upgraded. I also have tracks from an additional 3.
Beatles
Buena vista
Jeff buckley
Stone Roses
Dire Straits
Zeppelin
The Cars
Wilco
Guns and Roses
Miles
Hendrix
Neil Young
Drive by Truckers
Floyd
Stones
Willie
AC/DC
Nirvana
Pearl jam
Marvin
You’re a better man than I am, Gunga Din.
NO, just more of an indiscriminate musical whore.
Dude, at 16K songs on iTunes, I think I am the very definition of “indiscriminate musical whore”.
Hm. I only came up with two of the seventy-five, though I have other albums by some of the same artists. Guess that makes me a pretty sad wanna-be.
This was harder to remember than I expected…I mean given that our album collection is as married and Leonard and I are…plus there’s all that mished memory of roommates past thing going on. I think that we have the following:
Bowie’s Ziggy Stardust
Led Zeppelin
Bob Marley – Catch a Fire
Traveling Wilburys
Rubbber Soul
Sketches of Spain
Hendrix
Beach Boys Pet Sounds
Songs in the Key of Life
Who’s next
Neil Young – Harvest
and
maybe Sam Cooke’s Night Beat
We’re lots older than you and actually saw most of these on the shelf when first released – and certainly not Mahler and Beethoven.
Maybe because I’m not a man, I don’t really understand why these are the 75 must haves. I wonder what a woman’s list would look like?
If you want a copy of Pet Sounds, I’ll be happy to make one for you. Sam Cooke…I need to hunt for that one.