A few years ago there was a best-selling book called “100 Places To See Before You Die”. Next thing you know, there are a hundred copy-cat books with similar lists of things you have to do before you die, which, if you actually tried to do them all would probably kill you from exhaustion. One such book was 1001 Albums You Must Hear Before You Die.
This book breaks things down by decade beginning with the 1950s — “In The Wee Small Hours Of The Morning” by Frank Sinatra tops that decade’s list (and rightly so, I might add) — right up through the year the book was originally published (2003), with updates for every year since, including some disputed changes as this decade’s music has fleshed out.
Like any sort of attempt at a “Best Of” anything list, there’s plenty to argue about — the biases of the people doing the compiling, the relative merits of this or that particular artist or piece of work, and so on — all of which needs to be kept in mind when trying to come to terms with such a list. Still, any such list that was put together sincerely and thoughtfully will usually provide you with a fair-or-better primer, and I think this list is no exception.
This web page tries to step it up a notch: it has the entire list of 1001 albums (minus the commentary and other additional material found in the book) and a link to each one on the streaming music website Spotify.com How awesome is that, right? Let’s start listening to them all right now! How long could it take to crank through a thousand albums, a few weeks? Well, hold your horses, cowboy — Spotify isn’t available to users in the U.S. because they don’t have a licensing agreement with the good ol’ RIAA. Frankly, I laughed out loud to see this list of “must-hear” albums and then discover that I wasn’t allowed to hear them.
Which is not to say that you can’t get this music online. Perish the thought! Here, for example, is a BitTorrent of the book’s 1950s list, all conveniently zipped together into a 1.7GB download. There are a few other similar torrents as well, not to mention that you can almost certainly find every single album individually if you look hard enough. Kudos to the person who took the time to find all the Spotify links; it doesn’t appear that anyone’s taken the time to do so, but I’d bet that if you spent the time with a site like Last.fm or Pandora you could probably go a long way to building a similar set of links on those services.
Me, I’m still hoping to get through 1001 Things To Eat Before You Die.
Dear Harvey, Pete, Barry, Kevin, and every other weathermonkey on Boston-area TV: Enough is enough. The fucking blizzard was THIRTY-TWO YEARS AGO. It’s time to stop trotting out the same blurry videotape of cars stuck on Rt. 128 that is older than some of the people who are actually on your broadcast, just so we [...]
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Please, please, PUH-LEEZE stop talking about “What do we call the last decade?” Nobody could come up with an acceptable choice ten years ago, and nobody’s going to come up with one now. “Aughties” and “Naughties” are contrived and stupid, and so is the very idea that anything wraps up all nice and neatly into [...]
