A thought process
I was reading an ilx discussion on the Pitchfork list thing that had turned to discussion of gender bias of individual lists and overall trends. I saw someone put forward a challenge to straight white men to listen to only music by women for a week and see whether it really is as difficult to to find as claimed in their chosen genre(s). I thought that the task sounded like something that would be easy for me and that as far as albums go I’m already not too far off doing that some weeks (I fact checked to be sure: 65%/35% split in favour of female-fronted acts for albums I have from 2012). I then compared that to my actual 1996-2011 list which is male-dominated.
At that point I thought back to the difficulties of trying to put together the list given that I spend almost all of my time listening to new or very recent music and have done for a long time. Essentially doing something like it ends up an exercise in ranking the enjoyment that records gave me as a teenager versus the enjoyment that other records gave me more recently. There was only a small element of how much the records in question would give me enjoyment if I listened to them now, since for the most part I don’t.
As a result I gave kind of a loud voice to my teenage self. This also makes me think about my last.fm most listened tables which are virtually unchanged since the year after I signed up in 2004. Sometimes those lists look like an arcade machine high score table that I have no chance of reaching, filled up by one guy - he had an unerring focus and loads of free time on his hands, how am I meant to compete with that?
The end result: If it wasn’t too late I would submit a list of my favourite albums of 2011 as my entry.
