Check Your Blind Spots: Week One
Thursday, March 5th, 2009
I know it seems that every other post I make on Vikings & Beekeepers is intended to be a new series (Alphabetical iPod Diary, Pain For Pleasure, Overrated/Underrated), but I really get the feeling this one’s going to stick.
As voraciously as some people like to ingest the musical landscape, it’s downright impossible to keep up with everything – it’s part of the reason actively discovering and listening to music can be so daunting, there are always stones left unturned. Even the oversized boulders get passed up from time to time. As much as I love to devour music at a gluttonous rate, there is so much out there that I haven’t heard, and some of those albums have been thoroughly canonized and are considered to be quite essential and/or important in their own right. There are several factors why a person may have missed out on these kinds of big-ticket albums, and probably the biggest reason is generational (although there a million other reasons like genre ignorance, passive, non-committal listening or just plain old, ugly contrarianism). I began really listening to music in the 90s, which meant I had several decades’ worth of beloved, groundbreaking and historical music to catch up on. Which means every year leads to new discoveries, but that pile of “yet to listen to albums” has hardly been dented.So that’s essentially what I’m aiming to do here. Let’s get all our bases covered. Let’ check our blind spots. (more…)