Hi. I am proud to say that I am a matter of hours away from completing a project which has consumed much of the past week. Beginning last Saturday and continuing to today, I have been singularly devoted to one task above all others, including such incidentals as grading papers and compiling final grades. (You know, what I do for a living.) But before I reveal the nature of my project, a little background …
On any given weekend, if you were to ask what I was doing at any particular moment, the response would likely be “fucking around with my mp3s.” Presently my digital music library contains some 23,070 songs (this includes many files that are not, strictly speaking, songs, such as spoken-word recordings and episodes of This American Life), a number which grows with each new CD purchase. I haven’t listened to all of the songs, although I have listened to about 2/3 of them at least once. (The song I have listened to the most? “Earn Enough for Us” by XTC, which has tickled my ear drums a staggering 184 times, and that doesn’t includes listens from cassette, vinyl, or CD. OCD, anyone?) So what does fucking around with my mp3s mean? Well, given my astrological sign, I have a natural proclivity for organization. From the way I fold laundry (that set of habits is too exhaustive to detail here) to how I put away dishes (same) to how I organize our household finances (same), many of my customs are reducible to a complex list of rules. Think of me as a n-level set of nested IF/THEN statements, and nothing more. Given the staggering size of my digital music collection, it is only natural that I would spend hour upon hour shuffling through my files, making sure that every song is properly labeled and in its place.
What exactly does this involve? For example, I like to have the year a song/album was released to be properly noted in the “Year” field in iTunes, so that if I want to listen to an artist’s output in chronological order - all the better to monitor artistic growth and maturation, you know - I can do so. (This has the additional benefit of being able to listen to a selection of recordings from a particular year and compare/contrast them. Because who doesn’t want to be slapped in the face by the smooth and easy transition between Joy Division and the Knack? Or between Judas Priest and Kim Wilde? I know I do.)
(This chronological organization method does present some obvious problems. For example, are songs listed by the year they were recorded or the year they were released? For many songs/albums, this is no big deal - many if not most of my tracks were recorded and released in the same year, or released the year after recording with no interstitial releases. But then consider something like T.B. Sheets by Van Morrison. The album, a collection of songs from 1967, recorded just prior to Van’s epochal 1968 album Astral Weeks, was officially released by Bang Records in 1973. Admittedly, I don’t own T.B. Sheets, but the same problem exists with nearly any album of as-yet-unreleased material. Do I place it in order of when the artist created it, or when it entered the public consciousness? For that matter, perhaps I should organize my mp3s based on when I first heard them, because if anything is going to capture the slow unfolding of the soundtrack of my life, it’s that. But God, I do not have anywhere near that amount of time.)
(On another parenthetical sidebar, if anyone I know is at all surprised by how OCD/anal I am with my mp3s, you obviously haven’t been paying attention. Have you noticed how I constantly twist and smooth my left sideburn with my hand? How I order the exact thing every week at Boscos? How all my clothes, with few exceptions, come from The Gap and are either black, gray, blue, or khaki/neutral? Such are the depths of my depravity, my people.)
I’m also big on making sure that the name of the song, the artist, the album title, and the track number are correctly recorded. Because, well … well go date a Virgo and you’ll understand. Genre is especially important too. For example, I have a playlist in iTunes for all my songs of the “Down Tempo” genre. What exactly classifies as Down Tempo. Whatever I say does, although such songs are generally 90 beats-per-minute and less, have some degree of groove to them, and aren’t too bleepy-squawky (i.e. no Autechre or Aphex Twin). When I’m at the office “working” (which constitutes about 20% of the time I spend “at work”) I like to have music on in the background on my iPod earbuds. This is for several reasons. First, if it weren’t obvious by now, I am rather obsessed with music and generally like to have it on at all times. Second, the back beat helps to keep me focused and on task, which is not an easy assignment. Third, the guy whose office is next to mine has a voice that is the exact right frequency to penetrate the wall between us and worm its way into my inner ear. Seriously, when that guy is talking, I cannot focus on a damn thing. Imagine Charlie Brown’s teacher but with a baritone voice and you’ll get the idea.
So now maybe you understand a little about what my mp3-organizing habit entails. But there is more. Specifically, there is the issue of compilation albums. It is certainly not uncommon for an artist or record label to release a CD of songs from various points in the artist’s career (i.e. “greatest hits”), or a collection of songs from several artists. This is fine; I certainly have no objection to compilation albums. But it does fly in the face of my organizational methods. Simply put, I cannot stand to have songs on a compilation listed as being on that compilation. I much prefer to have the correct album, track number, and year recorded for each song, rather than the name of the compilation and the year it was released. If I were to buy Forty Licks by the Rolling Stones (one of at least 20 compilations that band has released), it would drive me up the wall to have “Brown Sugar” (my favorite Rolling Stones song by far) listed as coming out in 2002, the year Forty Licks was released, instead of in 1971, the year Sticky Fingers, the album on which “Brown Sugar” debuted, was released. (Rolling Stones purists will note that the song was actually written in 1969, not 1971, and mostly by Mick Jagger, not the venerable songwriting team of Jagger/Richards, interestingly. To those I say: screw off. I just don’t have time for that.)
This brings me to the crux of this post. For the past week, I have spent approximately 20 hours listening to almost nothing but one band, a band that I first heard via a friend back in the 90s, a band that I’ve been meaning to spend more time with, especially given that I had downloaded much of their catalog from emusic, back when I was a subscriber to that service. That band is Pavement. Oh sure, I love(d) “Cut Your Hair,” the first handful of tracks from Wowee Zowee, even most of Terror Twilight, but how much had I listened to Pavement? How much time had I listened to the band that has been called among the most important alternative bands of the 1990s? (Although honestly, once “alternative” became less an indicator of new and cutting-edge music and more an advertising gimmick, the less I would ever want to be in an “alternative” band, even if it was that important.) Not enough, I decided. Hence 20 hours spent listening to the group.
What precipitated this adventure into Pavement was an afternoon spent, you guessed it, fucking around with my mp3s. Some time ago I acquired the released versions of several Pavement albums, complete with b-sides, live tracks, out-takes, and compilations. These rereleased albums came to me courtesy Matador Records and a friend with a prediliction for, um, downloading songs, as well as a genre-spanning and altogether impressive taste in music. (I have recently acquired legal, i.e. purchased, copies of two of the albums. Yay amazon.)
In the course of my fucking-around, I realized that I needed to update the track information on many of these Pavement songs. I mean, how could I sleep at night knowing that “Camera” (an R.E.M. cover) was listed as track 13 on the Crooked Rain, Crooked Rain rerelease, instead of being in its rightful place as the first of two b-sides from the “Cut Your Hair” single? I am sure that you now understand my obsession.
So, last weekend my quest began. First, I had to correctly record all the information about all my Pavement mp3s. This alone took me hours, and honestly, I’m still not done. Almost all of the b-sides are correctly labeled, but there is still the issue of outtakes, live tracks, and so on. I haven’t yet decided what to do with these, vis a vis their album names. I’ll be sure to update you when I do. [heavy sarcasm]
But once I updated most of the songs’ information, I realized that I had not listened to most of them ever, and few of the others more than once. So I decided to spend a day or two listening to all my Pavement songs, in chronological order, at least once. (This ultimately lead to me having listened to all the songs at least three times, just to make sure that I was sufficiently familiar with each track. Apparently three times is indeed a charm.)
A week later I am done. I have now listened to all my Pavement mp3s at least three times and have a much better appreciation for the talents and limitations of what is undoubtedly one of the most important bands of the 1990s. For my impressions of Pavement, you will have to wait for Part II of this post.