Some albums are so good you can’t stop listening to them. You listen and listen, memorize the ins and outs, and the music means so much to you—it is you—that when someone asks you what your favorite record is, there’s no hesitation in your answer.
But five months down the road, even though you can still recall everything about that album, you just don’t want to hear it ever again. Killing records has been happening since the days of vinyl, and the digital age is no different.
I’ve certainly killed my share of records—I remember the day I realized I never wanted to hear Led Zeppelin IV again. I can still acknowledge it’s a great record, but please, if I have to hear “Rock and Roll” one more time, I might have to go find Robert Plant and muzzle him.
But what about records that never die? These are the albums, I think, that we find ourselves attached to not because of the music itself, but because of what our lives were like when we were into the music. Blink-182’s Take Off Your Pants and Jacket is not a classic album per se, but every time it comes on I get goosebumps, and I’m right back in my seventh grade homeroom class, kicking back with my middle school buddies, oblivious to the world’s problems, and even to my own.
It’s funny—ask me any day of the week if Zeppelin is a better band than Blink-182 and my answer won’t change. But for whatever reason, that Blink-182 album resonates much more with me, even if juvenile pop-punk is somewhere near the bottom of my musical totem pole.
All this goes to show that reviews and critics aren’t the ones who decide whether any given record has value. The listeners do.
Critics might blast U2’s recent material, and some listeners might agree. But there are also thousands of people who will listen to How to Dismantle an Atomic Bomb five years from now and recall the moments it soundtracked in their own lives, and that has to be worth something.
Reminisce about all the small things with Justin at jhs55@georgetown.edu.
