A Statement of Purpose

Greetings and Salutations,

My name is David and I have an addiction. That's how it's supposed to start, right? Admitting you have a problem? Perhaps I could more correctly claim to have something that approaches a problem, outlines obsession, flits about fixation, makes my pulse quicken and my palms sweaty. I guess I'm in love.

The path leading in this direction was a reasonably straight-forward one. The kids on the playground were all talking about something I'd never heard of, taking turns grasping a small 2" x 3" box. It's specific contents are less important (and more embarrassing) than the eventuality they led to; another box, sitting in the middle of the living room of my childhood home, connected by thin copper wires to two larger boxes covered in mesh, one on each side. Turn it on, turn the dial and the world is yours. The radio. There must have been some magic in that old dark box he found, for when he heard its golden sounds he began to jump around. The radio led to over-full containers of cassettes which morphed over time into thin silver circles sitting orderly, alphabetical in the pages of a Case Logic binder. There was something in there for every occasion - big pop songs to sing along with in the car, quiet instrumentals to study to, aggressive shouters to turn up to eleven when I was angry or upset, and love songs, earnest and intimate to be played behind locked doors with the lights out.

Perhaps enough with the biography. What are we doing here? [insert Stockdalian expression of confusion/horror]. I intend for this blog to serve 3 functions. The first and least personal is to act as an outlet for me to talk to whoever feels like listening about the records, both new and new to me, that are lighting up my temporal lobe. The second and most ambitious is to aggregate reviews of my 100 favorite records, in an attempt to articulate and formalize my specific fixations with them (note: I mean to be explicit about the difference between the words "greatest" and "favorite" - one has aspirations to objectivity and the other does not. While I'm certainly not averse to discussing the presence or absence of greatness within a record, that's not really what this project is about, so please don't mistake me). The final and least regular will be the transmission and critique of mixtapes of my own construction, which will serve as the only music publicly available for download from this site. Probably implicit in all of this is the fact that I'll only be writing about records I like, so don't expect many diatribes about how terrible 90% of the music being made right now is. I intend, instead, to be a font of positivity, to say as many good things as I can about the songs that impress me and to let all else reap its own reward in silence. Sounds like fun, doesn't it?

In my next post, I'll outline what a basic entry in my 100 favorite records series will look like, specific elements that I'll be highlighting and the tools that I'll use in doing so, in the hope that we might avoid the kind of congratulatory, circle jerk aesthetic that accompanies most music criticism.

Until we meet again, don't know where, don't know when.