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.
