My obsessions with the year column

Posted by Flick in Opinions on 11 22nd, 2009 | no responses |

If you read Puddlegum and other music blogs, you probably share an obsession with music. You want to know about artists before other people, and you want to be familiar with all the influential artists that shape today’s music. Am I right?

As much as I’m listening to current music, I’m in a constant back peddling motion, looking over my shoulder, searching for an artist in the past that I either overlooked or wasn’t aware of. I find many artists from the past to be relevant today, both musically, artistically, and lyrically. I might linger on an artist for several months, soaking in their albums from their debut to their last, gaining a deeper perspective on not only the artist but on culture. The artist’s “essential collections” discs don’t suffice; I need to hear the songs in the context of their album. Yes, I feel like I’m cheating when I pick up an “essentials” disc.

Because of this, the “year” column in a music player, such as iTunes, is very important to me. I’ll create smart lists of a specific year, so I can listen to music from that twelve month span (scanning the headline of that year also brings insight).

One thing that bothers me though, is that we only catalogue the year the album was released, instead of the year the song was recorded. In a perfect world, we would keep track of both years, because the song may have been tracked a year or two before it was released.

There’s another reason why the year column isn’t always accurate. The album may have been remastered or re-released as part of a collection, bearing the year the album hit the shelves rather than the year it was originally released. This bothers me enough that I’ll do a little research to find out when it was actually released.

Admitting all of this, I understand that the average people isn’t as obsessed with music as we are. We would probably find that the average person rarely looks at the year column, unless they were debating about whether a given song hit the radio during their junior or senior year in high school.

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