ULCERATED TORRENT

Wed. June 30, 2004
Categories: Abstract Dynamics

“A master of the ulcerated torrent” eh? Like that – it’s going on the cv.
Incidentally, Matt commented the other day (25.06 – no permalinx on the hyper-minimalist Woebotnik, natch) that top 100 lists are ‘almost constructed to shore off the sniping remarks of one’s peers’. Well, I can say honestly that there was nothing contrived on my list. I simply thought about which records I’ve bought (and some which I’ve, not to my credit, gotten rid of) over the years, and tried to decide which ones had most impact on me.
The eagle-eyed amongst you might have noticed that I’ve put the top 100 up on the sidebar. I’ve decided to treat is as working document; at least then it won’t be a purely reactive blast against the Observer’s list. In the first instance, I’ve hyperlinked to pieces I’ve already written on particular albums at k-punk. In future, I hope to build up something on every one of the albums. When I’m short of inspiration, I can also post about one of the hot 100…
And Matt’s so right.
People don’t get heated enough about this sort of thing. That’s part of the syndrome actually: politeness, respect, eclecticism, all discourse part of the PR industry, everything goes….

2 Responses to “ULCERATED TORRENT”

  1. Eppy Says:
    June 30th, 2004 at 9:20 pm

    See, at this point I tend to think that people get way TOO worked up about the list thing (given that this is clearly part of why publications create them in the first place–controversy creates sales, cerainly I think this was the motivation behind the recent Rolling Stone list) and that getting too concerned about it just legitimized them far more than they deserve to be. I’m much more interested in passionate judgments about individual songs/albums/artists. Synthesizing lists in such a way invariably represents the taste of exactly NO ONE, since they’re the conglomoration of a bunch of different opinions. Who would actually have their list be exactly the same as the Observer’s? Maybe no one at all. Which is kind of interesting, but it doesn’t do much to validate the concept.

  2. mark k-p Says:
    June 30th, 2004 at 10:00 pm

    I agree about lists, actually Matt’s comments were about my Glastonbury rant. (I can see how the way I’ve presented it above is misleading).
    Ppl certainly don’t angry enough about Glastonbury.
    The individual lists are always going to be more interesting than the collated one, which will inevitably tend twds LCD.
    I’ve tried to be positive by producing my own list.