So, a couple days ago I went into BMV books in Toronto on my lunch hour and treated myself to a marked-down copy of this: every issue of Rolling Stone, front to back, on DVD, from 1967 to May 2007. I’m slowly making my way through it all — I certainly have no intention of reading every issue, though I do intend to at least browse through every page of the first ten years or so — and it’s fascinating stuff. I love all the old ads, the letters, the pics, and yeah, sure, what the hell, there’s even an article or two I’ve come across that’s okay.

I was hesitant about buying it, not because I don’t think it’s a good deal (it is), not because I don’t think it’s pretty cool to have at-your-fingertips access to all this stuff, but because I hadn’t read anything about the package itself, i.e., how well-designed it is, how easy it is to navigate through it, etc. As someone who spends an inordinate amount of time computing (both at work and at home), I pretty much have zero patience for non-intuitive PC gadgetry, and the last thing I wanted was some behemoth of a document that would be a pain to sift through.

With that in mind, a few early thoughts on the package. (There’s no point me discussing the contents; everything is scanned directly from the magazine.)

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Steven Rubio has an interesting post up about the Rhapsody music service, its association with Robert Christgau, and the venom (four pages of it) spewed by Rhapsody-subscribing assholes readers about Christgau, and about music criticism in general.

“As you read through the messages, it becomes clear that it’s not just Xgau that the writers hate. They hate the very idea of criticism. Note the problem described above: what gets the writer’s ire is that Christgau dares to give bad reviews to albums the writer liked. Apparently, the sole function of a music writer should be to list the tracks on the album and then get out of the way.

“I think this relates to the growth of artificial intelligence software that predicts our taste preferences. These programs don’t exist to help you appreciate art … they exist to help you find the stuff that already agrees with your tastes. They assume that the listener doesn’t want to be challenged. The rhetoric suggests otherwise, of course … they always claim that their method is the best way to discover ‘new’ music. But by ‘new’ they mean ‘things that are like all the other stuff you already like, only you haven’t heard it yet.’”

I think there’s some truth to all that, but my question is, has it ever really worked differently? Are we talking about a fundamental difference in the reasons people choose to listen to the music they do, or are we simply talking about the means by which they do so? Hasn’t radio been courting like-minded listeners for eons? (And haven’t listeners, in turn, long gravitated to the stations which filled their particular niche?) Ditto music magazines? Ditto live circuits and “scenes”? Have there been more than a handful–if that–of music magazines over the years which have seriously ever challenged their audience’s core assumptions and tastes? I don’t mean these as rhetorical questions–not entirely.

Apparently, some people are having issues accessing this site, and it seems to be (potentially) because of the YouTubes I’ve been posting. Not sure if this is a problem specific to wordpress or if it’s related only to certain browsers, but for now I’ve removed the images from those posts and provided direct links to YT instead.

If anyone out there is still experiencing issues reading stuff on here, please let me know, either through e-mail or in the comments box. We’ll be working out the kinks in this new format for a while, I suspect.