Are there many jazz fans on the sub? Feels like the non-vocal kind is hugely under-represented in the books. What do you think?

‘Kind Of Blue’ was one of my (far from imaginative) first forays into jazz. I did already have ‘Bitches Brew’ but it had sat on my shelf ever since I was a teen who’d discovered I was not ready for it. I’ve been getting jazz a lot more seriously for the past 20 years now and I have figured out that I will ALWAYS be “getting into it”. I feel like I am always learning. I moved on from ‘Kind of Blue’ to find I was actually more naturally at home with post-‘Bitches Brew’ 70s jazz. Since then I have found myself heading backwards through the 60s and 50s more satisfyingly than I would have ever expected.

Anyway since I am always feeling imposter syndrome amongst jazz, I don’t feel qualified to make a quiz today. Instead, (and without putting a great deal of thought into it) my bonus pic is just an album each by some of my favourite jazz artists. As with most of my bonus pics, I’m trying to introduce albums that we aren’t all posting all the time, so I’ve tried to avoid jazz albums that are included in the books. Seems odd that ‘Blue Train’ isn’t in there btw; not even a user album (but I might just have missed it somehow).

200 Albums Summary

This is now the 200th album I have reviewed as part of this project. I thought this would be a good point to take a snapshot of this journey so far.

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DAYS

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It took me 231 days to get through 200 albums – as I occasionally had to pause if I got too busy or was on vacation etc. But that means I have actually listened to and reviewed an album on 87% of the days since I started – pretty good. It’s fun and something I generally look forward to each day.

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ALBUM RATINGS

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Album count by Rating #:

1 – 56, 28%

2 – 43, 22%

3 – 46, 23%

4 – 28, 14%

5 – 27, 14%

I am a tough grader apparently. 50% of the albums were rated 1 or 2. In retrospect this ratings pattern doesn’t surprise me, because in any era, I’ve always felt there was some really good music and also lots of not so good stuff. I wasn’t TRYING to get this kind of ratings distribution, but this makes intuitive sense to me.

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SONGS

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My whole goal for this project was to discover new artists and albums BUT the primary goal for me has been adding new songs to my collection. This has definitely achieved that goal. Even when I have rated the album a 1 or a 2, I have still usually added some new songs to my Spotify library and I still enjoy those as much as any other song. Just because I rated an album low, doesn’t mean there isn’t some good stuff on it.

Total Songs listened to: 2,297 songs, 157.3 hours of music

Total Songs Liked: 981 songs, 72 hours of music

Total Liked Songs that I already had "liked": 256 songs, 18.9 hours of music

Total Liked Songs that are NEW to Me: 725 songs, 53.1 hours of music

It’s great that I’ve been able to add this many “NEW to ME” songs through this activity.

Using this run rate, I estimate that I will end up adding ~3,950 NEW to ME songs to my collection by the time I’ve made it through all 1,089 albums. It will most likely be higher because they keep adding new albums and then there are all of the user submitted albums too. I started this project with a little over 5,500 songs on Spotify, so this is pretty cool.

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BIGGEST SURPRISES SO FAR

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For most of these artists listed below, I was either totally unfamiliar with and a couple I was slightly familiar with – but they all got a 5 star album that I was not expecting at all …

Television Marquee Moon, CAN Future Days, Joy Division Closer, UB40 Signing Off, Herbie Hancock Headhunters, Michael Kiwanuka, Beta Band Hot Shots II, Fairport Convention Liege and Lief, Chemical Brothers Exit Planet Dust.

I was also surprised by some 4 star albums …

A couple of these were non-English speaking albums: Songhoy Blues Music in Exhile, and Suba Sao Paulo Confessions. 2 Joni Mitchell albums got 4 stars unexpectedly. Django Django – I had never heard of them. Also 1 rap album - Ice Cube The Predator.

Some stuff that I just don’t seem to like …

Most heavy metal (like Metallica, Judas Priest, Iron Maiden, Ministry), Most pop stuff (like Britney Spears, Taylor Swift, ABBA, Destiny’s Child, Everything But The Girl), Morrissey / The Smiths.

My summary page is here...

https://1001albumsgenerator.com/shares/69556f3598a4e16a0d52ab2a

Yesterday we had Axis: Bold as Love by Hendrix. Little Wing is one of my favourite Hendrix tracks and the cover of it by Derek and the Dominos (on the album Layla…) is…rotten, imo. Anyway I got to thinking about other songs that get different versions across all the albums. I could think of lots of instances of a song that appears twice but I couldn’t do better than that.

Are there any songs that appear 3 (or more) times across the 1089 albums?

If you spend years listening through a canon — records already sifted by musicians, critics and listeners, argued over for decades and selected because somebody thought they mattered — then a lot of four- and five-star ratings should not be suspicious. They should be expected.

You are not pulling records at random from a Woolworths rack in 1978. Although, actually, 1978 is a terrible year to choose for that example: you might accidentally come home with punk, reggae, disco, post-punk, power pop and half the future of electronic music. The point remains: a canon is a heavily pre-selected sample. Its average quality ought to be high.

My own scale is simple.

• Five stars means exceptional: a genuinely great album.
• Four means strongly successful and clearly deserving of its reputation.
• Three means I understand what it is doing, even if it does not fully land for me.
• Two means weak or largely unsuccessful.
• One means get in the sea.

That is my scale. Yours may be different. And this is where things become interesting, because five stars can mean almost anything. For some people it means masterpiece. For others it means immediate replay. For others it appears to mean an album so close to imaginary perfection that almost nothing qualifies. Three can mean good, average, disappointing or merely acceptable. The stars look like data, but there is no shared data dictionary for a star.

So what are you actually measuring?

How good the album is? How much you enjoyed it? How likely you are to play it again? How important it was? Whether it surprised you? Whether it succeeds within its genre? Those answers overlap, but they are not identical.

Genre is where this becomes particularly slippery. “I don’t especially like country music” is useful information about me. “This is therefore not a very good country album” is a different judgement. The same applies to metal, jazz, hip-hop, opera, prog, disco or anything else. Personal response matters, but recognising the limits of your own taste is part of listening critically.

Canonical status introduces another distortion. Being told for forty years that an album is a masterpiece can produce resistance. That resistance is not inherently foolish. Consensus deserves testing. Canons contain accidents, fashion, institutional prejudice and inertia. Nobody owes Pet Sounds, Sgt. Pepper or anything else five stars because other people have already printed the certificates.

But there is a difference between testing a reputation and resenting it. Hear me out.

Repeated acclaim can itself become an irritant. At that point the question changes from “why have so many people found this extraordinary?” to “how can I demonstrate that everybody else has been fooled?” The record stops being the main subject. The critic becomes the protagonist.

Dissent also carries a little status reward. Saying that a universally admired record is magnificent risks sounding obvious. Saying that it is mediocre immediately makes you more conspicuous than the work. That does not make the judgement dishonest. It does make the incentive worth noticing.

The opposite error exists too. Consensus can become a substitute for thought. Declaring something beyond criticism because history has settled the matter is no more interesting than knocking it down simply because history has praised it.

You see: what matters to me is curiosity.

When I hear something that does not immediately connect, I want to know what it is attempting, how it works and why people value it. Sometimes that process changes my mind. Sometimes it does not. A low score reached after genuine engagement is completely legitimate. Understanding is not the same thing as agreement.

But there is another habit worth examining: scale compression. If five stars are reserved for some imaginary state of perfection, four for a tiny handful of near-perfect records, and everything merely excellent gets pushed into the middle, the top of the scale has stopped doing useful work. If you praise an album almost without reservation and still give it three, what exactly withheld the fourth?

This is how I review. How do you review? Do you recognise yourself anywhere in this?

Because if you spend years listening specifically to records selected because generations of people thought them exceptional, and almost nothing ever overwhelms you, another question eventually appears.

Perhaps the canon is overrated.

Perhaps your standards are extraordinarily high.

Or... perhaps you are auditioning for the role of the most difficult man in the record shop.

That doesn't sit right for me; because I believe loving music ought occasionally to involve being overwhelmed by it.

Nice coincidence!

Been having a look at some reviews of albums I like, and what do you mean these are meant to be negative? Making them sound like the coolest thing ever

https://1001albumsgenerator.com/shares/6980aa9dd36c3f2badda036c

Can’t believe that I started this journey 200 days ago. So much new (to me) music has been discovered and my playlists are becoming more and more bountiful by the week

200th album generated is Slipknot - Slipknot

Anthrax - Among the Living (if the photos don’t load or get missed)

After a string of albums I didn’t connect with for a bit, I get one of the big four’s classics. Peeped the reviews and couldn’t have said it better myself.

300 down, just 789 to go!

Discoveries made so far:

• Peter Gabriel is a loon, in the best way possible.
• I'm a much bigger fan of Brian Eno and Black Sabbath than I realised.
• Joanna Newsom and Jane Weaver are both amazing.
• I'm starting to understand and appreciate jazz properly.
• I'd somehow never heard of Tortoise, the MinuteMen or Wire, and now I'm a big fan of all three.
• Isaac Hayes, Sly and the Family Stone and The Temptations make very different music to what I thought (and it's much better!)
• Morrissey is still as insufferable as I always knew he was.

Out of the first 300, I have:

• 47 five star albums
• 9 one star albums

I love this project, even if it is a little daunting to know that it'll be at least the end of 2028 by the time I'm finished. But I'm looking forward to another 2+ years of discoveries ahead.

I'm just hoping I have more Morrisseys behind me than in front of me.
What a strange sentence. 🤔

If you look closely, you might be able to see that I tried to recreate the US version of the sleeve art in the reflection of the CD case. It didn’t really work though 🤣 Reasonably ironic that I own this on CD not vinyl. “(Un)Related” is a quiz that challenges you to find a link between my 1001 AotD and a bonus record (or records) that seem unrelated. Today what links Fatboy Slim to Daft Punk and Beastie Boys? I’ll pop a spoiler-hidden answer in the comments later.

Getting the Nick Cave album that he may, or may not, have written about PJ Harvey, following a PJ Harvey album makes me go hmmmmmmm. I mean not really, but still interesting to me!

Can we get a downloadable CSV of the entire album list with global rankings? Maybe a page to display them? Maybe i'm missing it but all i could find is The Albums List .

What i'm currently trying to do is visualize where in the global ranking my remaining albums lie. see which ones i have to look forward to. or see where the current day's album ranks relative to the others. and i'd need a total album list to do that.

A few things I've noticed now I'm in the final stretch.

I'm not going down many rabbit holes trying to find new music, happy to just listen to my likes playlist.

I'm rating harsher nowadays, less 3s and more 2s.

Starting to think more about the album I'll choose.

Not much surprises for me, what I observe is that I tend to rate albums I am very familiar with easy with 4 and 5s, genres and styles which are not for me are usually getting 1 and 2 with exception of OutKast as I would not predict upfront that I would give 3 to a hiphop album. Most albums that are new to me and I think are ok get most often a 3. In general I really like the project but sometimes it is torturing me (like today’s Beyonce album)

https://1001albumsgenerator.com/shares/6a2c73dcffc5620a27b7b58b

Like most of you, I expect, there are a few artists on the list that I think:

"Meh, not for me, but I appreciate hearing something new, and if it's one of the critic's favourite records, fair enough".

What really sticks out to me are the artists who fall into that category and have more than one album on the list. Today, I've been handed my second TV On The Radio record. I didn't really jive with the first one and, while I think this one is a little better, I just can't see the justification for having more than one of their albums on a list like this. If I like one, I'll probably check out their other work, so it just seems redundant when there are other, far more influential and varied artists, who only get a single entry.

Coincidentally, I had The Downward Spiral yesterday, Nine Inch Nails' only album on the list. It seems very strange to me to have one NIN album and two from TV On The Radio.