doodledee

Interesting conversation came up at work today. I'll call it "Albums You Own But Have Only Listened to Once". It's pretty self explanatory: You get all psyched up about some new disc, you go out and buy it, you play it once, it turns out it sucks, you put it on the shelf, you never listen again. There's also a variant whereby you subject yourself to repeated listening over a short period of time in a [pathetic?] attempt to convince yourself you like it. For the purposes of this discussion, that still counts as 'once'. Sorry.

The causes of this phenomenon are varied. A common one would be a crappy solo album or side project by a musician you like(d) when they were/are in a band. Or maybe it's the ol' one hit wonder situation, or its somewhat rarer cousin, the follow-up album from a one-hit-wonder band that got lucky and made an okay one-hit album but probably should've quit while they were ahead. Or maybe it's simply because the album is just straight-up worthless (every Grateful Dead studio album after American Beauty, anyone?). I'm sure there are other less-logical reasons, too. Like does anyone buy an album just to have it on the shelf to look cool in case someone comes over and looks through their CD's? Methinks they probably do. Should that count? Methinks hmm.

There's a term in IT called 'shelfware', which is what we geeks call it when a company spends a ton of money on some fancy piece of software that they never end up using. That's probably not a great analogy, but it's close enough that I'm gonna go with it anyway. If I was feeling extra creative I'd try to come up with a term that mapped 'shelfware' to music… something like 'discware' or 'whatwasithinkingware', only more funny.

Anyway, back to the music. I'll start:

- Down With Wilco by The Minus 5. Never liked it. Tried. Tried again. Gave up. Put on shelf. (see: side project)
- Lovegod by The Soup Dragons. I fell for that "I'm Free" song. Whoops. Put on shelf. (see: one hit wonder).
- Justified by Justin Timberlake. Ha. Just kidding. I played that thing into the ground.

I'll also confess to having somewhat of a monster of a live music collection, much of which I obsessively collected years ago and much of which has only been listened to once and/or not at all. (A not uncommon affliction amongst my peer group. Then again, my peer group is obsessive music collectors, so that's probably not a surprise.) Thankfully, I'm mostly through that little phase. And by that I mean "I'm totally kidding myself".

I wonder if this is a non-issue for the mp3 generation? Too bad for them.